Skills icons

 

Recently I was shown the excellent work of the history lead of a local primary school.  They had chosen to design an icon for each of the seven history skills (Constructing the past, Sequencing the past, Continuity and change, etc..)  Their plan is to display the relevant icon at the beginning of each lesson, and then to discuss with the children how they will be learning, and to recall when they have used that skill before.

It got me thinking that we could use a similar system in Key Stage 2 Languages, to alert children to the skills that we are using and discuss how we are learning.  I introduced the topic in the Languages in Primary Schools Facebook group, where it turned out that some colleagues have used such icons in other subjects and have also dabbled with them in Languages.  We also discussed the skills that we would want to include.

I have used Canva to create sets of icons for French, German and Spanish.  The skills included are:

• Listening
• Speaking
• Reading
• Writing
• Phonics
• Grammar
• Culture
• Knowledge About Language
• Language Learning Skills

(For Knowledge About Language [KAL] and Language Learning Skills [LLS] see the objectives of the Key Stage 2 Framework for Languages.)

My plan for the icons at the moment is to put them onto the first screen of my lesson PowerPoints, the "Today we are going to..." screen, to explain how we are going to achieve our lesson objectives, and perhaps also on my worksheets.

I displayed them in my lessons today, and it enabled me to say not only what we were going to be doing, but also to tell them which skills we were going to be using.  I suspect that quite a lot of the time, the children aren't aware of the different skills that we use and why.

If you would like a copy of the icons (available as shown in the image above and in a reversed format for displaying on a dark background) then click on these links:

• French https://www.lightbulblanguages.co.uk/resources-fr-dis.htm#misc
• German https://www.lightbulblanguages.co.uk/resources-ge-dis.htm 
• Spanish https://www.lightbulblanguages.co.uk/resources-sp-dis.htm#misc

If you would like to use them (and I'm not saying you have to) I'd love to hear about how you have used them.

UPDATE 08.07.22:

• "Language Learning Skills" changed to "Language Learning Strategies" as per the KS2 Framework.
• Italian icons added (thank you Alberta!) https://www.lightbulblanguages.co.uk/resources-pr-it.htm#dis

Music and Languages

 

Thanks to my Google news alert, I've come across today this study by the University of Helsinki.  Previous research has shown that having a music-related hobby can boost language skills and can positively affect the processing of speech in the brain.  This new study by the University of Helsinki shows that the reverse is also true: learning another language can positively affect the processing of music in the brain.  

In one of my schools I share the PPA coverage with a specialist music teacher, and we often talk about what we are teaching the classes.  She told me towards the end of last term about the new Model Music Curriculum (MMC) for Key Stages 1-3 (March 2021).

This document is "non-statuory guidance for the national curriculum [in music] in England", "a practical framework through which the statutory requirements of the [music] curriculum can be met".  It's designed for specialist and non-specialist teachers in the primary sector, and specialist teachers in Key Stage 3.  I've been having a look at it today to see if there is anything that we as language teachers can contribute, or indeed if it offers any useful advice for us in the languages classroom.

My first thought when reading the document was "I wish we had a document like this for Key Stage 2 Languages!"  It is in fact one of the recommendations of the White Paper that we should have some non-statutory guidance for core curriculum content.  This is something that came up during the many and varied discussions at the weekend about the DfE's plans for teaching Latin in secondary schools.  Those £4 million would be a huge boost to the primary languages community and to ensuring that all children in Key Stage 2 receive a quality languages education.  But I digress....

Secondly, it was interesting to note the time recommendation for music in primary schools: "pupils should receive a minimum of one hour a week...may be short sessions across the week."  This is the same as the widely accepted recommended time for languages, so we can understand how difficult it can be for primary schools to fit everything into the timetable.

Music, particularly song, features prominently in the Key Stage 2 programme of study for Languages, and I have written before about using songs.  Children should be taught to:

• appreciate stories, songs, poems and rhymes in the language
• explore the patterns and sounds of language through songs and rhymes and link the spelling, sound and meaning of words

Music from the country or countries where the language is spoken is a facet of cultural understanding, and can also contribute to other aspects of the curriculum, such as expressing opinions.

The MMC covers the key areas of singing, listening, composing and performing, and I think it's the areas of singing and listening that are of the most use to us as language teachers in choosing songs and music for our lessons.  Here are the recommendations for the six year groups that I think will help us:

Year 1 (age 5-6)

• simple chants and rhymes
• simple songs with a very small range (mi - so) (3 notes)
• pentatonic songs (songs with a 5 note or 5 tone scale)
• call and response songs

I found this very interesting.  Quite often I find what I think would be a great song for Year 1, only to discover that they find it difficult.  I can see now that that the reason is often that the melody is too complex.  I'm going to look into chants and call-and-response for Year 1 as I think these would work well with them.  (If you know any, it would be great if you could put them in the comments!)

Year 2 (age 6-7)

• songs with the pitch range do-so (5 notes)
• songs with a small pitch range

Year 3 (age 7-8)

• unison songs, do-so range (5 notes)
• perform actions confidently and in time

Year 4 (age 8-9)

• unison songs, do-do range (8 notes, 1 octave)
• rounds and partner songs

Year 5 (age 9-10)

• broad range of songs
• 3 part rounds and partner songs

Year 6 (age 10-11)

• broad range of songs, involving syncopated rhythms
• 3 or 4 part rounds and partner songs

I think that seeing this progression in singing will help us to choose appropriate songs for our lessons, and therefore songs that children will be able to sing easily.

The MMC has a long list of suggestions of music for children to listen to.  Some of it links to the languages that we teach.  As I said before, children can listen to music and express their opinions of it, or you can play the music softly in the background while they are working.  Pieces of music can also be used for timing: "This piece of music lasts 5 minutes, so that's how long you have to complete this task."

Here are some suggestions of composers you could choose, in order to complement the music curriculum:

German

JS Bach

Beethoven

Weber

Schubert

Mozart

Mendelssohn

Strauss

French

Rameau

Chopin

Berlioz

Delibes

Saint-Saëns

Debussy

Fauré

Ravel

Spanish

de Falla

Rodrigo

Piazzolla

The Spanish list is very short compared to the others, so I've made a wider list (here as much for my own reference as anything else!)

Manuel de Falla	1876-1946	El amor brujo Cuatro piezas españolas Noches en los jardines de España
Isaac Albéniz	1860-1909	Suite Española no.1 and no.2 for piano
Enrique Granados	1867-1916	12 danzas españolas
Joaquín Rodrigo	1907-1999	Concierto de Aranjuez
Francisco Tárrega	1852-1909	Recuerdos de la Alhambra
Antón García Abril	1933-2021	film and TV composer
Paco de Lucía	1947-2014	virtuoso guitarist and composer
Tomás Luis de Victoria	c.1548-1611	choral music
Juan del Encina	1468-1529/30	choral music

If we are thinking culturally, then the 20 countries where Spanish is spoken each have their own styles of music:

Argentina	Tango, Chacarera, Chamamé
Bolivia	Kullawada, Morenada, Caporales
Chile	Torada, Cumbia
Colombia	Cumbia, Vallenato, Currulao
Costa Rica	Calypso, Chiqui Chiqui
Cuba	Rumba, Salsa, Mambo, Cha Cha Chá
Ecuador	Yarabi, Pasacalle, Bomba
El Salvador	Cumbia, Hiphop, Xuc
Guatemala	Garifuna, Marimba music
Guinea Ecuatorial	Soukous, Makossa
Honduras	Punta, Reggaetón
México	Mariachi, Cumbia, Danzón
Nicaragua	Soca, Punta, Chicheros
Panamá	Salsa, Calypso, Saloma
Paraguay	Guarania, Paraguayan Polka
Perú	Zamacueca, Festejo, Cueca
Puerto Rico	Guaracha, Bomba
República Dominicana	Merengue, Bachata, Salsa
Uruguay	Tango, Milonga, Candombe
Venezuela	Jarapo, Salsa, Calypso

Music and language learning have been shown to be mutually beneficial, so let's harness those links in the classroom!

No-screen activities

 

Today is another normal lockdown day in our house.  "Normal" consists of my daughters, my husband and I working at home, all on screens for most of the day.  I try to stay away from screens at the weekend (not always very successfully) for a break.  

Understandably, there have been a lot of requests recently for no-screen activities for students.  Here's what I can offer for languages:

• Lumen's Language Challenges: art and craft challenges with a languages focus. These are the ones that I have done, to give you some ideas.
  
  
• Make a minibook!  There are lots of different kinds, and you can read all about them on this blog as well as downloading a free publication containing all the information.
  
  
• Create a calligram: You can read all my blogposts about them here, or download this free publication which tells you all about them.
  
  
• Students could also complete a number of different no-screen activities and put them towards Lumen's French Award, Lumen's Spanish Award or Lumen's German Award.

Managing choral speaking

 

In my previous post, I wrote about language lessons in the "new normal", particularly with regard to choral speaking.

To help manage choral speaking, I have made some PowerPoint slides which tell the students which group should be speaking at any one time.  It also tells them what they should be doing while others are speaking.  There are slides for two groups and three groups, and the PowerPoint is available for Spanish, French, German and Italian.  You can download it from here.

Grouping in 3 groups (which I will have to for my classes of over 30) was a slight problem for Spanish, as the flag only has 2 colours.  So the three groups will be Los Rojos, Los Amarillos and Los Escudos, which I will probably type onto the slide.  Great for phonics too!

My Library

A couple of weeks ago Nathalie Paris told me about the My Library app.  She, in turn, had been told about it by Sylvie Doyle.  Now, I have a lot of books that I use both in my teaching and to inform my teaching.  I have blogged about a lot of them on here before, but I've never made an attempt to record anywhere the books that I have.  This app seemed to be a way of doing that, and a way of sharing my library afterwards.

The My Library app enables you to build up a list of your books quickly and easily.  You scan the barcode on the book, which records the ISBN number and locates the book.  Then you can add a Series (I've used this to enter the language the book is in or its theme, e.g. Pedagogy) and any number of categories.  For example, when scanning one of my copies of the Hungry Caterpillar, I entered it into the French series and gave it the categories Numbers, Food, Fruit and Days of the Week:

Now that I have all 422 of my books in my library on the app, I can use the search to find certain themes.  For example, let's say I want to find other books that I can use for Days of the Week, all I need to do is to select it in the search.  I tap on "All categories" first:

And then select the category that I'm looking for:

And here are all my books that have something to do with Days of the Week:

Doing this has highlighted that I have a lot of books about animals, food and colours, but very few or none about other topic areas that I teach.

I scanned all my books in with my phone, and it took several sessions over two weeks.  I've been able to export the library and its pictures so that I now have a copy on my tablet as well.  It's not possible to share the list with someone else without it overwriting all their books.  However, you can export your library as an Excel spreadsheet, which is easy to share and to sort.  The only slight downside of this is that all the categories end up in the same column and you can't use them to sort the books.  You can, though, highlight categories using the "Find" function.

I've uploaded my Excel library to Google Drive, and you can browse it here.

In a geekie way I've enjoyed reacquainting myself with all my books and recording what exactly I have!

5 in a row

Yesterday afternoon I had an enjoyable lesson with my new Year 6 Spanish class.  At the moment we are learning about sports, mainly to introduce opinions which they haven't done before, being new to Spanish in September. 

The whole-class speaking and listening, and the individual writing, was followed by this 5 in a row activity, which is from this lesson pack. 

• The children played in pairs, and there was one group of three.
• The 5 in a row grid has 64 squares, and the aim of the game is to win by getting 5 squares in a row, either horizontally, vertically or diagonally.  
• Each team member will need a different coloured pen or pencil.
• The children take it in turns to point to the square that they want and then say the right sentence to go with it.  
• If their partner agrees that they are correct, they colour in the square with their colour.  Alternatively they could write their initials in the square.
• The winner is the one who has five squares in a row in their colour.

To say it got a little competitive is an understatement!  There was plenty of target language being used and they were very good at playing tactically to block their opponents.  The group of three found it especially hard to get a line of 5 and had to use nearly all the squares.

This grid could also be used for a Blockbusters-style game, with one student moving vertically and the other horizontally.

It could also be used for a Knights game.  Students move in an L-shape, like the knight in chess, colouring in the square that they reach, as long as they can say the word or phrase correctly.  The student with the most squares coloured in their colour before both players get stuck wins.

If you would like to have a go at 5 in a row, there are quite a few games to try on Light Bulb Languages:

French - numbers to 15

French - numbers to 64

French - colours

French - fruit and vegetables

French - aller (present tense)

French - avoir (present tense)

French - être (present tense)

French - telling the time

Spanish - numbers to 15

Spanish - fruit and vegetables

Spanish - numbers to 64

Spanish - colours

Spanish - places in town

Spanish  - ir (present tense)

Spanish - ser/estar (present tense)

Spanish - tener (present tense)

Spanish - telling the time

German - numbers to 15

German - numbers to 64

German - colours

German - telling the time

Italian - numbers to 15

Italian - numbers to 64

Italian - colours

Italian - telling the time

If there is a 5 in a row game that you think would be useful to your classes and which isn't already mentioned here, please get in touch.  I already have the grid made and it's easy to adapt for a new game.

The Interference of English

Some time ago I wrote about the importance of spelling.  I asked if it was more important to spell accurately or to get your message across with some errors.  I included a list of the words in French, Spanish and German that are commonly misspelled by students.

Over the last few weeks I have been looking more closely at the issue of spelling in the new language.  While it's true that a considerable number of spelling errors are a result of carelessness, many others can be ascribed to the interference of English.

By the time students start to learn a new language in Year 3, they have undergone four years of rigorous training in English spelling and phonics.  The new language has different letter clusters and sequences, but the students can, often unconsciously, replace these patterns with more familiar English spelling patterns.  The four formative years of learning English spelling is enough to build a muscle memory, so that it feels more natural, for example, for a student to write rough than rouge, as the -ough letter cluster occurs in some frequently-used English words and the -ouge cluster is unfamiliar to English native speakers.

Spelling errors of any kind are exasperating for the languages teacher, especially when they are of the je m'apple variety which turn up again and again.  A systematic learning of phonics is one of the keys to ensuring more accurate spelling in the new language, but do we also owe it to our students to anticipate the sorts of errors that they are likely to make due to the interference of English and practise these words in a more focussed way?  

It is worth noting that this interference may also come from other languages that the student has learned, for example if they are in Year 7 and starting a language that is not the one they studied in Key Stage 2.  Any new language will have combinations of letters that are entirely unfamiliar to the beginner student and which they will need to practise in order to build their confidence and to start to build the new muscle memory.

We already draw direct comparisons with English in order to teach grammatical structures such as adjectival word order and the genitive, so should we now extend this to spelling?

Many thanks to the members of the Secondary MFL Matters Facebook group who joined in the discussion about this recently and who also provided many of the examples below:

FRENCH:
French word	often misspelled as	reason?
amusant	amusement	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English ‘amusement’
anniversaire	anniversarie	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English ‘anniversary’
blanc	blank	students remember the meaning of blanc by associating it with the English ‘blank’ but this in turn means that the word is often written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
bleu	blue	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English.
copain	complain	-m- probably added because of the influence of the English ‘companion’
danse	dance	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
déteste	detest	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
équitation	equation	the word is obviously unusual looking (and hard to spell/say for an English-speaking learner) so it is corrected to the nearest known English word
heures	hueres	-ue- is much more common in English than -eu-
histoire	historie	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
il	ill	the nearest known English word
intéressant	interestant	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
je m’appelle	je m’apple	the nearest known English word
magique	magic	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
maison	mansion	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
manger	manager	the nearest known English word
montagne	montange	-gne words often cause problems for English-speaking learners, as -nge is a much more common letter sequence in English than -gne.
natation	nation	the nearest known English word
neuf	nerf	apart from the obvious phonic influence, some of the influence will come from the well known Nerf guns….
oui	qui	these three vowels are never seen together in English.  It’s much more common to have q+u and then another vowel.
rouge	rough	English words ending -ough are quite common, hence the change to the nearest known English word.
vacances	vacancies	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
vingt	vinght	-gt is not an English word ending, but there are quite a few words (eight, knight etc) that end with -ght, hence the correction

SPANISH:
Spanish word	often misspelled as	reason?
centro comercial	centro commercial	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
difícil	diffícil	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
favorito	favourito	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
fútbol	fútball	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
geografía	geographía	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
me encanta	me enchanta	the nearest known English word
seis	sies	rigorous application of the “i before e except after c” rule!
tecnología	technología	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
vamos	vamous	few English words end with -os, so this is often written with an -ous ending, which is more familiar, from words such as famous
veinte	viente	rigorous application of the “i before e except after c” rule!

GERMAN:
German word	often misspelled as	reason?
es ist windig	es ist winding	-ig as a word ending is not seen in English, so it is corrected to resemble the much more common -ing ending
Katze	Catze	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
langweilig	langweiling	-ig as a word ending is not seen in English, so it is corrected to resemble the much more common -ing ending
lernen	learnen	written to make the word look more like the more familiar English
nicht	night	the nearest known English word
Schwimmbad	Schwimmenbad	the extra -en- is added to make it resemble more closely the English ‘swimming pool’.
zwei	zwie	rigorous application of the “i before e except after c” rule!