teaching

New term – a great time to raise your game.

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Happy New Year to you all.  I hope you had an excellent Christmas and a promising start to the new year.

I’ve decided this should be a simple post about things I will try this term, starting next week.  There are numerous aspects of teaching that I want to improve and various ideas that I want to try.  All of it is aimed at trying to make my lessons the very best they can be.  While inevitably some lessons will go better than others, I want the return in terms of learning to be high every lesson.

Here are 4 ideas I want to try in January:

1) Experiments with excellence

I’ve been reading a little about Ron Berger and his “ethic of excellence” and his insistence on feedback and how it can drive improvement. Whilst Berger teaches in a relatively unique setting I wonder if his ideas can be applied in an MFL classroom.  My year 8 Spanish class will produce a postcard from a holiday but rather than it being a week long homework at the end of the topic, we will draft it over 2 weeks before they do a final version at the end of the topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqh1MRWZjms

2) Speaking/Translation tandem

Inspired by a Bristol colleague.  Students have phrases on a sheet of A4 with alternating Spanish/English.  They have to say what they think is the phrase and their partner can nudge them towards a correct version.  It should have the effect of reinforcing grammar structures, raising translation as an activity (with the new GCSE in mind) and could work quite well.  Probably will try it with year 7s or year 10s.

3) Insistence on TL

All students have phrases in their books they can use but I’m really going to push it this term.  I want to see if we can get lessons where there is an 80/20% ratio of Spanish – English.  To this end I plan to have 3 things in place:

i) A TL monitor – a student I trust who can monitor my TL usage and that of the class.  They will have a traffic light card to indicate this.  In lower years this will probably be referred to as the Spanish Sy

ii) TL phrases on wall – students need to use these in responding after a listening exercises or wherever possible.

iii) Rewards for students who use most TL, this will be monitored by my TL monitor.

4) Live marking

That is “live” in the sense of “in the moment” not live as in “live, breathe, eat, sleep marking.”  I saw this suggested on another post.  A teacher picks 8 students and aims to mark their books whilst the students are on a task of some description.  The marking then finishes with a question relating to what he/she has seen and demands a response.  Our students have to respond to our marking, this might be a way of encouraging it.  They are more likely to respond if I am stood next to them marking their neighbours book.  It might also be a way to reduce the marking load.  We will see.

Listening Activities

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Hit a milestone with visitors on this blog today.  thank you to those of you who read it.  I hope you find something useful that helps your teaching, or at the very least it triggers an idea.  Drop a comment if you want a particular topic or skill exploring .  You could also be the first comment (another milestone).

GCSE Languages places a heavier emphasis on writing and speaking, which can lead to listening being neglected.  Listening activities can be time consuming but they are vital in being able to understand a language.  They allow students to experience a range of accents, ages and speeds of talking without leaving the classroom.  Some are contrived and others are effective but how can you exploit a listening text for all it is worth?  There seems to be a school of thought emerging that if teachers teach using maximum TL then that counts as listening.  I think there is still a place for the recorded material.

Listening can be differentiated for pupils of various abilities.  Below are some of the ways I have used in a classroom that work.  I wish I did them all more often.  The majority will work at Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4.

This takes some planning but consider how you could stretch your more able and support your less able.

More able

  • Ask them to look for particular things.
  • Have a column of extra details if completing a table and get them to fill it in as they go.
  • Could they do a dictée on a particular line?  You could suggest to a class that all those with a target grade of … could do this?
  • Can you do a higher level listening with your more able while the foundation students do a reading activity and then swap.  This works for mixed ability groups.
  • Could they write their own extract afterwards based on the recordings they have heard?

Less able

  • Multiple choice – you can give them this on a handout or on a slide.
  • Write down the words that they hear that they definitely know.  Essentially give them a chance to understand bits before asking them to find answers.
  • Give them the script for the first recording so they can read along
  • Give their TA the script – TAs appreciate this as the teacher’s guides generally have the answers afterwards.
  • Give them the answers and have them highlight the ones they can hear this should help you see how much they comprehend,
  • Teach them skills to help them – key words, cognates, sound patterns, discerning plurals etc
  • VLC is an excellent media programme and has a facility to slow down recordings, I would not go much below 0.90 but it can help.

Conducting a listening effectively

  1. Try not to talk too much
  2. Consider the following order
    1. Play recording all the way through without stopping, students do nothing.
    2. Play through and students try to get answers.
    3. Play through and have breaks in between for students to either write answers or check their answers.
  3. Make sure students are clear on what they are listening for.
  4. Don’t tolerate chat in between.  It needs to be their own work
  5. Try to do them regularly.

Make it lead to something.

Could your students do a similar thing later in the lesson?  Perhaps they could record it and you could use that instead (providing you have permission).   Could they do a speeddating style activity and use some of the phrases from the listening recording, or any other activity for that matter?

Teaching School Subjects

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Before I start, thank you to the handful of regular readers and the ones who shared me on twitter (something I have never used) , it precipitated a massive spike in viewings in the UK and further afield so thank you!  I hope the material and ideas are useful.  Enjoy half-term.

School is a topic we cover a number of times.  If you’re following Mira then it comes up in years 7 and 9.  I find in year 9 it is a lot harder to make it engaging.  The students are going through that stage where school means hard work, drudgery and the novelty value the topic had in year 7 is all but lost.  We then often revisit it on GCSE syllabuses so I guess it is worth having some good ideas.

Here is a selection of things I’ve tried with both years.

Options discussion.

Great way to revise school subjects, opinions and reasons without it seeming like repeating year 7 material.  ¿Qué vas a estudiar el año que viene? or ¿Vas a estudiar …? This lends itself to a nice discussion in fours where the students have to see which group can keep discussing options the longest in Spanish.  If you have done various activities to revise the subjects, opinion phrases and reasons, they should be able to keep this going.  A speaking frame is also helpful.

Options discussion in pairs with flowchart.

Give students a flowchart on powerpoint.  They can then work through the various stages

I’m (not) going to study… because…

it is … (positives)                               it is … (negatives)

and

the teacher is ….  (positives)               the teacher is … (negatives)

Hopefully the flowchart makes sense although wordpress does not permit the use of lines and arrows, just imagine they are there.

Good student/bad student

A lot of textbooks take the opportunity to teach verbs with this topic.  Why not have a diary of a good student or a bad student and simply get your students (presumably good and bad) to create the opposite one?

Describing your school

Students in year 9 seemed very happy to do this once I said you can talk about Waterloo Road or your primary.  They spend every day at your school, the difference made it more fun for them somehow

Rate your teacher/favourite subject

Very simple activity probably for year 9 although for year 7s following Mira it could work.  Who is your favourite teacher and why.  Conduct a class survey and note the responses.  For those of you facing OFSTED and having to evidence numeracy, get some graph paper from your maths or science department and get them to produce a graph.  You could equally do this with school subjects.

Harry Potter Extension

Very simply give any year 7 a timetable that looks like it came from Hogwarts and tell them you want to know what subjects are when.

aritmancia, estudios muggles, adivinación, estudio de runas antiguas y cuidado de criaturas mágicas, transformaciones, encantamientos, pociones, historia de la magia, defensa contra las Artes oscuras, astronomía y herbología.

Then they can also pretend to be the characters and explain their like or dislike for various subjects.

Say something else

Ban the following words if students are relatively able: “good”, “nice”, “interesting”, “boring” and “fun”.  Your English department probably already operates on this policy but it is a good opportunity to use dictionaries and make their language more interesting.

Teaching House and Home

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Whilst it may not be up there with my preferred topics of food, holidays, media and Christmas, house and home always makes its way on to a year 7 or year 10 course.  Here’s a few of my favourite activities.

Origami houses (massive thanks to Mrs Shepherd and Mrs Cotton on my teacher training course)

This is tricky but kids love it and there are plenty of youtube videos showing how to make morecomplicated ones.  Once you have the technique nailed you can produce it year in year out.

Try this.

  1. Get A4 sheet
  2. Hold it so it is landscape
  3. Fold it in half to make it like a birthday card.
  4. Fold in half to make it like a small birthday card but don’t press all the way down the fold, just make a crease
  5. Open out  6)
  6. Fold from edge into crease on both side and press down the fold.  At this point it should look like a wardrobe.
  7. This is the really tricky bit to explain.
  8. Where the tops of the wardrobe are you need to put your thumbs in and pull down on the paper.  It will make a triangular roof   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZioO5aeHhY   2mins 30 explains what I am aiming at here.
  9. Students are then free to decorate the outside and inside, label it in French/Spanish/German and you have some excellent display work or a good revision activity.

Luxury House

Independent learning is the order of the day.  After teaching the house topic, students have to produce an A3 brochure page for a luxury house.  One half must be the pictures and students can get these from magazines or the internet.  the other half has to be a description.  Put students in pairs.  You have of course the normal options here

  • Friendship pairings – often produces good results but naff results in other cases as they chat too much
  • Single -sex pairings – same as above
  • Mixed pairings – careful the brighter one does not do all the work.
  • Abiliity pairings – pair together students of similar ability

“I can’t help noticing I am considerably richer than you”

Based on the Harry Enfield sketch.  This is essentially the shops game.  Students try to out compete each other as to the features their house has.  This is great for practising plurals and numbers too.

Student 1: En mi casa hay un baño grande.

Student 2: En mi casa hay tres baños grandes, dos aseos and a partridge in a pear tree  etc…

Chocolate eclairs prepositions mini-plenary

I remember this lesson from when I was in school a long time ago.  Our teacher had taught us the prepositions but to test us, she had glued or placed a number of Cadburys chocolate eccairs in positions around the room.  Any one who could use it in a sentence got one.  The nature of toffee is that it keeps kids quiet for a while.  Genuis!  Make sure your most disruptive student is not lactose intolerant 😉

Sherlock

If you have seen the TV programme of the same name.  You will notice the hero’s ability to remember and remark upon every feature of a room.  Give students a picture and get them to do the same

12 days of House-mas

Great practice of rooms in house, phrases like il y a, numbers and plural endings.  Using the 12 days of Christmas as a model get students to describe a house.  Then get them to draw a floorplan of their partner’s house and label it accurately.

En mi casa hay doce …

En mi casa hay once ..

En mi casa hay nueve…

Before and after. 

Exactly what it says and there is not much of a leap between il y a and il y’avait or es gibt and es gab  Give students  two pictures of the same rooms and get them to comment on before and after.

Spot the difference

Again exactly what it says, try and find two pictures of a similar room on google.  Or compare a double and a single room from a hotel website

Famous houses

Essentially the same as the Sherlock activity above however you can recycle language previously taught by bringing in family vocabulary.

Dans ma maison au premier etage il y a la chambre de mes parents.  Mes parents s’appellent Robert et Carla.

Teaching holidays – 9 things to try

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Holidays.  It is the quintessential topic all MFL teachers have to be capable of doing and most cover on a bi-yearly basis.  Most holiday modules in textbooks tend to deal with the past tense so this seemed like a good place to start but there will be other tenses below.  Aiming at 9 things you can try tomorrow, here goes…

1) Consequences. 

If you know how this works great.  If not try the following:

  • Students write their name at the bottom of a piece of paper.  That’s right, at the bottom.
  • Write where you went (fui a…) fold over and pass on
  • Write who you went with, fold over and pass on
  • Say one thing you did, fold over and pass on
  • Add an opinion with “fue”, fold over and pass on
  • Say another thing you did, fold over and pass on
  • Add opinion, fold over and pass on
  • Keep going until you have a full page of text.

Bottom sets like it because it seems like less work.  Top sets can get creative.  Everyone wins unless they start to get mean…

2) Trapdoor/mindread/paired speaking thing.

Sentences on whiteboard with multiple options at various points.  Students have to say the sentence out loud that their partner is thinking.  Partner can shake head to indicate wrong choice.  The other has to keep talking until the get the right answer to carry on.

Fui a Italia    Alemania     con     mis padres     mis amigos

Grecia  Suiza                     mi familia       mis abuelos

3) Postcards – it is a great homework and you get some creative efforts.  Use it at the end of a holidays topic.  Tell them it has to look authentic and you will get some great efforts.  One teacher I know hangs them from a washing line in her classroom.  Both ends of the ability spectrum tend to enjoy this.  The less artistic ones can use a computer.

4) Quiz Quiz Trade

Not technically my activity but get pupils to write a question on a whiteboard.  They go around the class and must ask and answer a question before swapping whiteboards.  Excellent practice of questions and answers as long as TL is maintained.

5) 50 places to visit before you die/Plan a gap year

You’ve seen the books but to reinforce the future tense why not get them to plan a year out using “voy a” and infinitives.  Allows for creativity and personal interest.  Lower abilities could do it on a powerpoint and add pictures.  Tricky bit is if they spend more time looking at places than writing Spanish.  Be careful there.

6) Hotel Review (GCSE)

Tripadvisor is one of the best known hotel reviewing sites.  Give half of your students some pictures of New York’s Plaza hotel (last seen in Home Alone 2) and for the other half the worst hotel you can find on google.  Students then have to produce a review using as much subject specific vocab as possible (or as edexcel calls them “complex lexical items”) such as service, personnel, concierge etc.  For a broader task, give them the title holidays from hell and a starter with some more powerful adjectives (dilapidated, depressing, disastrous etc)

7) Dice speaking (borrowed from a Rachel Hawkes ppt)

9 boxes each with a starting sentence and 6 options.  One student rolls dice and says the phrases while the other produces a translation on a mini-whiteboard.  Tried it with a yr9 bottom set the other day and they enjoyed it!  I could not quite believe what I was seeing.

8) Voki.com

Use the postcard idea above or the hotel idea but get voki.com to convert it into speech.  No need to sign up but fun and then allows students to practise pronunciation.

9) No personal experience allowed.

Sometimes we tell students to use their personal experiences.  What about if we encouraged creativity and imagination by insisting they cannot use anything they have already done.  The entire past holiday has to be imagined.  Not so much an idea to use tomorrow but a thought.  Would they be more creative and would it lead to better work?

Teaching the alphabet

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Again it’s that time of year.  Letters of the alphabet!  It’s like pencil case items, you simply cannot do year 7 without it.  Anyway for help with this mfl-learner rite of passage, look below…

French

Teachers need look no further than here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMhbDUn041s

Year 7s love it!  If you happen to have the programme VLC media player then look in the bottom corner near the volume control and you can speed it up using the slider that is there.  Great fun!

Spanish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MJbHmgaeDM             Even better if… it had a cat not a dog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjhrOgJxuJY     Probably best used a punishment…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyn8ZDiqcyU  Possibly my favourite.  Students like it, also see VLC media player comment above.

Generic ideas for all languages

  • Spelling names of classmates, teachers, famous people, film titles, book titles etc
  • Reading race.  Who can spell out a name the quickest?
  • Get one person to transcribe and the other to spell out.  It is a great way for one student to check they are pronouncing the letters correctly and the other is forced to listen carefully.  Speaking, listening, peer assessment and pair-work all in one.  Happy days
  • Learn the songs and perform them is always good.