Category: opinion

There’s been lots of football going on around here – I’m making no apologies for it as it’s part of me and therefore part of my blog. Added to that, it is relevant to my ‘mission statement’ of making PLL relevant and fun, as proved earlier this week.

It was my assembly on Thursday – actually it seems to be my assembly every Thursday! – and the theme for the week was Happiness. I talked about Sunday night when Spain had been playing Italy and how I had felt sick when it went to penalties, and then about the match that was happening that evening between Spain and Russia. I talked about my friend Nick who supports Russia and how one of us would be very happy and one would be sad on Friday morning.
Come Friday morning, I walked down the path into the playground and felt like royalty as so many kids stared cheering and shouting and hugging me as if I had personally led the Spanish to victory. It was amazing! And what’s even better, they were shouting in Spanish! They love learning Spanish, and this has given them another reasn why their learning is relevant to their lives. Some of them even commented on John Motson’s pronunciation – good on you, kids!

So I am SO looking forward to seeing them tomorrow – it’s my day off but I’m going in anyway, just so we can all dance around the playground, chanting
¡Campeones! ¡Campeones! ¡Olé, olé, olé!

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Happy Colorful Girl, originally uploaded by Pink Sherbet Photography.

I’ve finally got around to responding to being tagged for the Passion Quilt meme – not once, but FIVE times!
This meme, started by Miguel Guhlin , asks people to consider what their passion in education is, find an image that encapsulates it and explain their passion.
So, thanks to @theokk , @moodlehotpotato, @ajep, @langwitch and @ahenderson, here’s my passion.

Entitled Happy Colourful Girl, this picture is described as follows:
‘I just gave the girls poster paint with no rules…I told them they were free to paint themselves any way they wanted and they were given clean white T-shirts to wear and use as napkins! They had such fun…what you see is the result of pure child’s art…no rules 🙂 ‘

Whilst I don’t think we should abandon the rules completely, this image for me sums up how I think teaching and learning should be –

• colourful, full of vibrancy and life
• child led
• fun
• exciting and thrilling
• offering challenges and activities that inspire creativity
• memorable experiences.

I loved going to school – I’d fight my parents to let me go when I was ill. You may think that’s odd, and it possibly is, but that’s what I want for my children – my own and the ones I teach – to enjoy the time they spend at school, learning so much more than how to read and write, experiencing a wide spectrum of activities and wanting to come back day after day to find out more.

Some of you might have expected me to choose something Spanish – and I could easily have done so as nothing stirs me quite like it – but my passion goes deeper than that into all areas of teaching and learning – not being restricted to one subject but encompassing all.

So there you have it!

Now to tag five more people (hopefully who haven’t already been tagged!)

1.Leanne Simmonds
2.Rachel Hawkes
3.Dave Stacey
4.Sharon Tonner
5.Adam Sutcliffe

Instructions-

1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce etc.

Have fun :o)

I was just having a look at my Google alerts and was reminded that I’d signed up for TeacherTube ages ago. For those who don’t know, TeacherTube is like Youtube but for teachers!
Surprisingly for me, I remembered my password and managed to find my account, including the videos I’d bookmarked.

And I once more came across this lovely video called Three little men. Made by children with severe learning difficulties at Frank Wise School in Banbury, it use Playmobil men greeting one another in Spanish as the pupils practice speaking skills.

There is often debate about the merits of teaching MFL to children with ‘special needs’. I’ve always found that MFL has been a good leveller – by that I mean that pupils who are struggling in other areas of the curriculum find themselves on a fairly equal footing with their peers, particularly if their difficulty is with the written word as there is so much speaking activity.
And as to it being a ‘waste of time’ as I’ve heard many times – well, having watched the video, judge for yourself!