Thought it was about time I adopted a pet for my blog.

There were no cows available at the Virtual Pet Shop unfortunately – anyhow, Angus would get jealous, wouldn’t he @mrmackenzie?

So, in honour of my friend, The Countess of Devon, here’s my new pet who will henceforth live in my sidebar.

Feel free to feed my sheep with hay or lettuce – just offer it to her and click for her to eat. Apologies that she’s a noisy eater.

One of my Google Reader / Feedly subscriptions is to a site called Noticias Locas which offers ‘Noticias curiosas, insólitas, raras …. pero rigurosamente ciertas‘, a bit like a site that catalogues ‘And finally…’ news items in Spanish.

I thought I’d share with you one that tickled me!

You can search here by title – find such gems as the Japanese biscuit with a special ingredient, the unfortunate Austrian girl with the tractor driving boyfriend, or Rory the horse who thinks it’s a dog.

A warning – you couldn’t use the site directly for pupils due to some dodgy adverts at the bottom, and some of the stories are of an ‘adult’ nature e.g this one about an interesting side effect of beer. However, if you pick your article and take a screen shot, or print it out, I think you could use some of the stories for gist reading – certainly in a secondary context, but also as an example of using all the clues you can to decipher meaning without understanding every word.

And, for amusement value, it can be quite amusing :oD

Whilst I’ve been getting overexcited about the exceptional performances of Team GB in the rowing, cycling, swimming and sailing – not to mention the gymnastics yesterday – Spain has been enjoying success too.

Yesterday saw Rafa Nadal win gold in the men’s tennis singles, beating Fernando González of Chile 6-3, 7-6, 6-3. And this morning he was crowned World Number 1, knocking Roger Federer off his perch!

And Spain won another gold on Saturday, courtesy of Joan Llaneras in the men’s points race in track cycling at the Velodrome (Chris Newton of Team GB won bronze)

Then today saw silver for Martínez and Fernández in the 49er sailing – oddly no British medals in that one ;o) They might even be promoted to gold after a protest over the (gold medal winning) Danish crew using a Croatian boat in the final race after theirs broke.

And Leire Olaberría didn’t quite manage to emulate Llaneras’ feat on Saturday, but did win bronze in the women’s track cycling points race. (Rebecca Romero, having won gold yesterday in the women’s individual pursuit, came 11th in her first attempt at the points race)
With good prospects of medals in the open water canoeing, hockey, synchronised swimming and triathlon amongst other things, Spain is optimistic of adding to its medal haul before the Games are out.

¡Vamos a ver qué pasa!

The lovely Joe Dale sent me the link to this video on Teachertube today – thought I might find it interesting. And I did, so I thought I’d share it with you too.

Adorable Spanish Elementary Plays is described as

High School Spanish students perform The Three Bears, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood plays for area elementary students.

The sound isn’t brilliant but the idea is clear – older pupils have worked on a play to present to younger pupils from neighbouring schools. This is an idea for transition that I love. It benefits both groups of pupils – excellence and enjoyment, anyone? The older pupils get to plan script practice and perform the play, using language they know and also stretching their vocabularies; the younger pupils are familiar with the story so don’t need to understand every word to be able to follow the plot. Both groups have fun, and links are made between the Key Stages, making ‘moving on’ easier for pupils – and potentially for their teachers too.

It’s good to see what can be done with a bit scenery, imagination and a good smattering of Spanish!

There are other videos from sparkenthusiasm that I’ve discovered via this one – more of those tomorrow :o)

Regular readers may have realised by now that I’m a sports fan – and even irregular readers probably have an inkling! So you can guess that I’m currently having a fine time keeping an eye and ear on events at the Olympics Games in Beijing. My boys are quite interested too and it’s fun trying to work out the rules of various rarely seen sports like fencing and judo as well as explaining those that I do understand like badminton and canoeing (again rarely seen on TV!)

Of course I’m particularly enjoying the cycling – Sami Sánchez (left) came good in the road race although Contador failed to make it a Spanish double this morning – my eldest was pleased though as he’s a Cancellara fan.

For those of you who are also enjoying the Games and fancy finding out more in Spanish, you can access the official site in Spanish – as well as English, French, Arabic and Mandarin.

Other places to check out –
Olimpiadas Beijing 2008
Clarín from Buenos Aires for a South American view
the sports pages of ABC and also El País (interesting article about Michael Phelps)
El Universal (Mexico City)
Terra (Miami)

And whilst I’m still on holiday for another three weeks (well, bit under I guess!), those of you in other countries will soon be back to school so here’s a link to some great Olympic resources from the Australian Olympic Committee – five lessons worth of stuff available in Spanish but also Arabic Chinese Croatian French German Indonesian Italian and Japanese. I’m thinking that I might use them anyway as part of EDL day – I know all the languages aren’t European but it’s about celebrating different languages and I’m never really very strict on them being European ;o) You could also check out this blog for some further ideas in Spanish.

And of course, don’t forget the Chinese policeman about whom I blogged before the Games – wonder how many people he’s helped – and in how many more languages he’s mastered greetings!

Anyhow, back to my sporting activities – I have a fantasy football team to complete – and it’s not going to plan as there are too few Spanish defenders in the Premiership to make my team fully Spanish so I’m haivng to cheat more than a little. Oh well!

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DSCN0704, originally uploaded by lisibo.

We’re now over half way through the school holidays and time is flying. My thoughts are already turning to the new academic year – I’ve been invited to do an ICT action research project next year and I need to decide on the title, I’m speaking at three conferences (so far!) so am thinking about those, I need to start resourcing the new Spanish SoW for KS2 at school and I’m planning an animation club so need to make sure that’s in hand too.

In the light of this, I was struck by the ‘Cita de hoy’ from About.com

El trabajo más productivo es el que sale de los manos de un hombre contento.
(Victor Pauchet)
(the most productive work is that which comes from the hands
of a happy man)

I’m having a good holidays and feel happier than I have in a long time – so I’d better get to it, hadn’t I?

But I’ll also be bearing these words in mind when term starts and life is getting me down – I think my bike will be seeing some action ;o)

PS you can sign up for the Dichos refranes y citas newsletter here.

Picture taken at Greenwood Forest Park.

After my week in Anglesey (pictures on Flickr!) I returned to a mammoth list of posts to read in Google reader. I’ve now waded through them and am back to a nice clean page (until someone else blogs!)

This post on About.com -Spanish language caught my eye-

Reporting on an article in the Telegraph , it seems that Barcelona FC cancelled their flight to the USA on Air Berlin as the company refused to deliver the in-flight communications in Catalan. The club’s President, Joan Laporta is involved in the promotion of Catalan and the decision, it seems, was made as a matter of principle.

Whilst I can support the right of people to speak and promote their language, especially in the light of the treatment meted out by Franco to Catalan, Basque and Gallego, and in light of recent discussions, I’m wondering…
how realistic the demands are on a low cost airline? As the spokeman for Air Berlin said, it would involve a great effort.
how far the right to have announcements in your language could be taken – will those from Valencia expect valencià to be spoken whilst those from Mallorca would want them to ‘xerrar es mallorquí’ ?
how much it was for the entourage rather than the players – although the manager is now Pep Guardiola – Catalan through and through – and there are a number of players from Barcelona, there are others who perhaps would be more comfortable in Spanish – or perhaps they should have asked for announcements in Portuguese, French and Icelandic as well?

And one last thing – does anyone pay attention to the inflight announcements anyway?

Mañana voy de vacaciones, pues no habrá mucha actividad por aquí durante la próxima semana.
¡Hasta pronto amigos! :o)

Having spent a good while flicking between Youtube and Zamzar over the last couple of days, I’ve had a chance to look over some of my ‘favourited’ videos once more, and came across this one.

I remember They Might Be Giants from their song Birdhouse in your soul – classic lyrics including ‘blue canary in the outlet by the lightswitch who watches over you’ and ‘not to put too fine a point on it, say I’m the only bee in your bonnet’ – and It’s Istanbul not Constantinople – but here they are singing a song about the Alphabet of Nations. They cheat for X but otherwise a country for each letter.

I was thinking of using it as a challenge for European Day of Languages – some ideas:

• learning the song would be the simplest
• play the song each day for a week then have a quiz on countries
• name the languages spoken in the countries
• name the capital cities
• challenge pupils to label the countries on a map
• pupils rewrite the song with countries of their choice
• write a collaborative Alphabet of Languages – then learn a word in each language

Doesn’t have to be for EDL – it would be a good exercise for global awareness and ICU at any point.

There is an Animaniacs video naming countries too, but I prefer this one as it’s shorter, less dated (in terms of look and also countries that no longer exist) and also funkier. ;o)

I came across Omniglot the other day and bookmarked it in my del.icio.us account for further investigation.
Omniglot is ‘a guide to the languages, alphabets, syllabaries and other writing systems of the world’.

You can find out information about a myraid of languages including ones I’ve never heard of!

It’s fascinating to look at all the different writing systems both real – some Mayanscript

and some imaginary – some Klingon!

There are tips on language learning, as well as a multilingual bookstore and articles on languages.

In fact, there’s so much on there that it’s hard to do it justice in a blogpost so I’d encourage you to look for yourself. However, here are three of my favourite parts.

1. Language related art
This is a piece of art by Venantius Pinto based on the Torcharian script and there are links to other examples of artwork such as Mike O’Connell‘s artwork featuring a number of different scripts and Peggy Shearn who is inspired by language and writing systems (see also below)

2. Useful foreign phrases
Ever wanted to know how to say ‘Please speak more slowly’ in Estonian?

Or ‘Where’s the toilet?’ if you’re caught short in Greece?
??? ????? ?? ?????????
There is a quite long list of possible phrases in a wide range of languages – some with accompanying soundfiles to aid pronunciation. And there are also phrases that are possibly not as useful, but nonetheless amusing such as ‘My hovercraft is full of eels’ – here in Mandarin Chinese ?????????? and Polish Mój poduszkowiec jest pe?en w?gorzy and ‘Stop the world, I want to get off!’ in perhaps Czech Zastavte sv?t, chci vystoupit! or Armenian ??????? ?????? ????????, ??? ?????? ????:

You can also access in a variety of languages, again some with soundfiles-
for example –

??? ????? ?? ???? ?????;
(Miá pápia ma piá pápia)
A duck but which duck). (GREEK)

Esel essen Nesseln nicht, Nesseln essen Esel nicht.
Donkeys don’t eat nettles, and nettles don’t eat donkeys. (GERMAN)

Mae Llewellyn y llyfrgellydd o Lanelli wedi llyfu llawer o lyfaint.
Llewellyn, the librarian from Llanelli, licked many toads. (WELSH)

3.Proverbs and quotations about languages.

Omniglot has collected together proverbs and quotations in various tongues on the subject of languages. The majority are quite profound –

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Una lengua natural es el archivo adonde han ido a parar las experiencias, saberes y creencias de una comunidad.
A natural language is the archive where the experiences, knowledge and beliefs of a community are stored.
– Fernando Lázaro Carreter (SPANISH)

Cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon.
A nation without a language is a nation without a heart. (WELSH)

but there are others that are less ‘serious’ –

Chan fhiach cuirm gun a còmhradh.
A feast is no use without good talk. (GAELIC-SCOTLAND)

It’s no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase “As pretty as an airport” appear.
– Douglas Adams

??????????????????
(Ti?n bù pà, dì bù pà, zh? pà Gu?ngd?ng rén shu? P?t?nghuà)
I fear neither heaven nor earth, I only fear Cantonese speakers trying to speak Mandarin. (MANDARIN)

????????????????????
(Tìn m? gìng, deih m? gìng, jí gìng b?kfòng yàhn góng Gwóngdùngwá m?jeng)
I fear neither heaven nor earth, I only fear Mandarin speakers speaking Cantonese badly. (CANTONESE)

My particular favourites include

Any time you think some other language is strange, remember that yours is just as strange, you’re just used to it.

Kolik jazyk? znáš, tolikrát jsi ?lov?kem.
You live a new life f

or every new language you speak.
If you know only one language, you live only once. (Czech)

and this French saying that I hope will soon be seen as untrue –

Un homme qui parle trois langues est trilingue.
Un homme qui parle deux langues est bilingue.
Un homme qui ne parle qu’une langue est anglais.
A man who speaks three language is trilingual.
A man who speaks two languages is bilingual.
A man who speaks only one language is English.
– Claude Gagnière

Looking at all the above ‘favourites’ I can see the OMNIGLOT site as an excellent resource for expanding the vision of languages in an interesting and fun way.

Why not use it as a resource for European Day of Languages on 26th September?

You could use the artwork to inspire your pupils to create their own having looked at the section on various scripts and writing systems.

Or challenge pupils to learn tongue twister in another language – the sound files are great for that!

Or each class could attempt to learn a phrase in as many languages as possible – and other classes could guess the phrase – I think we’ll be doing this at WCPS!

Whatever you do, it’s well worth a look!