Sentencify.net

 

Yesterday I was browsing posts on the Secondary MFL Matters Facebook group, and saw a reference to the website sentencify.net, which can be used to generate sentences and retrieval activities from a sentence builder.  (Thanks Marissa!)

I've had a play with it this morning (up early as daughter #1 had an early shift at work!) to see what it does.

First of all, you click on the "Get started" button, and this takes you to your "sentence builder" grid.  I entered some simple pets sentences:

There are 10 boxes altogether to structure your sentences.  The next step is to click the "Generate sentences" button, and choose how many sentences you'd like sentencify to generate for you.  I chose 8.

Then you need to type in the English (L2) for the sentences generated.  The sentencify user guide suggests copying and pasting into an online translator as a short cut - I pasted mine into Google Translate (ssshhhh!) and then just had to change turtle to tortoise.

Once you have your sentences in the L1 and L2, click on "Generate activities" for the options for the retrieval activities.

The first is the Match Up:

The activity is designed to be completed online, but it would also be possible to copy and paste into your paper-based activity or PowerPoint.

The second activity is "Unjumble":

The original L1 sentences are jumbled up and students have to rewrite them in the correct order.  It's worth noting here that the program wants the sentences to have the format of the singular pet followed by the plural pets, but grammatically speaking the order could also be the reverse of that.  This is something that you may want to consider when designing your sentences, especially if you are going to ask students to complete them online.

The third activity is "Fill the gaps":

and the fourth is "Translate":

The final activity is "Drag and drop":

To be honest I'm not entirely sure of the aim of this activity.  Each one I generate turns out in a different format!  If you have used the drag and drop, it'd be great if you could say in the comments how you've used it.

At the top of the screen there is also a "Create a test" button.  You can generate a test where students have to translate either L1 sentences to L2, or L2 to L1.  

Once you have finished your sentence builder and sentences, it's possible to save them, but remember to copy the code that is generated for your activity, as you'll need to enter this to open it again.

There is also a function for entering impossible sentences into the sentence builder and using hashtags to clarify which words can go together:

I had a go with this, and it takes a bit of trial and error to get enough variation in the sentences:

Finally, it's also possible to put emojis into your sentences.  I saw this on the sentencify Twitter account.  I didn't know before that pressing the Windows logo key and the full stop together brings up an emoji menu!

The resulting "sentences" will be more useful for some of the activities than for others.

I enjoyed exploring the site and can see how it will be useful in particular for generating quickly and easily lots of sentences from a sentence builder, as well as retrieval activities.  Have a play and see what you think!

A Spanish crowd-sourced resource

Very many thanks to everyone who contributed to my recent crowdsource.  You can download the resource from here.  It took a long time to get everything to fit on one sheet - I had been intending to use speech bubbles and a prettier font!  You may want to copy it onto A3 if you're going to use it.

My Year 6s have just started my Unit 17, which is about where you are from, the languages you speak and so on.  I'm going to use these texts as reading practice for countries and languages, as well as for helping with the conjugations of hablar and ser.  I can then use them for working on nationalities - we know the countries everyone comes from, so what is their nationality?

Social media is often criticised, but there is sometimes nothing better for making teaching resources.  Twitter and Facebook came up trumps with this resource.  Thanks again, everyone.

Messing around with text!

In the past I have written about practising word and sentence structure by mixing it up in some way and asking students to sort it back out into the correct order.  I have done this most often with missing out the spaces and making anagrams.

I have also asked my students to rearranged jumbled sentences into the right order so that they make sense, one of the ideas in my search for ideas for translation.  When I was preparing resources for Studio 1 (French Key Stage 3 course book) I put together worksheets like this one where I had jumbled up the sentence myself.

I was really pleased to see this tweet from@EClaire71247211 recently:

One of my favourite hacks - paste a load of TL sentences into this site and it instantly creates a sentence unjumbling exercise - good for making your own Conti-style 'sentence puzzles' or for scaffolded translations into L2. #mfltwitterati #langchat https://t.co/QhkT38WoCQ

— eclaire (@EClaire71247211) May 4, 2020

The Scramblinator is so easy to use - type in or paste in your sentence, hit the "Scramblinatorize" button, and it does all the work for you!  Resources are quicker and easier to put together.

It reminded of the Reverse Text Generator which is useful for messing around with text.  It also has a "Disemvowel" tool, which you can use to remove vowels or any other letters from your text quickly and easily (and which makes your sentences look like they belong in Only Connect) and a Word Scrambler / Descrambler amongst its Obfuscation tools.

Here are some of the effects you can get:

ORIGINAL SENTENCE	Je joue au foot avec mes amis.
Scramblinator	joue / foot / au / Je / amis. / mes / avec
Disemvowel	J j  ft vc ms ms.
Word Scrambler	Je euoj au ootf vaec mes asim.
ORIGINAL SENTENCE	Il fait chaud aujourd’hui.
Reverse	iuh'druojua duahc tiaf li
Reverse the wording	hui'aujourd chaud fait il
Reverse each word’s lettering	li tiaf duahc druojua'iuh
Upside down	ınɥ,pɹnoɾnɐ pnɐɥɔ ʇıɐɟ ןı

UPDATE 13.5.20:  I've found some more sites which can do similar things to your text:

To create word shapes, click here

NimbleText does disemvowelling and reverse text among other things (scroll down the list)

LingoJam puts your text upside down for you

The LingoJam Number Generator makes a number code out of your words

LingoJam will also disemvowel your words

Spellbackwards will reverse your text in various different ways 

Crowd-sourcing model texts for French

Following the success of the Spanish crowd-source and resulting resource, I'm now crowd-sourcing for French.

I would be very grateful if you could write a sentence or couple of sentences using the highlighted language that you can see at the top of this post.  You can see my example to start you off.  Don't worry about colour highlighting, as I can do that.  If you don't want to add your real name, a pseudonym or nickname would be fine.

You can add your sentences here in a comment, or email them to me.

Merci!  I will, of course, share any resulting resources.

Mundo Primaria

While looking for something else yesterday, I found Mundo Primaria.  It's a website intended for Spanish children, but has plenty to offer us as teachers of Spanish, both in primary and secondary.

Here are my favourite pages:

• Chistes cortos para niños  At Language World, Glennis Pye recommended jokes as good short texts for translation.  This page has a slide show of 25 jokes.
  
  
• Lecturas cortas  These texts too would be good for translation, particularly the non-fiction ones.  El Sol is among the texts that would also be useful for reading in Key Stage 2.
  
• Cuentos infantiles cortos  Lots of short stories of different genres.
  
• Infografías educativas  The first ones are for English, but look further down the list and there are some good word mats for maths and the solar system.  I particularly like this food pyramid one.
  
• Ejercicios de ciencias sociales  Downloadable worksheets for social sciences.  The geography ones are to do with the map of Spain (which is what I was looking for originally!) and even if you don't use the exact resource it will give you some ideas for teaching the geography of Spain.  The Vida en sociedad and Historia worksheets are also useful for cross-curricular learning in Key Stage 2 and even Key Stage 3.
  
• Ejercicios de lengua  Worksheets that provide useful ideas for teaching grammar, especially in Key Stage 2.
  
• Números naturales hasta el millar  These maths worksheets would be useful for any student learning big numbers in Spanish.
  
• El Euro  Some useful adding-up-money sheets  (The rest of the maths sheets can be accessed from here.)

Decorative Letters

A couple of weeks ago I received from Europe Direct NE an email about the European Day of Languages competition that they are organising jointly with ALL(NE).  The competition is inspired by the current exhibition of the Lindisfarne Gospels in Durham, and the idea is that children select a short text in another language and present it as an illuminated text.

Now I know what an illuminated text is and what one looks like, but it isn't something I've ever taught before.  I'd really like for my KS1 children to have a go at this as well as KS2, but think that a properly illuminated text would be a little beyond the younger ones.

Then I thought of this book that I bought in the Espace Culturel at Leclerc in St Jean d'Angély last month.  I like it because it combines handwriting, drawing, vocabulary-building and knowledge of the French writing system.  It will be useful especially for KS1, for some cross-curricular literacy.

The book has one letter of the alphabet to each page.  The letter is written in the French style and then turned into a picture of something that begins with that letter.  Here are b and c, for example:

The b becomes the head of a bélier and the c is the back of a crevette.  I also like the l page where curly ls become the filaments of lightbulbs (lumières).  I'm sure children would enjoy taking a letter, writing it in their best writing and turning it into something in French/Spanish that starts with that letter, as well as writing the French/Spanish word in their best writing.  Taking it one step further, there are many French comptines that would inspire an illuminated text using this as a basis.

I should add that unfortunately the competition is only open to north-east schools.  And if you are in a north-east school, no nicking my idea, right?!

UPDATE 24.9.13:

The children will be embarking on their competition entries today.  Here are the two examples that I have made:

Reading in French

The new Programme of Study for KS2 Languages requires children to "appreciate stories, songs, poems and rhymes in the language".  I'm always on the lookout for books in French and Spanish that will enrich the children's learning experience and that will introduce language points and inspire some independent writing.  Plus I am what you might call a book addict.

There are lots of things you can do with stories and books. Here are some of the French books that I have.

La chenille qui fait des trous

The old favourite Hungry Caterpillar is ideal for introducing days of the week and food.  The "eating" pages contain repetitive language that's easy for children to join in with.

In Je m'habille et je te croque a wolf puts on his clothes before coming to eat you.  Children would be able to create their own version with perhaps a different animal and different clothes. 

Maman! by Mario Ramos only has one word (Maman) on each page.  A little boy runs from room to room in the house looking for his maman, not noticing that in each room there are a different number of animals.  This book is great for numbers, animals and plural forms.

The rabbit in Bon appétit! Monsieur Lapin decides that he doesn't like carrots anymore, and goes to ask some other animals what they eat.  The language is nice and repetitive, and introduces you to things like "Pouah!" and "Beurk!"  A good example of how direct speech works in French, and introduces some new food words, which children will be able to work out using their general knowledge.

The parents of the little crocodile in Je mangerais bien un enfant try to tempt him with bananas, sausages and chocolate cake, but all he wants to eat is a child.  The language is more complex than in the previous titles, but it could be simplified.

Toutes les couleurs introduces colours as a little white rabbit gets stained with different colours while playing outside, before being bathed in blue water by his mother.

The little dinosaur in Pop mange de toutes les couleurs takes on the colours of everything he eats until he is a rainbow dinosaur.  The language is a little more complex than in the previous title, but it also introduces similes and colloquialisms.

Petit poisson blanc is looking for his mother and comes across lots of other sea creatures who are different colours in the process.  Children could create their own version of this story, using different animals and a different main character.

The La petite boule blanche series shows how pictures can be built up using a series of shapes, and each of the books has a different language focus.  My favourite is La petite boule blanche au pays des contes, which focuses on nasal sounds.

Mots rimés pour lire sans trébucher has a series of poems and rhymes which focus on specific phonemes.  Excellent for phonics.

And finally for intercultural understanding there is the La Terre vue d'Alban series, produced by the team that brought us Earth from the Air.  Comment vivent les enfants dans le monde? has photos of children in the places where they live, with information about each one and a commentary by Alban the fish.

So these are the French books that I have.  I'd love to hear about yours!

One year on......

I published my first blog post here on 28th June 2009. Over the last week or so I've been thinking about the things I have learned over the last year, and I thought I would share them with you here. These are not only things that I have learned about, but also things that I have used either in the classroom or elsewhere in my work this year.

• Storybird and Storyjumper:  First of all, two tools which almost need no introduction, such has been their success amongst the language teachers in my PLN and beyond.  All of the Storybirds that I have created appear on the fantastic MFL Storybird Wiki, the brainchild of Fiona Joyce, and you can see my Storyjumpers on this very blog (look at the tabs at the top).  I have found the programs invaluable for presenting appropriate text-level work to my KS2 pupils, but they haven't been able to try it out for themselves for ICT reasons, if you know what I mean....  
    
• Mini-books:  I discovered mini-books quite by accident while looking for something else.  I knew that it was something that I wanted to try, but determined to find the right occasion.  My KS2 pupils created mini-books containing their own stories based on a mini-book that we read together called "¿Qué veo?"  You can see the results here.  Mini-books are small and so the children know that they don't have to write very much.  They enjoy illustrating their work as well.  And their size also makes them ideal for the children to take home to show to their families.
• Wordle and Tagxedo: I wrote a post in April comparing all the different word cloud generators that are out there at the moment. Of all the ones I mentioned on that occasion, I use Wordle and Tagxedo the most. I find them particularly useful for displaying objectives at the beginning of a presentation (I paste in all my notes from the presentation and fortunately the words that come out biggest are the ones I want!) and also for helping pupils to see which are the important words amongst all the ones we are studying - the high-frequency core words come out biggest. Here is a Wordle of my Delicious tags (see below) and a Tagxedo of my World Cup resources page:


• Podcasting and Audacity: I've been using Audacity for a few years, but, as I discovered after a course with Joe Dale in December, only on a basic level. Joe really opened my eyes to the possibilities offered by Audacity for producing professional-sounding podcasts. I produced some secondary-level podcasts with our language assistants and then started podcasting in earnest when I undertook on behalf of the LA to provide a series of upskilling podcasts for non-specialist primary teachers of French. The technology side of it is straightforward for me now, and it's the scripting that takes the time. While I'm talking about podcasts, I'll recommend JamStudio for creating your own loops, and for making guitar accompaniments for your songs if, like me, you don't play the guitar.
• The RecorderPen: This was my purchase from the Gadget Show Live. I wrote a blog post after I had played with it for the first time and before I had used it in class. This term I have been incorporating Y1's theme of "Seaside" into their Spanish lessons. I wanted to show them how to describe things using colours. I picked four masculine sea creatures, made A5 flashcards of them, added recorded stickers and laminated the whole thing. I also made, recorded and laminated cards for 6 colours. When we were working in our groups of about 10, I said something like "un tiburón amarillo", and the children took it in turns to make the cards say the same thing by using the RecorderPen to make them speak the right words in the right order. They found it fascinating and were very interested to know how it works. Their class teacher was interested to see it and is thinking about buying a set for the class to use elsewhere in their curriculum.
• Wallwisher: Wallwisher has turned out to be very popular with my KS2 pupils. I think they like it particularly because they can see their contribution and other peoples'. It has encouraged them to engage with Spanish in their own time and, therefore, to explore the rest of the blog (see below) while they are there. One of our walls shows our collection of Spanish food nouns, something we haven't studied in class since before May half term, but which they are still adding to regularly. Our latest wall is about flags - please feel free to contribute.

• Calligrams: I've mentioned Calligrams a fair bit this year. Just see for yourself. I think I like them so much because they are a combination of words and doodles. I have also tried them out, and plan to do more in the future. What I am most chuffed about is that they have captured other peoples' imaginations too, and they are trying them with their classes. There is a place for low-tech, or, in this case, no-tech.

• Blogging: Before I started teaching in my current school, I had seen examples of effective school blogs. It was something I was very interested in setting up for the children at my school, especially as I am only there for a day and a half a week. I wanted Spanish to have a presence in the school even when I wasn't there, to publish and celebrate the good work that the children were doing, and give the children activities that they could access at home to help them with their Spanish. Fortunately, the Head agreed, and thus http://www.spanishstpauls.blogspot.com/ was born. The children love it, and are always telling me about what they have accessed on it at home. The school governors are impressed, as are some of the parents to whom I've spoken. It's also proving useful at the moment during this time of Y6-Y7 transition - the secondary teachers can see exactly what the Y6s have been doing without my having to send them loads of bits of paper.
• Google Reader: When I first started to use Twitter I was seeing a lot of links to people's blogposts. And many of them were interesting reads. Problem was that if I didn't follow the tweeted link there and then, I probably missed it. Following tips from Joe Dale and Graham Davies I started to subscribe to the blogs using Google Reader. I have the Google Reader widget displayed alongside the Gmail widget on my iGoogle, ready for my viewing and reading pleasure each morning.
• Delicious: I blogged about Delicious last August when I first discovered its usefulness for storing and tagging all the useful websites that I came across. I now have over 1000 links on my Delicious. I think now that I have it, I bookmark more sites than I used to paste into my Word document, but, more importantly, I actually use them.
• Slideshare: In my new role I do a fair bit of training, and in my continuing role on the international education side I give quite a few presentations. I used to upload some of the presentations to the website or offer to email them to interested parties. But as my presentation style is becoming more and more minimalist - more pictures, less text - the presentations were becoming less and less useful by themselves. I had followed links to other people's Slideshare presentations and was intrigued to see that some had the audio commentary attached and linked into the presentation. This seemed like an ideal way to go, especially as these slidecasts can be embedded in blogs. I've used it to share my presentations, but also to put songs onto my school blog as YouTube embeds and Podbean mp3s don't work at school. You can view all my Slideshare presentations here. Well, almost all - there are 3 that for some reason don't appear on this list but which you can see here.
• SurveyMonkey: In October last year I set about auditing Primary Languages in Sunderland. We only have 85 primary schools, but it was still an onerous task. Headteachers are busy people, and it was unrealistic to expect them all to respond to and post a paper survey. The audit needed to be short and quick and easy to complete. I had completed some surveys for the British Council which used SurveyMonkey and decided that it would be a good way of gathering the information I needed. I emailed all the HTs the link to the seven questions which it would take them about two minutes to complete. And then watched the responses flood in. Well, trickle in actually. But that's another story. SurveyMonkey proved to be easy to use and certainly preferable to having to collate and manipulate dozens of pieces of paper.
  
  My KS2s had whole-heartedly embraced Wallwisher and so I thought I would capitalise on this enthusiasm to carry out a survey via the blog. I set up a SurveyMonkey about likes and dislikes of the foods that we had been learning. There haven't been too many responses though. Partly, I think, because there were too many questions, and partly because they couldn't see their contribution straightaway on the blog. I think it's something to try again at a later date, in class maybe where the results can be seen immediately.
• Pop-ups in Dreamweaver: MFL Sunderland was 6 years old at the end of April. When I started it I was a complete website novice. Everything you see on the website and its sister sites now is something that I have learned along the way. When I was creating the interactive map for the World Cup over the Easter holidays, I knew how I wanted it to look, but didn't know how to do it. I didn't even know what the thing I wanted to do was called! Much googling and researching and experimenting and HTMLing later I achieved the effect I was after - the information for each country popped up as a little separate window which didn't obscure the main continent page. This may be small potatoes to some people, but for me it was a sense of achievement equalled only by the discovery of roll-over buttons several years ago!

And finally..... why the picture at the top ? Well, as language teachers we are all different, with different styles and with different tools at our disposal. But we are all progressing and moving forward together towards a common goal.  These are my tools at the moment.  Doubtless I will have some new ones this time next year!

Reduce Reuse Recycle

Earlier this year I was very honoured to be asked to run a workshop at the north-east's third regional primary languages conference. This year the conference was called "Read all about it Write now!" (see what we did there?) and it focused on reading and writing in Key Stage 2. It was held today, 25th May, at Middlesbrough TLC.

My workshop was called "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" or "Adapting a model for independent writing". I thought you might like to have a look at my presentation and listen to what I had to say this morning. The slidecast is about 13 minutes long.

Reduce Reuse Recycle

View more webinars from cseccombe.

During the workshop, I got the delegates to have a go at some of the ideas. I gave them little post-its to write on, to reinforce the idea that you don't have to write a lot to be creative and to communicate successfully in another language. Here are some of the results. Most of the teachers who attended my workshop didn't know any Spanish, and so the Spanish examples show how effective writing frames via a dice roll exercise can be.

And finally, I said that I would post the link on how to make a mini-book.  My KS2s' mini-books can be viewed here.

Supporting Writing

Each time I produce one of my Primary Newsletters, I put a free resource at the end to tempt the readers and to disseminate good practice. The resource for the latest issue is a lily-pad writing frame, and I got the idea from one of my own previous posts. It's essentially a basic writing frame, designed to help KS2 students to write short sentences to express their likes and dislikes:

The idea is that the frog hops from one side of the pond to the other, picking up words and phrases as he goes, to make up a complete and correct sentence.  (If you'd like to download the lily-pads to try for yourself, it's here under "Opinions".)  Prior to using this, students will probably have practised basic opinions such as "J'aime le chocolat" and "Je déteste le thé", but may not have had the opportunity to join two opinion phrases together to make a more complex sentence using a conjunction. 

During the Easter holidays there was some discussion on the TES Forum about the value of teaching writing in a foreign language to KS2 students. One contributor in particular thought that KS2s should only be taught listening and speaking, because writing in a foreign language will just confuse children who are still trying to get to grips with English Literacy, and, anyway, it will be taught so appallingly badly that it will take ages for the secondary teachers to undo the damage.

This is not an opinion that I share. I've had some successes with writing across not only KS2 but also KS1.  When I was in secondary, my KS3 and KS4 students used to face approach writing tasks with apprehension, fear and dread - "I can't write French, Miss" - because they seemed to think that writing in French had to be like writing in their English lessons, where they are expected to be fluent and to write at length.  Writing needs to be de-mystified for secondary and for primary learners.  A piece of writing in a foreign language does not have to be a whole side of A4 - it could just be a single sentence on a post-it.  And you don't have to invent the whole thing off the top of your head - there will always be some sort of model that you can adapt.  (I can't be the only one who resorts to the back of Collins Robert to put together a formal letter in French!)

I am a firm believer in scaffolding activities to support writing.  Scaffolding on a building is a temporary support, and the teacher's support is given for a limited time to enable the learner to be able to write independently and confidently.  Writing frames are one way of providing this support to learners, of making sentence structure explicit, and they can use them and experiment with them until such a time as they feel that they can branch out on their own.

One way that you can use writing frames is to number each word or phrase, like this:

Give your students a series of numbers, which they use to write a correct sentence.  For example, 2-7-10-16-20 will give "J'aime le chocolat mais je déteste les carottes."  Deciphering a few of these will allow the students to see how the frame works, and then they can start formulating their own sentences, and writing the codes to give to other students to help them to practise.  If you are interested in using writing frames like this, there are a number of examples for KS3 and KS4 on MFL Sunderland - just do a search via the homepage.

Just as my car won't go from 0 to 60 without me working through the gears, so I can't expect my students to be able to write confidently in a foreign language without working through some small, supportive steps first.

Clouds of Words

One of my biggest regrets, educationally speaking, is opting to do Chemistry instead of Art for O'level.  I didn't understand much of the Chemistry and remain a frustrated artist.  Therefore I'm delighted that one of the best things that I have discovered via Twitter is the ability to make word clouds, as these display my very favourite things - words - in an artistic and useful way.

There are now quite a few different ways of making word clouds, so I thought I would show you here what they can do.

To make comparison easier, the words in all the clouds are from this blog.

WORDLE
First, the word cloud generator that people are probably most familiar with - Wordle:

I entered the URL of this blog, clicked on "Submit", and this is the group of words that I got.  I then chose a font, set all the words to lie horizontally and created my own colour scheme.  It looks as though Wordle has only used the most recent posts to make its cloud.  The biggest words are the ones which appear most in the blog.  It has discounted the most common English words, and this is a function that is available for other languages too.  Wordle is very easy to use, but you can only save your resulting wordcloud by doing a screen capture.

WordItOut
Another one that I have tried is WordItOut:

WordItOut works in a similar way to Wordle, but always puts the biggest, and therefore most common, words in the centre.  The WordItOut image has used the whole blog.

WordSift
To make a WordSift image, you paste in some text.  I used the most recent of my blogposts about the food flags:

Once it has made your wordcloud, WordSift invites you to sort your words in different ways.  The above image is an A-Z sort, and the one below is 'common to rare':

Once you have your word cloud, you can click on the individual words and WordSift will show you Google images for that word and you can also see that word in a Visual Thesaurus.  The Google images part works for text in other languages, but the Thesaurus does not.

TAGUL
Tagul creates word clouds in the same way as Wordle, but something you will have to do is to "blacklist" the most common English words to create the most useful result.  (My most common words came out as "they" and "then"!)  The big difference with Tagul is that each of the words in your cloud is linked to a Google search.  I think that this function is useful for word clouds of blogs, websites, or presentations, so that readers can click to find out more about certain things.  You can also embed your Taguls:

IMAGECHEF
The size of the Imagechef Word Mosaic means that you can only put in a small number of words, but in many ways this is ideal for use with students, especially beginners or the less able who find independent writing a daunting prospect.  You can make your own symbols and colour combinations, and then embed the results:



TAGXEDO
And finally, the new kid on the block, Tagxedo, which has caused much excitement on Twitter this week.  Tagxedo offers many different fonts and colour combinations, as well as different options for the direction of your words and for saving your word clouds afterwards.  But the main innovation and something that sets it apart is the function which allows you to change the shape of your wordcloud.  There are nine different shapes to choose from in the program, or you can import your own shapes.  Another bonus is the option to create your wordcloud in the shape of a word:

It's all very well to be able to make these beautiful wordclouds, but what's the point, apart from pure creativity ?  How can we use them in the classroom, and what is the value of students creating their own ?  The Twitterati have come up with lots of good ideas.  Here are the links to their blog posts:

Samantha Lunn  23 ways to use Wordle in the MFL classroom 

Richard Byrne  More Wordle in the Classroom Ideas

Joe Dale  Using Wordle in the Classroom

And here is a cool trick which will help you to put phrases into Wordle rather than just single words.

Of course it goes without saying that these ideas can be adapted for the other word cloud generators.

Clouds of words, pieces of art.

Are you sitting comfortably ?

Then I'll begin !

Every so often TES Connect sends me emails with things they want me to look at. I usually give them a cursory glance before deleting them (I've often heard it before on Twitter!) However, one of the links they sent me today was this one, which immediately caught my eye as I had just been having another look at the fantastic MFL Storybird Wiki set up by Fiona Joyce.

So the 30th January-6th February is National Storytelling Week. An ideal opportunity to try out some new ideas and some new stories.

There are Storybird stories to try - there are lots on the Wiki now and I'm just one of many who have already blogged about it. There are also ready-made big books available from places like Little Linguist. Something else worth considering is getting a translation of an English story book and comparing the two. We are big Sandra Boynton fans in my house and I'm eagerly awaiting the delivery of the Spanish version of "Moo, Baa, La La La" ("Muu, Beee, ¡Así fue!") I'd also recommend Elmer the Elephant and Rainbow Fish. The lovely Suzi Bewell recently showed me "Hooray for Fish" by Lucy Cousins, the author of Maisy Mouse, alongside its French translation "Drôles de Poissons", and described some of the activities for which they can be used.

Recently I've been reading up about Storytelling in the MFL classroom. Here are some of my notes. I hope they will be useful to you as well.

What can you do with stories ?
• Opportunities for experiencing rhyme, active methods, physical responses
• Pupils can react to sounds, words, phrases with a physical response
• Act out parts of the story
• Provide sound effects, missing words or phrases, or a refrain
• Stories provide a good model of pronunciation and sustained language. Pupils have to listen and concentrate
• High frequency words and phrases can be learned through stories
• Read story to the class, then pronounce and repeat certain words, reading from word cards
• Read story to pupils, they join in saying some key sentences and words while performing actions and sound effects. Children can gradually take over the storytelling.
• When introducing the story, use word flashcards of the things they’ll have to say and actions they’ll have to perform during the story
• Perform certain action for a certain group of words (e.g. months) or point to something in the room when you hear it
• Offers opportunities to listen, imagine, predict, comment, participate, express opinions, access longer texts without necessarily having to understand every word.
• Introducing a new story – identify key vocab (not just nouns) and limit the vocab to about 6 words or phrases.
• Decide on your objective: identify by listening? Pronounce accurately ? identify by sight ? read aloud ? write the words ?
• Involve children in the story from the start with actions and gestures, choral repetition of language, complete repeated sentences, hold up a card when you hear a certain thing

Follow-up activities:
• Make a model of one of the characters
• Learn a song with movements based on the story
• Write a description of one of the characters
• Pupils write their own stories inspired by the original
• Match words and pictures from the story
• Listen and draw
• Sequencing
• Making sentences from the story using word cards
• Drama
• Mini books

KS2 Framework:
• Y3 Literacy: “As children listen to sounds, words and phrases, they repeat and chorus, learning accurate pronunciation……They enjoy reading a few familiar words and phrases aloud and begin to write letters and familiar words.”
• Y4 Literacy: “Children develop their reading skills and learn to understand familiar written phrases in clear, printed script. They link listening and reading, by reading short familiar stories, songs and poems while listening to them at the same time. They write familiar words and phrases using a model and begin to experiment with building short phrases from memory.”
• Y5 Literacy: “Children….develop their reading skills by re-reading a range of short texts.”
• Y6 Literacy: “Children read a variety of longer texts from different text types. They read aloud with confidence and enjoyment, and also enjoy reading short texts independently.”
• KAL: “As they increase their understanding of the rules of sounds, spellings and grammar, they should begin to apply these rules when creating new language, both spoken and written.”
• LLS: Children plan and prepare themselves for a language activity – “How do you recall vocabulary in order to sing a song/join in a story/create sentences? How do you find key information in a new sentence or text ?
• LLS: Children use knowledge of English or other languages to help learning and understanding – “Listen and look for words that are similar and different in other languages. “
• LLS: Children pick out key words when listening
• LLS: Children learn a short poem, rhyme or story by heart
• Suggested activities: O3.1, O3.2, L3.1, O4.1, O4.2, L4.2, IU4.3, O5.3, O5.4, L5.1, L5.2, O6.1, O6.2, O6.3, L6.1, L6.2, L6.3, L6.4, IU6.3
• Dictionary skills

My favourite thing about stories in the foreign language is that they enable students to hear extended language. They get to immerse themselves in the rhythm, sounds and music of the language without necessarily having to understand every word. Especially important when so much of their work will be at a word or sentence level.

How are you going to celebrate National Storytelling Week ?