Mi bandera

I thought I would share with you a sequence of lessons that has been particularly successful with my KS2s.

As you'll no doubt be aware, I gave presentations in 2006 about using the World Cup in lessons, and also produced a lot of materials. In school, however, I barely touched it with my classes. If I remember rightly, it clashed with exam and reports season.

This year, 2010, I've done the same. Given presentations, produced resources. But the big difference is of course that this time round the World Cup fitted into my sequence of lessons perfectly.

Since September I have covered some of the Y3 Intercultural Understanding objectives of the KS2 Framework, but am conscious that they are something that you have to reinforce quite frequently to embed them in the children's brains! The World Cup gave us an excellent opportunity to re-explore the countries and continents of the world and to talk about where Spanish is spoken. Then we focussed on the flags. We have done a lot of work on nouns and gender (and they understand it really well) and I wanted to start to introduce the notion of adjectival agreement.

You can download the PowerPoint for the first flag lesson here, and if you read the notes at the bottom of each slide, you can see how the language is built up. It was inspired by a workshop given by Jim McElwee at the recent NE Regional Primary Languages Conference "Read all about it Write now". Jim builds up sentences describing pictures using repetition of phrases and actions for colours and shapes. I bent his ear about it and we worked out actions for the 6 colours and the shapes. The children caught onto it very quickly and we spent a large part of the lesson speaking Spanish together to describe the flags. I used the flags of the World Cup nations to illustrate the colours and shapes, and we had some good discussions about flag colours and shapes and which flag is which.  We also discussed and worked out the rule for the agreement of the colours - why did we say "rojo" when learning the colours, but then "mi bandera es roja"?  Why doesn't "azul" change?  At the end of that first lesson, the children designed their own flags using the 6 colours (with the exception of orange, there aren't really any other colours which appear on flags) and the 5 shapes that we had been working on.

This week was the second lesson of the sequence. We revised the phrases, colours and shapes to describe the flags. Then I showed them the flags of the Spanish-speaking countries who are not in the World Cup and asked each table to work together to describe the flags. Cue lots of loud independent speaking in Spanish ! They loved trying to describe each flag as thoroughly as possible. Then they had a little time to work out how to describe their own flag, again using the structure and actions that I had introduced at the beginning.

So where to now? One of my Y6 suggested we started a new wall for our flag work. (The children at my school LOVE Wallwisher!) So I have - if you would like to contribute, please visit our school blog where you will find all the information. Your contributions would provide us with some excellent lesson material, so gracias in advance!

The main thing that I have learned from this is that actions work!  I've always been scared of them before, but now have seen the light.  Because the children are actively doing something, the repetition is more focussed and successful, and the action fixes the word more effectively in their heads.  If you want to find out more about actions in the MFL classroom, I recommend this blog post by Samantha Lunn. 

I have also learned that some little boys have an encyclopaedic knowledge of flags!

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.

I've got a pen that talks !

Last weekend my husband and I went down to the NEC in Birmingham for the Gadget Show Live. Some people don't believe it, but Mr S is even more into gadgets than I am. In fact he's been into gadgets a lot longer than me, but I'm trying to catch up ! I already have most things that I need for my work, and so wasn't looking for anything in particular. I looked at a few things and talked to a few people (and asked the Flip Mino man a question he couldn't answer!) and then was most interested to come across the Mantra Lingua stand.

Mantra Lingua have a new product called the RecorderPEN. You can use it to play sounds in specially prepared books, but, more interestingly for a language teacher, you can record your own sounds onto special stickers and then stick the stickers anywhere. On seeing this, my brain started ticking over and thinking of lots of ideas for how I could use such a gadget. So, dear reader, I bought one.

A few days ago I started to have a play with it. It took a few attempts to get a decent recording (start talking as soon as it tells you to, and don't put it too near your mouth) and then I set about making a resource. I printed some colours on a piece of paper and recorded seven different labels - a title and the seven colour words.

Here is a little video of my 7 year old daughter demonstrating it:

My resource is on paper at the moment, and consequently is flimsy. If I were to use it in the classroom, it wouldn't be long before the paper got dog-eared and the stickers came off. I would print the next one on card and then laminate the whole thing to make it more durable. Mantra Lingua's support team say that the stickers will still work and can still be re-recorded when they've been through a laminator.

I teach my KS1s in small groups of about 10, and have thought of some simple interactive activities that I could make for them using the RecorderPEN. There are also plenty of ideas on the company's forum. I was lucky to get the pen and the stickers for the show price of £35 all in. It is a lot more expensive on the company's website, and unfortunately I think this may put people off. Something else that has been a little annoying has been the lack of written instructions - the instructions are embedded on labels on the packaging ! - so I listened to them and wrote them down myself. All in all I think it's nifty little gadget, which gives me something else for my teaching backpack. Watch this space !

Flash Forward

The premise of the American TV series FlashForward is that everyone on the planet (well, nearly everyone) simultaneously loses consciousness and experiences a blackout of two minutes and seventeen seconds.  During this blackout they have a vision of their life six months from that point.  The characters spend the series trying to come to terms with and to understand what they have seen in their "flash forward", and to discover who or what is responsible for it.

"Flash Forward" is also the title of an article in last Friday's TES magazine about MFL teachers who are using Web 2.0 and social networking in their work.  I was extremely flattered to be interviewed for the article by its author, Yojana Sharma.  I spoke to her for about 45 minutes about the tools that I have been using, about my websites and about my school blog.    And I am equally honoured to be mentioned on the same page as Joe Dale, Isabelle Jones, Suzi Bewell, Chris Harte, Helena Butterfield, Alex Blagona, José Picardo, Jo Rhys-Jones and Lisa Stevens.  The article is very positive, and makes it clear that what we are doing has not been imposed by the DCSF or any other agency.  It is grass roots - real teachers finding things that work and sharing them.  I'm proud to be a part of it.

I sent the link to the article to my line manager.  Part of his reply read "It's really pleasing to see that you are at the forefront of new technology use.  What can we do to share this practice further in Sunderland ?"

Interesting question.  If I were to put on a training session next week for language teachers, in particular secondary language teachers, they would either smile and nod politely and then forget all about it, or go back to school all fired up with new ideas and find that all the important websites were blocked.  I don't think that there is any one easy solution to this problem of getting more teachers on board, so why bother ?  Well, we are ceaselessly trying to show our students that knowledge of another language is an important skill for the modern world and for the future world.  So we need to present it in a modern way which looks to this future world, and which speaks to the students in their language, the language of the digital native.

So, now to more thinking about parallels between FlashForward the TV series and Flash Forward the article.......