Category: french

Here’s a lovely Spanish carol I’ve found on Teachertube. it’s originally from the LCF site Babelzone which is a (very reasonably priced I have to say) subscription site, but there are a number of their resources shared on Teachertube too.

and for the French teachers amongst you, here’s an alternative version of the Twelve Days of Christmas in French.

I’m helping the producers of the BBC schools website a bit this week, giving them some suggestions about their Primary French and Spanish pages.

It’s that time of year again!

I’m very excited to pass on the news from Val Thornber of Little Tales of the Unexpected and Beelingua fame.

Her message reads –

I am delighted to inform you that a unique collection of GrowstoryGrow’s wonderful stories has just been published by Beelingua Products Ltd (makers of Little Tails of the Unexpected).

The stories are all designed to help primary school children effectively learn a foreign language.

Each story has sentence-building tasks, games, fun lesson plans and many other useful resources.

All of these stories are currently available “Free of Charge” for a trial period.

COMING SOON – over 100 extra stories will be available in many languages including German, Italian, Urdu, Russian, Hindi, Portuguese, Arabic and Polish.

Over the course of the next few months we will be regularly publishing these new stories. If you would like us to tell you about these new publications you need to subscribe to our newsletter.

Please forward tell parents, teachers and friends who you think may find GrowStoryGrow stories useful. Why not try out the stories with your children TODAY and please let us have any feedback by sending an email to Valerie Thornber (creator of GSG): val@growstorygrow.com

To access the stories you will need to log-in to the website www.growstorygrow.com

There you will receive a trial login and be able to try out the product for a while.

I love Les sacs en plastique – ver
y simple but with an important message; and Le monstre de la musique is very amusing too – if only it were in Spanish, I could use it wth Year 5 in their current unit of work!

Can’t wait for more languages and more stories to be added.

If yu check out the site in detail, you’ll find details of the methodology behind the resource, how the Scheme of work will be comprised and also details of pricing for September.

Well done Val and keep up the hard work!

Mark Pentleton of Radio Lingua Network fame has one more worked his magic and a few days ago, launched a new addition to the plethora of products already available to help you learn languages.

Called School Run French, the series of 6-7 minute episodes allow you to take advantage of the school run, football run, Brownies / Badgers / BB run – in fact, any short journey to learn or practice your French. As Mark explains

Many of our listeners have been asking for materials which they can use
with their children or grandchildren, and we’ve been working for some time
on the development of materials aimed at this group. We’re delighted to
announce “School Run French” as the first in a series of shows which will
be aimed at younger language learners.

Picking up a language at an early age equips children with valuable skills
for life, and just as our many hundreds of thousands of adult listeners are
learning a language in their coffee break, so too can children learn a
language while they’re doing something else, for example in the car on the
way to school, football practice, ballet class, or whatever.

School Run French breaks down the French language into short chunks of 6-7
minutes, and every episode contains an interactive audio game which helps
children consolidate what they’ve learned.

School Run French is available on iTunes to download and sample audio
episodes will be put there on a weekly basis. However, the first ‘pack’ of five
lessons with colourful pdf puzzle sheets is now available for £5.00 (+VAT for EU customers).

I’ve had a listen and I love it – so do my ‘testers’ – marvellous having two kids who are a acaptive audience! They like the fact that it’s fun and there are games and challenges to test whether they know the answer.

Just itching for Mark to do School Run Spanish as I am constantly asked for such a resource by the parents, grandparents and carers of pupils at school. How about it, Mark? ¡Por favor!

Just been checking my e-mails and came across one from Helen Myers that I thought I might share with you!  

In response to a request for a song about pets in French, Helen posted - 
To the national anthem: (thanks to Rachel Hawkes for reminder of this .. I think it originates from a CILT Pathfinder / Steven Fawkes) ...

Although I no longer regularly teach French, I still love the annual French phenomenon that is the Tour de France. I used to make a big fuss over it with an interactive map and daily updated chart – I think that was when my NQT year really seemed to reap rewards as the kids at the tough comp where I taught fought to be my ‘updaters’.

Anyhow, I’ve been Tweeting all week with @sharongs and @etalbert amongst others about Le Tour, and my house has been a hive of Tour activity as my boys have been avidly watching ITV4 each night, and Mr S has been getting overexcited as his cycling fantasy teams have been doing rather well (his Vélo games team was in 87th place yesterday!)

So the big question is…. who will win?

I don’t share the opinion of some fellow Twits who are missing Armstrong and Ullrich – I love the more open race this year. From the start, I’ve been rooting for Mark Cavendish for the sprints and Cadel Evans for GC. With Cavendish abandoning to concentrate on the Olympics – and to give other sprinters a bit of a chance too ;o) – all my supportive vibes have been channelled the Aussie’s way.

However, Carlos Sastre is in yellow going into the penultimate stage – what shall I do? He’s Spanish after all! Should I be loyal to my Spanish preferences and yell for Sastre, or to my original choice and scream for Evans to make up the deficit of just over a minute and a half? The likely outcome is a win for Evans as Sastre is not a great time trialler, but anything can happen in Le Tour!

But I really can’t see this animation coming true – sorry, Bernhard Eisel – but, just to be on the safe side, watch out for cows, Carlos and Cadel!!

Whilst blogging last night, I was reminded of a video on Youtube that I had seen 6 months ago (and commented upon, so I know it was six months ago!!) but forgotten about. A masterpiece of sock puppetry, and an advertisement for a great product! See for yourself!

Coffee Break Spanish, presented by Mark and Kara, is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to learn Spanish. Now nearing it’s 100th episode, you can subscribe on iTunes and find out more about CBS at www.coffeebreakspanish.com/.

And should you wish to learn other languages, check out www.radiolingua.com where more of the prodigious output of Mr Mark Pentleton are showcased – including Coffee Break French, One Minute languages including Luxembourgish and Norwegian and MyDailyPhrase eg Italian. No froggycoffee here, eh Mark ;o)

A couple of local news items about been brought to my attention by Google alerts, both related to young language learners.

The Mirfield Reporter covered the story of a Year 4 class at Battyeford Primary School who learned a song in French, La Meteo, that they performed in assembly. Not just for fun, but also in order to achieve Asset Languages level 1.
The class teacher mentions that they are the first class to achieve the award – how many other schools are already going for accreditation for their pupils? She also thanks the teacher at Castle Hall School for her help. Sounds like an example of cross KS links / liaison to me.

The second article, from the Liverpool Echo is headlined School girl wins award for language.
It reports that Elizabeth Foulkes, whilst a pupil at Grassendale’s St Austin’s Catholic primary school, achieved the highest score of all primary children tested in Spanish for Language Ladder Asset Languages exams. With Liverpool so hot on primary languages, it doesn’t surprise me that the girl comes from that area, especially as St Austin’s is a centre of excellence for Spanish, having a FLA and an advisory teacher working with them as well as a link school in Spain, parents encouraged to learn alongside their children and weekly language lessons for teachers. Shows that the effort is worth it!
Elizabeth has now moved on to high school and is quoted as saying –
“Learning it means now when I’m on holiday in Spain I can understand things, like menus – especially useful because I’m vegetarian!”

The children I teach love learning Spanish and one of their reasons for enjoying it is that they don’t have to do exams and aren’t labelled as ‘level 3s’. So there’s a tension for me between knowing that there is a need for some kind of assessment of progress but also not wanting to remove one USP of PLL. But here we have examples of pupils having fun and learning useful stuff for personal interest, and at the same time gaining recognition for their efforts. Mmmm.

What do you think? Should we be looking at formal ways to assess PLL like Asset, or is informal assessment sufficient?