Sunday 23 December 2012

What to buy your favourite linguist for Christmas


....a ticket to the best MFL and ICT CPD event in town!  The 3rd ICT and Languages Conference (affectionately known as #ililc3) will take place at the University of Southampton on 9th and 10th February 2013.  Read all about it on the Languages SouthEast website.

Read about the original #ililc and #ililc2.  I am honoured to be speaking again at #ililc3, this time about Numeracy and Tarsia.  There are many other superb speakers on offer as well.

And you mustn't miss the Saturday night Show and Tell!

Come on, you know they're worth it!




Wednesday 12 December 2012

Post it!

ImageChef.com

While looking for something else yesterday, I came across this post on the Number Loving blog.  It's all about Post-its and different ways that you can use them.  I was inspired by the first idea in the post, which I thought could be adapted easily for use in the languages classroom.  I particularly liked it because it promotes pair work and is also good for the repetition of vocabulary and structures.  

The aim of the game is to claim squares on the grid by writing the answer on a Post-it and sticking the Post-it on that square.  Each one in the pair needs to have a different colour or shape of Post-it so that you can see who has claimed which square.  Once the squares are all covered, pairs remove the Post-its and give them and the grid to another pair, who match the post-its to the correct squares.

I've made a French maths version, to go with my numeracy resources, and also a Spanish weather one, which I am planning to use with Year 5.  I'll make three different ones, so that, on tables of six, no pair is doing the same one, and laminate them.
Weather Postit Grid

Number Postit Grid

Off to find some small, cheap Post-its!

UPDATE 12.01.13:

Year 5 have had their first session of writing on the Post-its this week.  I purchased a big pack of 51mm x 38mm Post-its from my local Staples (soon to be closing down - I obviously haven't bought quite enough there).  I made three different versions of the grid so that each pair on the tables of 6 was doing a different one, and you can download all the grids from MFL Sunderland now.  Below are some pictures of the grids in action.  Next week, as a starter, they will be given another pair's grid and Post-its to match up.  If you are trying this yourself, I'd recommend doing a demonstration first.  Some of my class didn't quite understand what they had to do to start with.






UPDATE 2 16.02.13: Read about how @mflgirl has adapted this idea for use with her AS French class to work on speaking.