Welcome to the rambling thoughts of a 50 year old languages teacher with too much time on his hands, most of it spent in the kitchen. If you have any comments or questions about language learning or resources please email or follow me on twitter @dominic_mcg
Exciting news for North East MFL-ers! The ALLNE is hosting its first Teachmeet. It takes place on 20th October 2015 at Newcastle University's King George VIth Building in room 1.36. The Teachmeet runs from 4:30-6:30pm with the idea that attendees will have the opportunity to network and chat afterwards and perhaps wander into Newcastle for food and drinks.
This is a Teachmeet with a difference as it is specifically aimed at trainee teachers and NQTs.
Why? It came about after a conversation Steven Fawkes and I had at Suzi Bewell's MFL PGCE Show and Tell at York University this summer. Steven thought that it would be a great idea to put on similar events in the North East. There are lots of really great Teachmeets around the region, but none specifically for MFL trainees and NQTs. So after a few emails and tweets between us, the amazing organisational skills of Newcastle Uni PGCE tutor, Cheryl Mackay, Eleanor Gordon for creating the link and Rene for letting us have the venue, everything seems to be ready.
Any teachers or educationalists can sign up to attend but presenters must be either trainees or recently qualified teachers. How do you sign up? You can find out more and sign up to the event here. If you wish to present for either 2 or 5 minutes or have any questions, you can contact Steven or even Me and we'll be glad to help. Also if you're reading this and know someone who might like to come, please tell them. See you there! If you can't make it Newcastle, don't worry, we intend to host others in and around the North East during this academic year.
I love my job but I'd be tempted to move if my classroom had views like this:
This is my report of the day. (Anything in brackets wasn't mentioned and is just me thinking out loud).
The day started at 11 with a welcome from Keswick School's headteacher, Simon Jackson.
Anna Bartrum of University of Cumbria, said some opening words and gave us some activities to do to warm us up. These included a watching powerpoint where we had to identify words which flew very quickly across the screen, an activity called "ask 3 people" where we had to ask 3 questions to 3 people to find out information which we then fed back to the group. finally she asked us what all these things had in common with a sandwich.
The first presentation came from Wendy Lightfoot.
Wendy talked about starter activities which are great for practising numeracy and literacy.
They included:
order the numbers - give the students numbers as words and get them to put them in order fizzbuzz - a counting game where pupils count in the target language but replace numbers ending in a 5 with the word "fizz" and those ending in 0 with "buzz".
scrabble - getting students to create valuable words
boggle - give the students a pre-made boggle grid with key words for them to find. (You could make your own using a wordsearch creator and reuse them) wordclouds - Wendy suggested tagxedo
quick write - teacher starts to write a word on the board students have to guess it before it's finished
definition bingo - students pick words, teacher reads a definition for the students who have to work out if they have that word first letter last letter game - student says a word, their partner has to say one which begins with the last letter of their partner's word and so on. (You could even make it into game show style activities. See my blogposts on Harry and Chain Letters) anagrams - useful for consolidating spellings spot the mistake - (I know lots of teachers hate this! I quite like it. I do these types of activities regularly with my students)
Next was Jane Hegedus who shared with us some ideas for introducing a "little bit of literature" into our lessons. She talked about the ALL literature wiki and shared with us the poem un hombre sin cabeza.
Jane showed us the activities she had done with her pupils with a felt and velcro lifesize body prop, which included introducing and consolidating vocabulary, dictionary work, brainstorming vocabulary, and practising and reinforcing grammar. She also showed us how we could use Clare Seccombe's "Trash or Treasurehttp://changing-phase.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/trash-or-treasure.html" idea.
Becky Henderson was the next presenter. She showed us how to "keep it real" in Italian. She uses real situations to teach language, including cooking using the only target language. She also taught us how to order drinks in Italian by means of a song. All good fun.
Helen Tucker then told us about 3 part sentence Mastermind (I know it as Cluedo and it needn't necessarily be 3 parts!) . It's a great idea for getting students to talk. It's great for revision, takes only a few minutes to plan, it's competitive and it also makes students listen to each other.
Paul Harrison then told us about iportal4languages. This is a EU funded project for people who want to learn English, Spanish, Turkish, Polish, German, or Bulgarian. Or all six. It is completely free. You just sign up and start learning. It has its own youtube channel and, should you so wish, you can learn in Second Life too.
Stephanie Licht then showed us some Great German Resources. She told us about how we can get free, fairly robust maps of Germany for students to use and some for classroom displays for very little money. (I missed the end of this as I was preparing for my presentation. Sorry, Stephanie.)
I was next talking about Time Management. This was a 7 minute chunk of my hour long "Standing out or outstanding?" presentation from #ililc5. (This is probably the last time I'll ever do this, as I think everyone in the world has seen it by now.) It seemed to go down quite well and got a few laughs, so that's always a bonus.
The final presentation of the first session was from Alex Crawford.She talked about her department's Relationships and choices project. Her students do a lot of cross curricular work and their work often links to business studies. She showed us how her students do practical activities, creating videos, project managing a team of students, etc. to achieve well in languages. They have a weebly website with all the information and resources the students need. The students also each have to acquire a certain amount of zollars using zondle to be successful, too. (Garry Mills has written about using zondle on his blog).
After coffee (which was OK) and cakes (which were amazing!) we had the second session.
The first presentation of the second session was from Elaine Pratt. She showed us the workbooks her department uses which contain all of the worksheets and grammar needed for her groups for the whole year. (She didn't say what happened of they got lost, ruined or stolen, though.) Then she showed us a Quiz Quiz Trade activity. This is one example of the many cooperative learning structures.
Rebecca Chapman then showed us some examples of CLIL. Her students have learned about King John in History and have learned about Senegal in Geography lessons, all taught in French. There is some more information about this on the MFL page of their school's newsletter with comments from some of the students.
Stuart Gorse was next with Hugo. Hugo is a ventriloquist puppet who is the star of many youtube videos, which Stuart creates to help his students to learn.
Stuart told us that he gets bored really easily and so tries to teach in a way which will not be boring for him or for his students. Here is Hugo and Marlene Dietrich in Stuart's take on Déjeuner du matin:
Helen Tucker had to follow that and did extremely well, all things considered. She told us about using the song Léon le caméleon with her primary students and how it was used as the basis for a lesson on colours and to introduce similes.
She also showed us the poetry balls. These were strips of coloured paper with sentences, or lines of poetry on, fastened at the top and bottom with paper fasteners and then can be hung up as a display. I shall be using this idea next term.
Marie Nunes was the next presenter. She showed us her virtual classroom, lakesloveslanguages. It's a weebly account which contains all the information needed by students in each year group from primary right up to A level. There are lots of quizlet quizzes embedded onto it, also there are vocab lists, activities and videos. (It's impressive.)
The penultimate presentation of the day came from Suzi Bewell, who also provided the raffle prizes. She talked about FLAME, which isn't CLIL, in case you were wondering. Suzi talked about transforming language learning and instilling intercultural understanding into our teaching. We shouldn't always talk about the differences between different cultures, we should also talk about how similar they are, she said.
Suzi mentioned these: Sur le chemin de l'école:
Where children sleep:
and Le Travail des Enfants:
The final speaker was the day's organiser, Rebecca Wylie.
Rebecca told us about how she uses vocabulary mats, there were examples of these on our tables. They were laminated A3 sheets with key vocabulary on them.
She also showed us how she uses classdojo with her groups. (I love classdojo and blogged about it here in 2012.)
The best thing Rebecca showed us was the scratchcards she made.
These are made by putting special scratch off stickers over cards. Ours were for prizes but could be used for lots of things in the classroom and we got some to take home.
All in all, it was a fantastic day.
I met some old friends, met some new people, and learned and was reminded of loads of really good stuff.
I'm really looking forward to next year's #MFLSATLakes2.
My students will finish school for the summer at the end of this week so this week will be learning about Bastille Day, or as it should be called, La Fête Nationale.
I've done work with my students about La Fête Nationale many times over the years but realised that I'd never blogged about it.
So, here is a list of some resources and links you could use:
There's a cornucopia of resources here on the TES website.
I included a link to the institut français' German website where you could find a dossier pédagogique with exercises for students to complete before, during and after watching the film.
For the last fifteen years, the Institut Français Deutschland has held a Cinéfête for students, the Jugendfilmfestival, where Francophone films are shown and studied.
For each of these films, they have produced a dossier pédagogique all in French, with exercises all in French.
The selection of films for the 2015 festival are:
Comme un lion - Samuel Collardey
Populaire - Régis Roinsard
Le tableau - Jean- François Laguionie
L'Italien - Olivier Baroux
La Cage Dorée - Ruben Alves
Une bouteille à la mer - Thierry Binisti
Séraphine - Martin provost
Information about these films can be found on the festival site here.
