European Day of Languages

September 26th will be European Day of Languages.  Over the last couple of weeks I have been saving a lot of links for it, and so I thought I would share them with you here.  In no particular order:

• If you're looking for ideas for something to do, you should head over to Dominic McGladdery's European Day of Languages Wiki
  
• How other languages hear animal sounds  - a cool video featuring lots of different languages
  
• "Let it go" in 25 languages - many of the children I know are obsessed with Frozen and know all the songs.  Disney have released this version of the Oscar-winning song "Let it go" in 25 languages.  Can your students name 25 languages?  My 11 year old knows this version of the song off by heart now, but before she heard it said "I didn't know there were 25 languages."  There is also a "behind-the-mic" version showing all the singers singing it.
  
• If your students are fed up with Frozen or are mostly boys, they might prefer this clip of Darth Vader saying "I am your father" in lots of languages.
  
• Interactive version of the "Languages take you further" booklet
  
• Language facts and fun from the Council of Europe
  
• The Great Language Game - listen to a clip of a language being spoken and identify it.  How high a score can you get?
  
• European Day of Languages flyer from the Council of Europe
  
• Some ideas from the Guardian Teacher Network
  
• Free resources from Routes into Languages
  
• Find the links here to my countries and languages Tarsia puzzle
  
• Activity from the Red Cross about how a little language can go a long way
  
• There are still some free resources available from the CILT website
  
• Global Communications, a resource pack for KS3 from Global Dimension
   
• World Stories - stories for children from around the world, in many different languages and English
  
• Lots of ideas and links from Europe in the UK
  
• A video with lots of language facts and figures
  
• ALL's European Day of Languages on Film project

Erasmus+

From January 1st 2014 Erasmus+ will become the new EU funding programme for education, training, youth and sport.  It replaces Comenius, Leonardo, Erasmus, Grundtvig and Transversal as well as other smaller programmes.

Last week I went to a briefing session which was run by Europe Direct Northeast.  Here are the main points.

Erasmus+ has a new and different approach to that of the old programmes.  Europe is a changed and changing place, and it needs to become more competitive in the face of the new economies of South America and Asia.  Priorities are different.

The new programme is much simplified.  It is more user-friendly and easier to navigate (not difficult, if you have experience of filling in Comenius application forms!)  There is also a substantial budget increase of 40% to €40.8 billion over seven years.

These are the objectives of the programme, against which project applications will be scored:

• improve the level of key competences and skills (especially literacy, numeracy and ICT)
• foster quality improvements, innovation excellence and internationalisation at the level of education and training institutions
• promote European lifelong learning
• enhance the international dimension of education and training
• improve the teaching and learning of languages (a real bonus for the MFL community!)

Amongst the opportunities for individuals, across the EU 800,000 lecturers, teachers, trainers and education staff and youth workers will be able to teach or train abroad.  500,000 young people will be able to volunteer abroad and take part in youth exchanges.

Key Action 1 relates to the Learning mobility of school staff.  The aims are to develop school staff competences, such as languages and ICT, and to offer professional development opportunities abroad.  The application procedure has changed.  In the past, schools completed their own applications and delivered them to the national agency by the given deadline.  Now, schools will need to register with the programme and then formulate a strategic two-year international plan.  Then they apply for opportunities as and when they come up.  The approach, therefore, is now strategic and institutional, and is no longer an opportunity for personal enrichment.  It must be whole-school. 

There are opportunities for innovation projects and the exchange of good practice.  There is funding for 25,000 partnerships involving 125,000 institutions (which works out at about 5 partners per partnership) to share best practice, enhance basic skills and to keep children engaged with their learning.  Cross-phase and cross-sector partnerships are encouraged.

eTwinning will take on an enhanced role, with an expected 200,000 teachers collaborating online.  Money will be spent redeveloping eTwinning, and more use will be encouraged.  It will aim to provide a stronger platform for cooperation between schools and will support all kinds of school cooperation and mobility.  

Key Action 2 is for Strategic Partnerships.  They aim to develop and implement practices and tools, as well as an exchange of experience and good practice.  The funding deadline will probably be March. Successful applications will show transferability of knowledge within partnerships, a clear sense of European identity and an introduction of languages, and will not be just a transfer of materials.  If a partnership wishes to meet in one of the partner countries, they will have to demonstrate why they have to meet physically and not online.  The meeting will have to lead to something specific.  Again, the application procedure is different.  In partnerships of just schools, only one application needs to be submitted, by the co-ordinating school.  Then the whole partnership will be approved by the co-ordinator's national agency - whole partnerships are selected.  This will solve the problem that Comenius school partnerships have had in recent years, where each school applied separately to their national agencies and were approved or not at national level.  Partnerships often collapsed when not enough partners were approved by their own national agencies.  Partnerships will receive a fixed amount of Euros regardless of where the partners are, and will be based on the number of organisations in the partnership.

Sadly, Comenius Language Assistants and Partner-finding seminars are not a part of Erasmus+.

Keep an eye on the website erasmusplus.org.uk as well as the Twitter hashtag #erasmusplusuk.

Using Web2.0 tools to promote reading

Today I gave a presentation at this year's Atlas conference in Durham - "The International School - Promoting the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of global learners".  I gave some ideas for using Web2.0 tools to promote and facilitate reading.  The context was for reading within a partnership with schools overseas, but of course the tools that I have highlighted can be used across the curriculum and not just for reading.  Here is the presentation:

using Web2.0 tools to promote and facilitate reading

View more PowerPoint from Clare Seccombe

Take a walk around the world

I expect lots of people are going to be looking for Olympics-related ideas for their lessons next year, me included.  Today I found out about the Global Children's Challenge.  Teachers of Y4, Y5 and Y6 and their classes are invited to apply to take part (applications close on 31st July, so you'll need to act quickly).  The idea is that teachers and the children in their classes wear a pedometer every day for the 50 days of the challenge, which runs from 15th September until 3rd November.  They work as a team to accumulate and log actual physical steps, which then enable them to take virtual steps around the world via the Challenge website.  There is the possibility of visiting 50 different countries.  The Challenge is an initiative designed to get children more active, but of course is also an excellent global and intercultural opportunity.  Full information is on the Challenge website, and you can download the flyer here.


Admittedly time isn't on most schools' side with both holidays and the application deadline looming, so many schools who want to take part may not be able to.  But there's nothing stopping you from adapting the Challenge and putting your own spin on it.  Pick a French-speaking or Spanish-speaking country and find out the distance from its capital to ours.  Will they be able to walk enough steps to get to London in time for the Olympics?  Where will they pass on the way?   Give yourself a time limit and see how many countries you can walk to in that time.  Can you do a tour of Africa or of South America?  There are all sorts of possibilities.


If you reckon on 2000 steps to a mile, you and your class will soon be able to rack up the miles.  The cheapest pedometers are available for about £3 from places like Argos and Amazon.  You'll be able to watch your class tearing around the playground, getting lots of exercise and enabling you to tell them about lots of fascinating countries and cultures.




*Image by the brilliant @bevevans22

The Birth of a Nation

I have been following with interest over the last few days the news coverage of the beginnings of the Republic of South Sudan.  It was this BBC news article which first captured my attention.  It talks about all the things that the new nation will have had to sort out in advance of its official "birth" yesterday, such as its political border, its flag, stamps, currency and its country-level internet domain.  South Sudan had an X-Factor style competition for its new national anthem.


It struck me that this would make a good school project.  Tell the children that your region - the north-east in my case - has decided to become an independent state.  They have to decide on its capital city (Newcastle?  Sunderland?  Durham?  Controversial!), a flag, currency and so on.  What they choose will depend on the cultural identity and heritage of where they live.  This could also work in language lessons.  Instead of their own region, you could choose a region of one of the target-language countries.  For example, tell them that Castilla y León is going to become an independent state.  They will have to do some research to find out more about it if they are going to create a meaningful profile for it.  And then of course they can practise their presentation skills by introducing their new country to the rest of the class.


Just an idea.

Fruit Miles

One of the things I do on my day off on a Friday is go to Tescos to do the weekly family shop.  We used to do it on a Saturday morning, but my younger daughter has started dance classes which are, you've guessed it, on a Saturday morning, and of course at a different time to her sisters'.

This morning I was accompanied on my shopping trip by my husband, who also has a day off today.  When we reached the fruit and veg section, I told him about the lesson I had with my Y3 class last week. 

We had watched one of the chapters of the BBC Active's DVD "Being Spanish", which shows some Spanish children picking nectarines in Valencia, and then following the nectarines' journey to the processing warehouse, the giant fridge and the delivery lorries, which then transport the nectarines all over Europe.

We then talked about where the fruit in our supermarkets comes from.  Some of the children had already noticed that some of the fruits that their parents buy come from other countries.  I asked them to have a look at the labels next time they are in the supermarket.  We talked about it again this week, briefly, but it was evident that they hadn't had the opportunity to look at the fruit, or had forgotten!  So when I was in Tesco today, I thought why don't I do a little survey to find out where all the fruits come from.

With my trusty HTC Desire I took photos of the labels showing where the fruits are from.  This afternoon I have PowerPointed them, ready for our lesson next week.  This has been quite a labour-intensive process just for one bit of one lesson, and so I thought it would be worth sharing here as I'm sure it will be useful to others too. 


Before you look at the slides, have a think about the questions I'm going to ask Year 3:
1. How many fruits did I see?
2. Which fruits do you think I saw?
3. How many countries were represented?
4. Which countries do you think were represented?


I'm going to get them to do some predicting in table groups, and then they can mark each others' while we look at the PowerPoint.

Fruit miles

View more presentations from Clare Seccombe

I'm hoping that the information will also raise important questions such as the environmental impact of importing all these different foods, why we import them in the first place, and which foods are in season when.  Even if we don't get onto that, they will be finding out the names of more fruits and the locations of more countries, which can only be good.

Intercultural Understanding

If I had £1 for every time a student has said to me, "Why doesn't everyone speak English?", I would currently be in the Caribbean soaking up the tropical rays and sipping cocktails on board my private yacht, and not in cold, rainy Washington. 

It's a question they often ask in exasperation or to deliberately disrupt the lesson, and so my reply has often been similarly exasperated, along the lines of "It's not something that's quick to explain so if you come back at 3.30 I'll tell you all about it for half an hour."  And that usually does the trick.  Some students have been genuinely curious, and I have given them my quick "Because of history, geography, politics and religion" explanation.

In retrospect, it's a question that we should take seriously and do our best to answer in depth.  Because you cannot completely understand or appreciate a language without knowing something about the country or countries where it is spoken.  The two are inextricably linked.  For example, the Spanish phrase "hacer puente" does not always mean "to bridge" in its strictest sense.  Scratch the surface and you find out about a tradition for taking days off that you'll wish you had, and then dig a little deeper and you discover how many holidays Spanish children get compared to British children. 

What is Intercultural Understanding?  Here are two definitions:

• 
  
  “Intercultural Understanding is the ability and willingness to see things from a different cultural perspective..... It is respecting different ideas and lifestyles and recognising that your culture is not superior to others.”
• 
  
  “Appreciating the richness and diversity of other cultures.....Recognising that there are different ways of seeing the world and developing an international outlook.”

For me, Intercultural Understanding addresses and disproves the stereotypical views that Britons so often have about people from other countries, proves that our way is not necessarily the only way or the best way, and allows students access the rich and vibrant culture of the target-language country or countries through their language studies.

The photograph at the top is one of a series that I took to make a CrazyTalk video for a training session I was giving.  The little figure is one of a set of "World People" that can be purchased from the Early Learning Centre (and who you may recognise from Gorseville!)  I use them often to explain about stereotyping.  Is this what French people look like?  What do they really look like?  And interestingly, go a step further and examine why we have this stereotypical image of French people.  The BBC's "Coast" programme explains very well about the Onion Johnnies, who would have been the first and only contact that many British people had with the French.

I am a big fan of the Intercultural Understanding strand of the KS2 Framework, and am pleased that it is part of the KS3 Framework as well.  I've done my best to include Intercultural Understanding in my KS2 Spanish lessons over the last year, and I have to say that it has been harder than I anticipated.  It seems a bit false somehow, especially when you only see the children once a week, to depart from the "thread" of your lessons and stick something intercultural in.  What I have done so far, formally in any case, has been looking at the Spanish-speaking world (thanks World Cup!) and highlighting certain fiestas such as San José, San Fermín and la Fiesta Nacional de España.

After some useful tweets and research over the last couple of weeks, I have come to the conclusion that Intercultural Understanding, in my setting at least, would best be covered little and often, as a "drip-drip-drip" approach, rather than as one-off occasional lessons.

I was reading Danny Nicholson's blogpost "Powerful Images to Give Lessons Punch", where he suggests displaying a photograph on the board at the beginning of the lesson to stimulate questions.  In the MFL lesson this could be a photograph of a fiesta, place, child or house from the target language country, or something a bit different like a Google Doodle.  Fiona Joyce tweeted the Google Doodle link and I could see its potential for intercultural work, as Google Doodles are something with which our young people are very familiar.  Here's one to start you off:

It's from August 27th 2008.  Which Spanish fiesta does it represent?

In September, one of the first things I will be teaching my second-year-of-Spanish pupils is the months of the year.  I am starting to make the flashcards, and have decided to put images of fiestas on each month's card, such as Reyes for January, San Valentín for February, San José for March and so on.  This will give learning what is essentially twelve words a bit more depth and purpose.

I thought I would share with you some of my favourite Intercultural Understanding links.

FRENCH

Equipment that children need to buy for La Rentrée:  What do our children buy to return to school in September?

Videos showing playground games

Collection of playground games from all over the world

24 heures de la vie d'un enfant: Study the daily routines of children from all over the world

Ton scooter est japonais: Poem reminding us that many of the things we use in our daily life come from other countries.  An easy model for students to replicate.

SPANISH

Playground games from El Huevo de Chocolate

More playground games

European Playground Games, including Choco-choco-la-la, which my KS1s and daughter love

Calendar of Spanish fiestas

Semana Santa: origen de las procesiones

Spanish customs and culture

Map puzzles: of each continent and more.  Perfect for perfecting your South American geography!

Colours in Cultures: In the West we wear black to mourn.  In South America the traditional colour is purple.


I would be interested to hear about how you teach Intercultural Understanding, and any good resources that you have come across. 

You can also read a blogpost I wrote about Intercultural Understanding for José Picardo's Box of Tricks blog.

Working with partner schools overseas

When I first started working with partner schools overseas, in 1997, communicating with partners and exchanging project work involved faxes, telephones, files, CDs, video tapes, books, pieces of art and craft work.... and many expensive trips to the Post Office to post it all. It took time for it all to reach the partners, and just as long for them to send theirs to us. Everything took a long time. Over the years, however, thanks to all the new technology that is out there, this communication and sharing of work has become much easier, quicker and cheaper. There are many web tools that we can use now to collaborate with our partners.

Two of the tools that have really taken off in the MFL world are Storybird and Storyjumper. Brian Stobie, the international officer for County Durham, discovered Storybird recently and could immediately see its use for partnership work. He asked me to give a presentation about Storybird and Storyjumper at the Atlas (RNIL) conference today. I agreed to speak for 10 minutes, just to give delegates a taster and to whet their appetites to find out more. I decided to present Storybird and Storyjumper as a story. I hope you like it.


Here is a Storybird that I wrote in collaboration with Dominic McGladdery.  I wanted Fiona Joyce, queen of the MFL Storybird Wiki, to be involved as well, but at the moment you can only collaborate with one other person.
What do you like to do ? by d_mcg, CSeccombe on Storybird

Storybird and Storyjumper aren't of course the only programs that can be used in this way.  You could also try Voki, Wallwisher, Voicethread, Xtranormal and GoAnimate, to name but a few.  And you could set up a blog or wiki for the partnership so that you have some shared webspace via which to share your work.  Anything that motivates you and your students to sustain your partnership and make it meaningful can only be a good thing.

Food flags, informative flags

I always check my Tweets while I'm having my breakfast in the morning.  This morning there was one in particular which caught my eye:

Last year's Sydney International Food Festival was promoted with these wonderful images of national flags made up of their country's iconic foods.  Here is a copy of the poster, which you can download as an A3 or A4 PDF here. 

You may know by now that I am passionate about international education, in particular about getting people to see past stereotypes and find the "real" people and countries in the world.  These flags seem like an excellent place to start.

Esther Mercier (the genius behind A tantôt) suggests giving the pictures to Food Technology teachers so that they can join in European Day of Languages.  Students can research which flag is portrayed each time, and which foods are used to make them.  They could then have a go at making their own flags for other countries.  This links in nicely with the World Cup as well.  While pupils are finding out about the 31 teams who aren't England, they could research the typical foods of the countries and have a go at representing them pictorially like this.

But why stop at food ?  There are all sort of images and indeed words that could be represented as flags.

Here is a Spanish flag I made using MS Publisher.  Is it the truth or is it stereotype ?

And here is a French flag represented as a Calligram that I made using Imagechef and Publisher.  Students could do the writing themselves.

There are many possibilities.  If you're not averse to a bit of mess in your classroom, get some travel brochures and get the students to make some mosaic flags with images of the chosen country.  Whichever method you choose, they will certainly make for an eye-catching display.

One flag that is missing from the Sydney poster is ours.  What foods would your students put on a pictorial representation of our flag ?  Why ?  What other images would they put on our flag to represent our country.  They are obliged to think about their own country and its identity.  Community cohesion.

World Cup Calligrams

Combining ideas for bringing the World Cup into your classroom and my love of calligrams:

World Cup Calligrams

View more presentations from cseccombe.

I found a football colouring sheet and lightened the lines to pale grey using PaintShop Pro. Braver people could draw their own in pencil ! Then I filled in each section with words about England and being English. These are the images that you can see on the slides.

Suggestions for using this in the classroom:

• Show pupils the images and ask them to read what is written in each section. Why have these words been chosen ? This makes them think about their own country and the things that typify it - community cohesion !
• Pupils then research another of the World Cup countries, finding out similar information.
• Pupils either draw their own footballer or find a suitable colouring sheet and represent their findings as a calligram. It's even better if they use the country's national colours.
• For a MFL twist, pupils can present their findings in their foreign language or even in the country's language !

The 2010 World Cup

So you might be wondering what the 2010 World Cup has to do with the blog title "Changing Phase". Well, football up here in the north-east is certainly changing phase, with Sunderland being the only north-east team still in the Premiership. Who would have thought it ?!

Today I attended the annual Atlas conference at St James Park in Newcastle. Atlas is the name of the steering group of the north-east branch of the Regional Network for International Learning, and I have been the Sunderland representative since I became an AST in 2002. The title of the conference this year was "Ready, set, go global! - developing international links to enrich school life", and had a particular focus on forthcoming sporting events, in particular the 2010 World Cup and the 2012 Olympics, and how they might help us as classroom practitioners to bring an international dimension to our teaching and therefore to pupils' learning.

I "volunteered" to give a presentation on the 2010 World Cup and how it can be used as a stimulus for activities in the primary classroom. We ran an event in Sunderland in 2006 called "Making the most of the World Cup" which produced many resources and which was very successful. The World Cup resources page on the LA's international website continues to receive a number of hits even though the tournament is long over.

When putting together my presentation, I looked at the resources that we produced for the 2006 tournament for a bit of inspiration, but based my presentation on the official Fifa World Cup website, which is a mine of fantastically useful information and well worth a look.

I hope you enjoy the presentation. It's my first go with Slideshare, and especially my first go at linking audio with PowerPoint. I hope also that it gives you lots of ideas for how you can bring the world into your classroom. After 12 years, 4 Comenius projects and 3 International School Awards, international education is something that I am passionate about. This is the latest step in my mission to enthuse as many other people as possible !

World Cup 2010 - activities for the primary classroom

View more documents from cseccombe.