Category: primary languages

[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AYHTuUcC]

The Keynote on Saturday morning at Language World was delivered by Cynthia Martin, President of ALL this year, and was report on research that she and others have carried out into Primary languages. Rather than try to write it all down, I took lots of pictures of the slides and made a movie. And here are a few comments that I hope will shed light on the slides.

The first session I attended was Helen L. Walker presenting Raising global awareness in a second language and speaking from her experience as an early years teacher in the immersion programme in Canada.Helen asserted that we still tend to live within our own cultural bubble despite the immediacy of internet etc, and that global awareness, that is, an understanding and appreciation of other cultures, is something on which we still need to work. She talke dof how we can do this using books, experiences and contcts as well as global focus weeks such as thos edetailed on the SWgfl.

Whilst living in an English speaking part of Canada (Calgary), Helen taught a class under the immersion programme of pupils aged 5 who had no or very little French. they began their journey using the topic L’Afrique, and applying an enquiry based method of learning. They looked at elephants, had an Africa day and did lots of art activities. Questions were posed and the children looked for the answers with teacher help where needed.

One such question was ‘Does it rain in Africa?’ to which the children immediately answered ‘no’. Reading What the animals were waiting for, a book about the rains in Africa, challenged this view and shaped their understanding of what it might be like to live in Africa.

Another book Beatrice’s Goat had wide reaching effects on the pupils.

Beatrice lives in Uganda and wants to go to school but has no uniform as she can’t afford it. Then she’s sent a goat from a charity. The pupils empathised with Beatrice – and wanted to send a goat to her. Helen explained that Beatrice now had a goat, but that perhaps they could buy a goat for another child. The class discussed how to raise money to send the goat, and settled on creating items to auction off including the journal of Françoise the class teddy bear, booklets made in computer time in french about numbers, colours, animals and Africa. On an art trip they made a quilt with each child contributing a square – this too was auctioned . All in all, they raised sufficient money to buy a barn full of animals. Not only had they raised funds but also the awareness; the pupils were so proud of themselves and had a great joy in giving.

Helen offered a list of some of the resources she used, and of sites that were useful for this type of thing, and others shared ideas from their classes including a boys’ school where the pupils raised money by doing the staff’s ironing!

As a postscript to this, I overhead a conversation today about an article saying that by teaching ICU, we are producing racist pupils as we are presenting a ‘stock view’ of countries. This rang bells as I had had a similar experience in Liverpool at the PLS where someone had been challenged for portraying a very narrow view of life in Martinique. Good point i guess. How can we make sure we’re not reinforcing unhelpful stereotypes?

All a bit topsy turvy I guess, reporting on a course I ran on Tuesday after a presentation I did today but heigh ho!

I had the pleasure and privilege of speaking at the Education Show today. I volunteered myself, admittedly, but I hardly thought they’d say yes! I’d attended a previous seminar there and had been rather unimpressed and thought ‘I could do better!’ – so I put my money where my mouth is – and hope I succeeded.

I did a day of ICT in PLL training today at Hillcrest School and Sixth Form Centre. More of that in another post..

Have a look at the Lingua website for more details!

Last Wednesday I took part in a day for Language Coaches in Birmingham. The afternoon session was given over to looking at links between Primary Language Learning, EAL and literacy, and we were fortunate to have Joe Brown from CILT to address us.

All sounds very exciting and I await the results with anticipation. You can catch Joe speaking at PLS in Liverpool in two weeks time!

I subscribed to the channel belonging to Imagiers a while ago.

Originally, I saw the traditional songs below –

There are thousands of videos on the channel – some are more advanced grammar and so on, others are simpler vocabulary presentations. And some are not French at all – eg there are several clips about Helsinki!

I just have to share this lovely lovely storytelling clip that was brought to my attention by @mariefrance.

Following on from my previous post about rediscovering Seesmic, another friend, John Warwick, asked me to share a little bit about eTwinning in the primary language classroom for an eTwinning presentation he was preparing. I decided to record him my answer as it’s easier to explain in person and I also thought it might be useful too! So here it is!

If you want to find out more, see my Slideshare and post here.

Wondering if any of you would like to add to a debate I’m having at the moment re QCA schemes for KS2. I’m trying to help someone choose the best way to present materials on a site to satisfy as many Primary MFL teachers as possible. Having drawn their attention to the KS2 Framework and the QCA units and their thematic and skills rather than topic based approach, they’re now in a quandary as to how to best present things.