Category: knowledge about language

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of presenting at the PSB MFL conference via Zoom.

My presentation was entitled More than words with the subtitle Language learning is about more than learning lists of vocabulary. In it, I discussed my ‘idea of what ‘list of ingredients’ for language learning, particularly in the primary context. After discussing OFSTED’s 3 pillars and 3Is, I moved on to present my 7Cs!

And what are my 7Cs?
Context
Consolidation
Confidence
Communication
Culture
Celebration
Connection

I was thrilled with the response to my presentation and want to thank all the attendees for their kind words; I was floating on air all day despite an afternoon of stircrazy 10 year olds who’d not been out to play all day followed by parents evening!

If you’re interested in what else I shared, my slides can be viewed below.

What do you think? Have I missed a C? Let me know!

At the end of July, my husband and I popped off for a short break in Copenhagen in celebration of our silver wedding anniversary. We had a lovely time exploring and sightseeing, and as usual at various points my ‘teacher brain’ or as I prefer to call it ‘lifelong learner thinking’ engaged and I was struck with thoughts and ideas for the classroom.

Firstly I really struggled with not being able to communicate in Danish. I really didn’t need to as everyone spoke English but it made me feel bad not being able to speak. I found that I could understand to a certain extent if things were written thanks to having done some Swedish on Duolingo, plus managing find some similarities at times with German and/or English, but understanding speech was very problematic and speaking more so! My son (who’s studied Swedish for the last two years at Uni) and my husband (who works with Swedes and Danes) tell me that part of the problem is that people ‘swallow’ consonants in spoken Danish making it harder to understand than Swedish. However, I did persevere with my trying to understand and had some success.

And, as usual, I couldn’t leave without a book for my collection. I had a good look and decided that whilst I’d love a storybook, my level of understanding wasn’t high enough yet, so I settled on a simple word book.

Min første bog om Farver is a board book all about colours. Each page has a different colour until the last page which has a rainbow colours. I can see the likeness of farver and Farbe in German. Some colours look – but don’t sound! – like English (pink, orange), some are like French (brun) and others wouldn’t be recognisable to me without the images – sort is black and hvid is white. The last page is about rainbow colours which again reminds me of German Regnbuens farver although I wouldn’t have guessed that er flotte meant ‘are great.’

I’m looking forward to using this when I next look at colours in Spanish as children this year have enjoyed all the comparative exercises we’ve done with multiple languages, finding similarities and differences.

When we moved to Switzerland seven years ago, I had no job and no idea if I’d need my large collection of books. We decided not to take them all with us in the first instance so I started to make a list of them all whilst selecting some favourites that I couldn’t leave behind. The list stayed on my iPad and I forgot it was there.

Last summer I decided that I needed to work out how many books I had and list them somehow in some semblance of order. So I started a few Google Docs so that each time I purchase new books I can add them easily. And Google Docs have the added bonus that I can share the links so others can see too.

I’ve added the title of each book, the format and an idea of what the book is about and/or links that could be made to topics or to other curricular areas. Sadly it’s not searchable but you’re quite welcome to have a look!

Ideas:
If you’re looking for books on a topic, have a browse.
If you want ideas of books to purchase.
If you’re not sure about a book’s suitability, check and see if I’ve got it, and ask my opinion, or for a look. (I’m happy to do either!)
If you’re starting teaching a language and are looking for ideas.
If you just want to be nosey, go ahead!

So here are the links:
Spanish fiction
Spanish reference and non fiction
Spanish rhymes, poems, plays and puzzles
French
German
General ICU/GL/International/language promoting

Let me know if you find anything interesting or helpful!

A couple of months ago, Clodagh from ALL contacted me and said that Teach Primary were looking for someone to write a primary languages lesson plan for their magazine, and would I be interested? I said yes and last week, the new edition came out, complete with my lesson on p76-77.

Free KS2 MFL Lesson Plan from @lisibo – Use the Spanish version of George’s Marvellous Medicine to write your own wacky recipes | https://t.co/Qrm8oJg5KH pic.twitter.com/LEfglX0E4D

— Teach Primary (@TeachPrimary) 22 November 2018

It’s a lesson that I used on World Book Day 2016 when my school went with a Roald Dahl theme.  Whilst I teach Spanish, and the resources are therefore in Spanish, it’s an idea that could easily be done in French, German, or any other of the 58  languages into which Dahl’s work has been translated!

You can access the lesson and resources here on TeachWire .

And if you’ve come to my website via Teach Primary, welcome! There are lots of other ideas for lessons here, including more for World Book Day here.

And if you’ve never seen Teach Primary, have a look at the lesson plan for KS2 French on directions from last issue, by Amanda Barton or this lesson by Liz Black that links French and juggling!

Hopefully there’ll be another of my lessons published in the near future…

PS Thanks to Clare for sending me her copy so I have one for posterity!

“I am not a walking dictionary!”

How many times have I replied with this phrase when asked ‘How do you say…. in Spanish/French/German/Polish? (yes, there were some who felt that the Language Coordinator meant that I was fluent in all languages…) Using a dictionary was one of the skills that I feel is really important to develop as it allows greater learner independence as well as supporting and enhancing literacy.

Firstly, it’s important that learners know that a bi-lingual dictionary has two halves, often helpfully separated by a coloured band, and recognise that you won’t find the word for ‘cow’ by looking in the Spanish to English part!

Once that’s established, looking at alphabetical order is helpful. Whilst this shouldn’t be too much of an issue, it’s worth pointing out that in a Spanish dictionary there are entries under the letter ‘ñ’. I have a Diccionario Salvat from my university days that has a separate section for “ch” and “ll” as well but this not common nowadays.

One of my classes’ favourite dictionary activities was playing ‘Quick draw Spanish’ in which they competed to draw their “weapon” (dictionary) and “shoot” (find a word) as quickly as possible. Works well with individuals or as a table game with learners taking it in turns to be the Sharpshooter. There are some other good ideas of games to play with dictionaries (and other reference materials) here. I also like this game where more advanced learners could use their Knowledge about Language (KAL) to deduce what words might mean, and younger/newer learners might be given a list of 4 possibilities from which to choose.

When I was thinking about this, I found some free online resources (always a bonus!) Whilst they are linked to the Oxford Learner’s Spanish Dictionary, they can be used with any dictionary and are mostly straightforward. At WCPS we had a short period at the start of the day called SODA (Start of the Day Activity) and these exercises would be ideal to do at that time, or perhaps as part of Guided reading, developing skills. The higher numbered worksheets start to deal with more aspects of grammar and tenses so you might not want to give them as written to a group, but the ideas are useful and there’s always a child who needs a challenge! (The same worksheets are also available in French and German, and there are a variety of free primary resources for using a dictionary and a thesaurus)

And Collins also have some free resources linked to their Easy learning dictionaries in French and Spanish including an 11 page guide to using a bilingual dictionary.  ELSpanDictionarySkills

There is also a set of resources to go with dictionary skills on TES Resources. Whilst labelled as Secondary, some of the most basic ones aimed at Year 7 could equally well be used with Upper Key Stage 2.

Whilst paper dictionaries may be giving way to online versions, the skills needed to look for and successfully select the appropriate word are still as important – especially if we are to avoid such ‘faux pas’ as referring to a (video) shoot as ‘une fusillade’.

Thank you to June da Silva for pointing this out via primarylanguages@mailtalk.ac.uk.

November 21st is World Hello Day on which people are encouraged to greet 10 people to demonstrate the importance of personal communication in maintaining peace.

  World Hello Day was begun in response to the conflict between Egypt and Israel in the Fall of 1973.  Since then, World Hello Day has been observed by people in 180 countries.

    People around the world use the occasion of World Hello Day as an opportunity to express their concern for world peace.  Beginning with a simple greeting on World Hello Day, their activities send a message to leaders, encouraging them to use communication rather than force to settle conflicts.

    As a global event World Hello Day joins local participation in a global expression of peace.  The World Hello Day web site address is http://www.worldhelloday.org.

As June says in her email, what an opportunity to promote communication in other languages too. I will be attempting to greet 10 people in Swiss German and / or their native language. I’m sure I can find 10 people who speak 10 different languages at home amongst my boys’ new classmates and parents…

www.ipl.org/div/hello will help me in my task as will http://www.digitaldialects.com/ 

And how about these lovely song?

httpv://youtu.be/kjwkMmdqmH4

Another little gem I found on the Consejería site last night was a resource aimed at language awareness.

Entitled Languages all around you, it was developed by

• Consejería de Educación
• Consolato Generale d’Italia Edinburgo, Ufficio Scolastico
• Goethe-Institut Glasgow
• Institut Français d’Écosse

This is a collection of activities showing how modern languages are part of everyday life. The idea is to make pupils more aware of the importance of languages, the role they play in many aspects of young people’s experience and how languages can be learned while having fun and playing.

This booklet is aimed at children of Primary six and seven (that’s our Year 5 and 6 I think) although I reckon it would be good as a transition project between Primary and Secondary to get know pupils and find out about their experiences.

In the six units pupils explore the following topics:

1. Family & Home

2. Friends & School

3. Languages in Public Places

4. Languages & Travel

5. Languages & Food

6. Languages & Sports

And the best bit? It’s freely downloadable from the publications tab under material didáctica.

I particularly like section 2 where it asks pupils to talk about languages spoken by their family as well as their peers. And I discovered something about Haribo too!

I recommend you explore the site if you haven’t already – there are other resources (some paid) that are well worth considering including PDFs of resources that are now out of print.

On Tuesday I was in sunny (yes, it was sunny!) Manchester, delivering my AQA course.

Apart from the problems with the internet, I believe a good day was had by all – lunch was once more a highlight!

Rather than repeat all the links, can I refer you to my last post where you will find all the ‘new’ links about PLL, and also some recommendations from other delegates of sites and learning materials that they’ve found useful.

I forgot last week to put a link to a resource listing many many games and quick activities for the PLL classroom, so here it is.

I love this poster, shared with me on Twitter by @nwinton from the imaginatively named I love Typography blog in a post entitled Diacritical Challenge. The challenge is to a) name the font and b) identify the diacritical marks!

I’ve got to say that I couldn’t name all of them but there are plenty of people having a go in the comments!!

The subtitle of the post is ‘Squiggly bits’ which is how many of the pupils I teach describe them. As they’re unfamiliar in our language, it can take a bit of explaining but ñ isn’t too hard to explain, and the accents in Spanish to show where to stress words is easily explained when I mispronounce their names by stressing the wrong bit. And ¡ and ¿ are explained by the need to know if something is a question or exclamation a the beginning of the sentence so that your intonation is correct – cue much overacting ;o)

All counts towards Knowledge about Language!