Month: June 2014

I love visiting IKEA and wondering around the children’s department as my attention is invariably grabbed by something I think I can use. It’s not often that a  specific lesson is ‘born’ as I browse, however.

Meet Señor Brócoli. Our eyes met and I was inspired!

I saw his pockets and thought of using him like a food triangle , filling his pockets with play food. And a lesson was formed, which was a bonus as I had a lesson observation looming and this was perfect!

I had adapted a presentation by Rachel Hawkes that she had shared on TES Resources previously for use with Year 4 in their unit on healthy eating but felt that it would work well with Year 6’s unit on food as well. The preceding week had been healthy eating week and we had made Wordles and Tagxedos of healthy eating vocabulary (they only had 40 minutes to find the words, type them in and print them so it wasn’t in great depth!) That was the starting point for the lesson.

We then played ‘ping pong’ with food vocabulary, seeing how long they could keep the rally up.

Having gone over pronunciation, pupils used the vocabulary from slide 3 cut into slips to classify vocabulary according to certain criteria using Tesoro o basura sheet; feminine nouns, plural nouns and finally healthy foods were the treasure.

The next step was to consider what healthy means as it’s not easy to decide definitively. That’s where Señor Brócoli came in. Using plastic play food, pupils ‘fed’ him, placing food in his pockets. The pocket into which they placed their food item corresponded to the frequency with which you should eat it – top pockets are smaller and correspond to a veces, the middle pocket to a menudo, and the bottom pocket to todos los días. The pupils all wanted to take part and say the appropriate phrase in Spanish.

They then classified the food in the triangle (slide 7)

I assigned each table a text from slide 8 to read, and encouraged them to ‘magpie’ useful phrases. They compiled lists together and then shared them with other groups.

The final part of the lesson was to write their own short text using slide 10.

If we had had more time, slide 11 was the extension activity with pupils suggesting food to match the definitions.

Pupils really enjoyed the lesson and didn’t want to go to lunch – and that’s very unusual. And it proved to be an outstanding observation too.

Throughout the lesson pupils RAG-ed their work using the fruit scale  – ¿eres un tomate, una naranja o una manzana? That was a hit too; much more appealing than traffic lights!

Señor Brócoli will appear again soon; Year 4 are looking at healthy lifestyles too!

Download the presentation – adapted from Rachel Hawkes’ PPT and with Tesoro o basura from LightBulb Languages La_Comida_sana_y_malsana final

Download lesson plan sano malsano lesson

A journey through seasons by Luiza Vizoli

Having worked on adapting a verse of La Primavera by Antonio Machado last week (see here and here for previous posts about this) , Year 5 were set a new poetic challenge this week.

Whilst I was out of action with my broken ankle, some students from BCU taught my Y5 classes using the QCA SoW unit Las cuatro estaciones as their starting point. They taught about the weather, the months of the year and the seasons, and judging by the recap lesson we had, they were successful in their aim!

This week we reviewed the seasons and thought about how we might write simple poems about them. I suggested we thought of colours as everyone was familiar with at least 5 colours that they could match to a season. I  introduced other adjectives, including reminding them of ones we had used in connection to music (Autumn term) and the planets (Spring term)

I modelled a simple structure, saying we were aiming for something like a Haiku not a sonnet; about half of them understood what I meant!

La primavera es verde y amarilla.

La primavera es bonito y alegre.

Me gusta la primavera.

Having given a sheet with some adjectives on it (including some unsuitable ones for this task like alto and bajo) and access to dictionaries, off they went.

And I was really pleased with some of the results.

Amelia has missed most Spanish lessons since Christmas as she has spent Tuesday afternoons at a local secondary school doing some G&T work.  Today she wrote the poem below in 10 minutes.

And these children impressed too, especially this one from Sam who finds Spanish tricky at times.

They are simple, yes. But they demonstrate to varying extents that they can

• write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structure that they have learnt
• broaden their vocabulary and develop their ability to understand new words that are introduced into familiar written material, including through using a dictionary
• write phrases from memory, and adapt these to create new sentences, to express ideas clearly
• describe people, places, things and actions … and in writing       (Languages Programmes of Study: Key Stage 2)

Looking forward to next week when we will continue in this vein and present our poems using technology!

Last weekend I created a survey using SurveyMonkey entitled Twitter thoughts with the aim of ascertaining a range of views on Twitter. I publicised the survey on Twitter and Facebook and asked others to share the link too.

Please could you please spare 2-3 minutes to complete my Twitter survey (and RT!) Thank you! https://t.co/PEQyAJWpLJ — Lisibo (@lisibo) June 13, 2014

Thank you to everyone who responded – the survey limits responses to the first 100 as I don’t have a Pro account (i.e. I used the free version!) and that number was met. I posed the questions in preparation for a presentation on Twitter this weekend at the UK eTwinning Conference in Nottingham; I’ve shared the presentation and some links in my previous post  I thought that people would be able to access the results via the link I posted in the presentation but obviously you can’t see the results unless you’re the originator of the survey, and I needed to share so here is the link – Twitter thoughts – a survey Below are the graphics from questions 1-3; you can access the analysis via the link.   As you can see, it’s a resounding win for Twitter there. The question didn’t ask people to specify whether they meant Twitter.com or the Twitter app so this figure will be an amalgamation of the two. I’d expected more votes for Tweetdeck to be honest.   Given the people that follow me on Twitter and that fact that most of my Facebook friends that may have filled in the survey are in education, I  wasn’t surprised that the highest votes went to CPD, T&L and sharing ideas. I liked the response in the comments section “hearing views from people I might not normally encounter. and funny people” I also thought that the following response was interesting – it’s true that Twitter has become a vehicle for “getting things done” “contacting customer service departments of big companies”   The graphic for top 3 uses of Twitter baffled me; in fact, I learned more from looking at the statistics which also baffled me at first! The figures are expressed as a percentage of those that rated that option so of the 10 people who rated  ‘following celebrities’ in the top 3, 2 put it first (20%), 1 second (10%) and 7 in 3rd place (70%); the three percentages add to 100% Another response I liked was in the notes below this section; the respondent noted that one of their top 3 was “Being nosy at what others are up to”   The final section invited comments on the following question: Three of the eighty five people who responded to the question said that they wouldn’t encourage people to join Twitter; one expanded on this

“I wouldn’t I would just explain how to use it if they are interested and say what I like about it.”

There were lots of responses that mentioned the MFLTwitterati (hardly surprising!) networking and CPD too.  There were also several mentions of news and moving information around;

“because it bundles news and you don’t waste time browsing news portals anymore”

“Fastest way to get a message to a wide range of people”

There were mentions of support and being like an online staffroom as well as a place to learn from others.

There was also a respondent who had a more negative view;

“I’ve really gone off of Twitter lately, it’s such an echo chamber, not really seeing anything new, just lots and lots of retweets and old stuff resurfacing”

Some comments I particularly liked –

on relationships –

“It’s a great place to network with like minded people, sharing great practice and when you end up meeting at a conference or cpd event in person it’s like you know them already!”

on CPD and learning

“Where else can you talk/listen to so many knowledgeable people at no cost to yourself apart from your time?”

“Because in these cash-strapped times it gives unlimited access to the best brains in the business and learning opportunities”

on your part in making things work-

“Create your own network which provides exactly what you want from it.”

“Because it’s fun, and you make it want you want to be. And we need the nice people to outnumber the idiots.”

“Loads of potential benefits as long as you realise what it can do.” I think the above comments are particularly relevant; Twitter is what you make it. Sometimes judicious use of the mute, unfollow and even block buttons are needed; sometimes I go off it for periods of time but I’d probably agree with the many positive comments about support, ideas sharing, friendship and learning. Why would you encourage people to join Twitter? “Because it is power”

I”ve been presenting today on Twitter at the UK National eTwinning Conference in Nottingham at the National College of Leadership. Below is my presentation – the videos have obviously not uploaded so I’ve embedded them below.

I’ve also added a link to my Pinterest where I’ve bookmarked some useful links to Twitter, particularly in education.

Here’s my Keynote presentation from today’s Sanako Technology in Language Teaching (TILT) conference.

In it, I reflect on my journey in language teaching, reflecting on the increasing role that technology has played. Along the way, I revealed my experiences (the good, the bad and the ugly) and discussed some of the tools that have proved useful, brilliant and/or indispensable.

If you click the slides in the Slideshare, you’ll find some hyperlinks. A few things to which I referred:

Amara

Association for Language Learning – http://www.all-languages.org.uk

NoTosh website 

Join the Carnival de los animales 

Wordle 

Tagxedo

SwitchZoo

Build Your wildself

The Year 3 lesson progression that I didn’t manage to fit in is described here.

If you go to my Slideshare account you’ll find other presentations about technology that you may find helpful. Unfortunately Slideshare has stopped Slidecast so there’s no audio anymore but some presentations can be found at Lisibo Talks.

And if you use the search box on my blog you’ll find posts about all sorts of tools!

Any questions, please tweet, email or write a comment below!

I’ve just co-hosted the #UKEdChat MFL special with @icpjones
We talked about many things including favourite activities, assessment, ‘great works of literature’, the role of technology and what languages should be studied. Great fun trying to keep up with the stream of tweets and reply/respond. It made for lots of frantic retweeting, and I need to reread the stream.

Here are the questions posed – thanks to @ukedchat who kept the questions coming from  the list that Isabelle and I had compiled, leaving us free to reply and respond to people!

1. What’s your favourite #MFL activity?
2. How do you/ will you assess your pupils with #MFL Progress?
3. What great foreign literature have you used in lessons? From primary to post-16?
4. Which language(s) are taught in primary and what songs/methods/rhymes work best?
5. Is there a place for technology in #MFL? What tech/programmes/apps do you use?
6. What’s your ‘can’t live without’ #MFL tool?

You can catch up on what was said – or rather tweeted – via this Storify. (Not all tweets seem to have been pieced up; for example, my first one in the Storify is actually the third of a series of several about QuizQuizTrade)

And there’s a summary of the hour as well as an archive of all the tweets here too.

One upshot of the evening is that start of #mflchat on the first Tuesday of the month. So if you’re on Twitter, join in. And if you’re not, join Twitter and then join in! Stop press – the first one has already been arranged!

Date for the diary. The first #mflchat will be on Tues 1st July 20-21h London time. Languages (cont) http://t.co/serqvriukl

— James Gardner (@Langnut) June 5, 2014