Category: vocabulary

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!

In these strange times, the online conference is the way to go and thus I sat down at my laptop, coffee in hand and attended the ALL Primary Languages Conference a couple of weeks ago. Nicknamed ‘Acapulco’ by Steven Fawkes (there was a reason but nobody can recall what it was!) the conference was based around five pillars as can be seen from the graphic.

Others have shared their takeaways already, including Nathalie aka Nattalingo, as well as their presentations (Suzi’s is here) and I thought I’d share mine in the form of my sketchnotes.
Disclaimer: I had to ‘leave’ early so I’m afraid I didn’t do one for Suzi’s session nor Nathalie’s but you can access their slides at the link above!

An excellent conference and really well organised. Not only were the sessions great, the chat was good too with ideas flying so fast it was sometimes hard to keep up with it all! I recommend that you sign up to ALL as there will be future events for members, specifically designed for primary called PHOrum and they will be quality events! You can find out how to join here and also about the other benefits!

Thanks to Russel Tarr for capturing me telling a  story!

My session at #PracPed18 was entitled Tell me a story! You can find the Slideshare below.

Link to resources for El artista que pintó un caballo azul as a text to discuss diversity.

La Maravillosa Medicina de Jorge resources

Mi familia es de otro mundo review

¿Para qué sirve un libro? post and resources 

Clare Seccombe’s How to make a minibook tutorial

The book I mentioned that was recommended and demonstrated by Nathalie Paris at Language World was called Poux by  Stephanie Blake– check out the sketchnote of her session here, and follow her book blog and podcast here for more great book ideas!

My primary language book collection, classified by language type and theme.

The Storybird wiki   has been shut down but you can access the links etc here. mostly Spanish with a couple of German ones.

My Storybirds mostly Spanish with a couple of German ones.

ALL Literature Wiki

Pinterest links to research on Storytelling and stories in language learning

Pinterest board of online stories

Blogposts on books on ¡Vámonos! – lots of posts including book reviews, ideas for using stories and how to write your own!

Thanks for your participation and questions.
Photo credit – Russel Tarr

Notes:

Slide 18 – I skipped this one in my presentation as time was flying. This week, Merriam Webster shared a “time machine’ dictionary that tells you the words that were put into the dictionary during the year of your birth. I wrote a story using just nouns from my birth year, shared via tweet. This gave me the idea of giving children a list of words and challenging them to write a story with those words. A good way for more advanced pupils to practice verbs. I will share further when I have developed that thought!

Rewriting a familiar story. Photo credit – Russel Tarr

Acronyms:

GPS – grammar punctuation and spelling

PSHE – Personal, Social and Health Education

ICU – Intercultural Understanding

Key Stage 1 – children aged 5-7

Key Stage 2 – children aged 7-11 (languages are a compulsory part of the curriculum in English state schools)

WBD – World Book Day (April 23rd)

I came across this wonderful website today, linked from Teaching Ideas site.

Chillola.com is a multilingual site, offering simple resources in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian.

There are attractive vocabulary presentations accompanied by audio on subjects like colours, numbers, months, fruit and vegetables and body parts.  There are also very simple printable activities and colourables.

It’s a great resource for introducing vocabulary and for individual access, as well for raising awareness of other languages that are not necessarily taught at your school.

My favourites are the hamster teaching prepositions and the lovely illustrations for the opposites.

The site also offers links to several other websites about which I’ve never previously heard.  I feel more posts may be forthcoming…

Another example of the wonder of animation from Oscar Stringer.

[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AYHJ4Q4C]

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!

Brilliant ideas on how to recall pets in French using ‘pegging technique’-

un chien – a ‘she’ dog called Ann
un lapin – a rabbit on your lap in a pan
un hamster – a staring hamster
un perroquet – a parrot on your shoulder eating a pear saying OK
un souris – Sue the mouse looking for her friend Rhi(ann)
un cochon d’Inde – a cuddly guinea pig munching a dand(elion)
un poisson – a fish munching a croissant

Thanks Michelle!

Blogging from my desk, I can watch the cars sliding down the icerink that has replaced the road on which I live. That’s the problem with living on a steep hill – good for keeping fit but a pain when it snows as it fast turns to ice and makes it very hard to go down the road under complete control, and you might as well forget going up the road! And this situation can continue for long after all the surrounding roads have been cleared.

Anyhow – looking out of the window reminded me of a post on About.com entitled Spanish words for ‘SNOW’.

An urban legend has it that the Eskimo language has 25 (or four, or 50 or 100, depending on the version) words for snow. While the statement is seriously flawed (there’s no one Eskimo language, nobody knows what the true number is, and nearly all languages have multiple words for snow), it does have some truth to it: Living languages, by their very nature, come up with the words or means to describe nearly everything that people talk about and to differentiate among them.

It goes on to list the numerous words in Spanish to describe and name snow and related vocabulary. So, if you want to get beyond talking about ‘la nieve’ and become more descriptive, check out the list!

Here are a few words I liked!