wcps – ¡Vámonos!
 

Category: wcps

If you read my post a few weeks ago about my recent presentations, you may be interested in an article I wrote for the Global School Alliance.

In it, I wrote about the international journey of Whitehouse Common Primary and why it has been so important. Click the link below the image to read it.

While you’re there, why not have a look at the other posts from schools around the world, sharing their projects and the impact it has had on their school communities. It’s free to join the Global School Alliance and there are many interesting opportunities to be found on their platform.



As promised, here are some of the trioramas made by Y6 at WCPS on the subject of Mi pueblo. The pupils were very excited about making them and whilst one class did a better job than the other, there were some excellent examples created. Each classroom has a (static) Spanish display and I’ve added some of the trioramas to the border of them. I was going to attach them like a row of houses but decided that it was batter with the writing flush to the wall and the townscape facing the floor so that they could be read!

Why spend the time making them?

  • Yr6 needed a bit of motivation!
  • It encouraged them to do their best work and take pride in presentation in a way that writing in their books doesn’t.
  • Their work is now on display, or has been taken home (I took photos of them all to stick in books.)
  • Others within school have commented on the work; again this would not to be true if it were in their books.
  • It celebrates all the work that they have put in over the previous few weeks.

Today see the second Website of the week in QR code – this one is still under construction but is looking great!

The colour was chosen especially to match the colour scheme of the site – and the school ;o)

(For those of you without a QR reader, click here)

Wallwisher

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Just realised that I hadn’t blogged the Wallwisher made by Year 5 just before Language World.

It was the first time I’d used this online tool – which allows you to ‘stick’ Post-it notes on a virtual wall – with this group, and it was done as a sort of ‘Mexican wave’ type exercise.
Five pupils got out a laptop and I showed them what to do. They posted their notes then passed on their laptop – and expertise – to the next person. By the end of the lesson, everyone had posted their version of the poem extract from La Primavera by Antonio Machado, and also tried and mastered a new tool.
You’ll have to move the notes around to read them all; there are so many!

WCPS Spanish

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It’s a long time since WCPS Spanish was updated – very
remiss! However, we’ve been recording all sorts of things, and i’ve finally got around to podcasting some of the soundfiles this evening, having downloaded 140 files from our Easispeaks – and there are still two Easispeaks ‘AWOL’ ;o)

So, check out Year 4 talking about their freetime, Year 5 speaking about the planets in Spanish – our first tentative steps towards CLIL – and Year 6 talking about their town.

Teachers TV

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Last June I spent a very enjoyable but also very tiring day being filmed by Teachers TV. The premise of the series of which my programme was to be a part was that an ‘expert’ in an area of ICT was visited by an interested / curious ‘beginner’. The ‘beginner’ observed the ‘expert’ for a day then went back to their school to try out some of the things they had learned. My area was ‘online communities / social media’ and my visitor, Marie Guyomarc’h, a secondary French teacher.

Yesterday saw the premiere of the programme – I came downstairs at 8am to discover my children laughing their heads off as they watched. Thankfully, not all viewers were as amused and I received some lovely tweets from people who had seen the programme either online or on TV.
If you want to watch, you can access the video here where you can also find lesson plans and further tips on the area.
So, watch and see – will you join my boys laughing at me or will you find it even a little bit helpful?

Don’t stop movin

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Not a post about S Club 7 (athough I will say that my boys are big fans of Hannah who’s in Primeval now!) but about something that was reinforced in my mind last night.

The Assistant Head at school had been asked to run part of the PDM on EAL (English as an additional language) and to give some brief ideas on how to make life easier for EAL pupils at school. We don’t have many but it is an important issue – and one that is relevant in general too! On a recent course she had attended, the presenter had taught them some Welsh to put the delegates in the position of an EAL learner, and Jan had asked me to emulate this – her exact request was ‘you know an oscure Spanish dialect don’t you? Could you teach us some?’ Not sure how the Catalans would respond to hearing Catalan described as such but I took the challenge.

The idea was to teach numbers 1-12 and then do some basic maths but without using visual prompts like fingers, cards, notes, actions or mimes until about half way through the session. Thus the staff were put in the place of a learner who is capable to doing the task – all our staff can add and subtract numbers up to 12!- but don’t have the vocabulary to understand the task.

What struck me was how hard I found it to teach without using actions – I literally had to put my hands in my pockets or hold them together to stop myself gesturing. I found it really uncomfortable to see the looks on my colleagues’ faces as they tried to work out what I wanted them to do – and I think I caved in quicker than I should have done. My style is very much waving my arms around, pointing, miming and using any clue I can to enable the pupils to understand.

When asked how they’d felt, it was obvious that the exercise had hit the mark as the staff immediately pinpointed the difficulty of understanding the task being the biggest stumbling block, and how much easier it had been once actions had been introduced, or the list of numbers being written on the wall. One colleague said that she’d given up trying after a few minutes as she was so baffled; another that she’d felt so inadequate and small as others had caught on more quickly than her, and almost humiliated (once she’d understood it) by the simplicity of the task that she’d been unable to do.

So, despite my discomfort at teaching in a way that is alien to me, I think the exercise served to underline just how important gesture and mime are in enabling understanding.

We played a game from Digital Dialects as part of my mini-lesson. Well worth a look if you want to learn – or even just look at – some basics in a wide range of different languages!


Great excitement last week when a parcel arrived from Devon, with a courtesy slip from Devon Education Services.

Our copy of TAKE TEN EN ESPAÑOL has arrived!

As you may recall, I was asked to help out along with some of the pupils at Whitehouse Common Primary School where I teach. The kids have been eagerly awaiting the finished product and are very excited to see how it’s all turned out.

As the blurb on the DES site says ..

Take 10 en espanol is a resource that helps primary school children practise their Spanish in a fun way whilst taking part in short tasks of daily physical activity. In doing so it brings together two major educational initiatives and offers the potential to significantly improve children’s learning potential. A follow up to Take 10 en francais, Take 10 en espanol has all the features plus extra dance section with Salsa and Flamenco.

I’ll be using a song from it with Year3 on Thursday – San Fermin. Happens to fit the topic we’re doing – and serendiptously, it’s one of the ones that WCPS dance on the video!

If you want to get a copy, check out the DES site! You can buy just the book , just the CD/DVD or the whole pack (which is what I would do!)

Snow stops play!

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Today I was supposed to be in Leicester speaking about eTwinning and the potential of using Voki, Voicethread and Audacity in projects. However, the snow got in the way so I’m not there but at home. I sent my presentation and notes to Jenny from the British Council so those brave souls that made it could have a look at what I might have said.

Below you will find all that I would have presented today given the chance.

Notes for MadridFree Legal Forms

MadridFree Legal Forms

And here’s the slideshare related to Whitehouse Common’s awardwinning project – if you want to see examples of the sort of things we did, leave me a message and I’ll upload some of those too.

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