I was happy to be asked to present at the annual University of Chichester MFL Conference last week, and as I noted in a previous post, thoroughly enjoyed the positive and inspiring sessions I attended.
I delivered two sessions. You can access the resources and ideas from the session entitled Using Technology for collaboration in a previous post Sadly, TodaysMeet no longer exists but otherwise the ideas, recommendations and apps are the same!
The second session was entitled Tell me a story! and concerned the use of stories and books in the languages classroom.
The presentation is below to view. You’ll also find the links to some helpful posts and bookmarks below. I hope those that attended found the session helpful. Please feel free to leave a comment on the post if you have questions or comments!
Wednesday morning saw me gazing at the sea, then moving swiftly past Butlins to speak at University of Chichester MFL Conference. I had a lovely day attending sessions in the morning and sharing some ideas about using technology and stories in the languages classroom.
Below are my sketchnotes of the sessions I attended, starting with Elaine Minett’s upbeat introduction to the conference, talking about challenges being seen as opportunities, followed by an idea packed session about using poetry by Concha Julian of the Consejería de Educación and finishing with Lynne Brackley’s session on using drama based activities in languages. I enjoyed using my dramatic skills in both of the latter sessions!
If you get the opportunity next year, I can thoroughly recommend attending as the conference was varied with sessions for primary, secondary as well as cross phase sessions, and they were delivered by a variety of people including PGCE students, teachers and representatives of organisations like the British Council, the Consejería de Educación and Language Angels. I enjoyed seeing Catherine on the Little Linguist stand once more (and buying a new book!) as well as visiting other stands including Institut Français and European Schoolbooks.
After two successful years at the International School of Toulouse in 2015 and 2016, Practical Pedagogies is returning in 2018. This time it’s moved to Cologne and St Goerge’s English International School. Here’s what Russel Tarr, the conference organiser says:
Educational conferences can be prohibitively expensive for ordinary teachers, and often focus on abstract theory delivered by academics with little hands-on classroom experience. In contrast, “Practical Pedagogies” believes the best training conferences are delivered by practising teachers, for the benefit of each other and their students, at an affordable price.
Practical Pedagogies 2015 and 2016 took place at the International School of Toulouse, France. Teachers from all over the world delivered upwards of 100 sessions in a vibrant, friendly and enriching event lasting two days. Hot lunches, refreshments, an evening restaurant meal after day 1, and a bar tour after day 2 provided social opportunities for carrying on the conversations with old friends and new acquaintances.
The feedback was so enthusiastic that it’s been decided to take the show on the road, with St. George’s International School Cologne scheduled to host the next conference in November 2018. Session proposals will be invited as from January, a programme will be drawn up in February, and delegates will be encouraged to book their places from March onwards.
100 workshops have been confirmed, led by educators from all over the world – including me! – and delegates can pick 8 to attend over the two days. And the good news is, you’ve got two more days to get the Early Bird discount.
My very intense teaching week ends on Thursday evening, freeing up a week day to spend as I wish, and I was once more glad that I don’t teach on Fridays as it meant that I could attend a delightful day in London learning all about the Primary Latin Course. An early start and a cramped train journey both ways didn’t even dampen my excitement to find out about it (on the way) and enthusiasm to start sharing it (on the way back).
I could explain myself what the Primary Latin Course is but their blurb does it far better!
[The Primary Latin Course] has been designed working with UK primary teachers to help schools deliver Latin and Roman civilisation – without the need for any background in Latin. The course provides a gentle introduction to the Latin language for pupils in Years 3 – 6, aiming to establish reading fluency of simple sentences. Language learning is fully integrated into an immersive cultural and archaeological course set in ancient Herculaneum. The course is driven by photographs and evidence from the ancient site for pupils to explore and investigate.
All our materials are hosted online and available for free. There are Latin stories with clickable vocabulary and embedded audio, interactive reconstructions, online games, downloadable worksheets, activities and teacher’s guides.
During the day, delegates were taken through a couple of chapters of the course, experiencing learning Latin using the course, noticing and commenting on things about the language, admiring the amazing illustrations predominantly coming from actual things found in Herculaneum and marvelling at the quality and wealth of content available – for free! Will and Laila were excellent hosts, aided by Hannah and Tony amongst others, and the day was delivered in partnership with the Museum of London who allowed us access to their Romans exhibition as well as an artefact handling session. It was quite mind blowing knowing that I was touching things that were about 2000 years old!
As usual I sketch noted as much as I could and the outcomes are below. I hope they’re helpful!
Here are some links from the notes that I want to underline – and also so you can click them!
It was a high quality day and I’d thoroughly recommend you attending if you get the opportunity. I’ve been inspired to start a Latin Club at school – well, potentially at both schools! I’m looking forward to learning more as I explore the site and also to learning with the pupils. Watch this space for more news. And if you have any advice, leave me a message below!
This year at Language World I was invited to present some ideas for using technology for collaboration in language learning. I teach primary so the focus was on that age group but there are many ideas and tools that are equally applicable for young and old! In spite of some technical hitches and running out of time as there was so much to share, the ideas were well received and I hope that this will serve as a reminder/update for those who attended, and a snapshot for those who didn’t.
Below is my presentation. Whilst all the links work, the videos don’t I’m afraid but you’ll find some below to give you a taster.
Link to BetsyBelle’s webinar Out of this World on using apps in the Primary Language Classroom. Highly recommended viewing especially if you’re interested in the how as much as the why.
I was asked to present an idea at the Primary Spanish Show and Tell at Language World in Hinckley last week.
The idea of the Show and Tell is that there are a variety of ideas presented, and on this occasion my fellow presenters were Anne Poole, who presented some fun games that can be played in any language, and Jesús Hernández from the Consejería de Educación who, accompanied by his trusty guitar, presented a few songs as well as activities to accompany a couple of posters that we were all gifted. Jesús also shared news of a new ‘revista’ for Primary Spanish that will be published by the Consejería with ideas like the ones that Jesús shared.
My part of the session focused on how we celebrated World Book Day this year at Whitehouse Common. You can see my part of the presentation below – the whole presentation will be available soon on the ALL website.
I’m happy to share the materials to use with the book, but I can’t share the scanned book as that would break copyright. Para qué sirve un libro matching
A little later than planned, and with huge apologies, here are my presentations from the East Midlands Primary Languages Conference held on Nottingham on 5th December!
Más vale tarde que nunca. Mieux vaut tard que jamais! Besser spät als gar nicht.
Firstly, my presentation on Crosscurricular links:
Today is International Children’s Book Day and I’ve got a new book!
It’s called Presiona aquíand it’s by Hervé Tullet. It’s the Spanish version of Press here and I bought it to share with FKS and KS1, although I’m sure some of Y3 would also enjoy it!
The book starts with a single yellow dot and asks the reader to ‘presiona aquí y da vuelta a la página.’ Magically, another yellow ‘círculo’ appears on the next page, and there follow lots more pages with lots more instructions and lots more ‘círculos’ – grandes y pequeños; amarillos, azules y rojos. I like the simplicity of the illustrations as well as the text, and I think it would be a fun book to share on the carpet with children coming up to press buttons, or in small groups as a special treat. You can children enjoying it in the trailer for the English version below. In our Y2 Spanish scheme (based on Little Languages) they look at sequencing and this would be a great addition to the activities that include counting and sequencing buttons, shapes and any little things we can find (dinosaurs, cars, fruit…)
I mentioned that I thought Y3 would enjoy it, and with that in mind I’ve been thinking about what we could do as a follow up activity. When we were working on colours before Easter and talking about colour mixing I (perhaps rashly) said that we could do some painting in Spanish towards the end of the summer term when we’ll be looking at shape and colour once more. This would be a lovely way to introduce or revisit some shape and colour vocabulary, and I can see us creating our own versions of the book as a story board, perhaps diversifying into other shapes depending on what action the ‘reader’ does. Or perhaps we could use the same approach, an action leading to the appearance of a new item to create Miró-esque art? Still a developing thought…
After I’d started writing this, I discovered that there are a couple of videos of the book too – see below – so it would be possible for class teachers who are non specialists to borrow my book and share it with their class. This video actually uses the book but lasts more than ten minutes and the presenter doesn’t just read the story but offers comments too. I wonder if Nursery and Reception would manage to sit still for that long, and worry that the ‘extras’ might put off the non-specialist teacher presenting as they don’t know what’s being said? The video below would be my choice as, although it doesn’t feature the book and the instructions are worded slightly differently, it is much simpler and lasts just over 5 minutes.
Hervé Tullet has lots of other lovely books too – I think I may need to get ¡Mézclalo bien! is this one is a hit…
There’s a very simple free worksheet on TES resources to accompany the story and here are some ideas of how to use the book including a fun activity called Fizzy colours.
EDIT – I’ve now found a Pinterest board of ideas here.
One of the sessions I attended at Language World was given by Sue Cave. Entitled Language Detectives, it shared a project that Sue and a colleague had devised, originally for a day long workshop for more able primary linguists, based around children using their detective skills to decode unknown languages. Sue described it as ‘a morning of training in preparation for an afternoon trying to thwart a multilingual gang of criminals.’
The session referred to and worked on the Language Learning Skills (LLS) and Knowledge about Language (KAL) strands of the KS2 Framework (NB is still a very useful document!) We discovered that gesture is important but that it works best in conjunction with words, eye contact and prior knowledge, and I discovered that I’m not as good as charades as I thought I was. (Sorry Vicky!) We also discovered that knowledge of word classes as well as how to use a bilingual dictionary are skills that a good detective needs, and that listening to the sounds and intonation of a language is also helpful.
Having undergone our (very swift!) training, we used our skills to thwart the gang who spoke Spanish, Welsh, German and Italian, stopping them before they stole a valuable item!
Sue has very generously shared not her presentation but all the resources on her excellent website on the Sharing Good Practice section (scroll to the bottom)
One idea (of the many!) that I particularly liked was the Language Detective certificates that Sue gives out when a child makes a discovery about language and shares it with the class. Sue has generously shared her certificates in the Teaching and Learning section of the Sharing Good Practice page. As I teach Spanish not French, I’ve made some of my own that you can download from the link below.
Thanks for an inspiring session Sue, I know I’m not the only one who went away with my mind buzzing!
And thanks to Yvonne too for my ‘lucky dip’ magnifying glasses that fit the theme perfectly and will be put to sue immediately!
This time last week I was mid sketch note at Language World 2018, the Association for Language Learning annual conference. After a jam-packed, fun filled inspirational weekend, my mind was spinning with ideas and coupled with the last week of term, it’s taken this long for me to get my head together and get posting! So here goes a blog-fest over the next few days!I was thrilled to be asked to be Language World’s official Sketchnoter for a second year. Armed with pens, pencils and paper, I ‘live sketch noted’ each session I attended, before the finished product was whipped away to be displayed for everyone to see. I was pleased to see that there were lots of people looking at the notes as the conference went on, and it was really amusing to hear people talking about them in the dinner queue, not knowing that I’d done them!
I took photos of (most of) the sketch notes before they were displayed, but below are my sketchnotes or visual notes that ALL have now scanned and published on their site.
Opening of Language World 2018 – AnnaLise Gordon
The Language Magician – #LMagic Steven Fawkes (Too much to fit onto one sheet!)
The Mary Glasgow Plenary – Language Futures and the future of Language Learning. Dr Rachel Hawkes (Again far too much to squash onto one page!)
Primary Spanish Show and Tell It’s hard to sketch note whilst presenting, singing and playing games but I did it!
Planning for progression and transition. Liz Black once more filled my head with brilliant ideas!
The amazing things you can do with just a handful of books. Nathalie Paris aka @nattalingo
The official launch of The LANGUAGE MAGICIAN
You can view all of Friday’s sketchnotes in one place by downloading this – Friday PDF
Saturday morning Opening Plenary including the Primary and Secondary Language Teacher of the Year awards AnnaLise Gordon
Putting pen to paper. Clare Seccombe talks writing! (I learned from yesterday and used a big piece of paper for this one!)
A celebration of languages. Danielle Dion-Jones
Language Detectives Sue Cave
Lights! Camera! iPads! Joe Dale
Embedding languages across the curriculum. Richard Tallaron
Closing comments by AnnaLisa Gordon and Jane Harvey.
You can view all of Saturday’s sketchnotes in one place by downloading this – Saturday PDF
I loved sketch noting the conference. I hope that those who attended enjoy the reminder of sessions you attended and that those who didn’t get a flavour of what they ‘missed.’ I’ll certainly be having a look at Clare’s notes too as there were several clashes that meant I couldn’t attend sessions I would’ve chosen (Nigel Pearson for the second year running was speaking at the same time as me for example!)
You can also catch up with the Twitter buzz from the conference via this Storify .
I delivered two sessions. You can access the resources and ideas from the session entitled Using Technology for collaboration in a previous post Sadly, TodaysMeet no longer exists but otherwise the ideas, recommendations and apps are the same!
A little later than planned, and with huge apologies, here are my presentations from the East Midlands Primary Languages Conference held on Nottingham on 5th December!
A marvellous keynote by the ever effervescent John Rolfe.
An inspiring session by Chris Henley about being BRILLIANT – finding my WHY? and being Ms Different.
One of the sessions I attended at Language World was given by 
