Tag » French « @ The Langwitch Chronicles

Déjeuner du matin

Posted on March 6th, 2010 Langwitch View Comments

Yesterday we had a borough-wide CPD Day. I was lucky enough to be able to choose what I wanted to do, rather than have a day of workshops thrust upon me, so I chose to go to our local CLC for a day of creativity on Apples.

We were given the task of making a film, using iMovie and we had to include a flashback. So, we got into groups of 4 – we were 3 linguists and an ICT teacher (unfortunately for the ICT teacher!). We quickly decided to go all French and arty, planning to use Déjeuner du matin by Jacques Prévert. The final result can be seen below and we were all very pleased with the outcome. We would have liked to have added some piano music in the background for that true arty feel but, unfortunately we ran out of time!

I’m now buzzing with ideas as to how I can use what I learnt with my pupils – just need the time to be able to do it…

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The French Exchange Finally Happened

Posted on February 16th, 2010 Langwitch View Comments

Took this at the NRM and thought it was funny!

Many moons ago (so it seems)…well, 3 years, just when I was starting on this adventure into new technologies and discovering the possibilities for MFL teachers, such as myself, in terms of getting pupils using language for real, I was asked by my then Head of Area to find a French school in order to establish a link for exchanges. We already had an extremely successful link with Meppen in Germany and an equally successful link with Cheste in Spain but French was most certainly the poor relation in terms of links and opportunities for exchanges.

I had just discovered eTwinning via Joe Dale‘s marvellous blog and decided to find out what all of the fuss was about. Having registered with eTwinning, I quickly found a partner and established a project with a view to setting up an exchange the following year. The project “Je blogue, tu blogues…let’s blog!” was very successful with pupils from both schools develping frienships and helping one another with their language learning. However unfortunately for many reasons the link didn’t develop into an exchange and the hunt was on again.

One of my colleagues in the MFL Department had a link with a teacher in Caussade near Toulouse. I contacted her and things looked positive. We worked together on an eTwinning project (in English only, this time, as there were several schools involved) and my class exchanged letters every half-term or so with a class from her school and set things in motion for an exchange.

There were hurdles to overcome, as with any new link. The biggest hurdle being that our partner school wanted to bring 27 pupils!!! This was unheard of in Ian Ramsey history of exchanges…we are normally over joyed if we get to 20 (as I think most schools would be). Nevertheless, we persevered and, with a plan to house some pupils in a local hotel got plans underway. I was over-joyed when I managed to persuade the final 2 pupils to host French people, meaning that no-one was to stay in a hotel!

The week itself arrived and we had an action-packed programme, hightlights included a visit to Durham, the Angel of the North and the Metro Centre, a whole group trip to York and the National Railway Museum, project work at Teesside CLC and a visit to meet the Mayor of Stockton. The funny thing was, I got stick all week for organising the visit to Mayor and in fact our French friends loved it – telling me to definintely keep in on the programme for the future! As part of their CLC project, pupils started to work on a wiki as a diary of their week, to which I will add their presentations and leaflets about the history of the railways and York tourist leaflets as soon as I can. You can see what has been done so far here (still needs a bit of work!).

What of the future? Well things look very rosy. In 3 weeks time our pupils will return to France. Again, a record of 21 pupils (some of whom were so enthused by the whole event that they asked if they could come eventhough they didn’t take part in the home-leg!). In addition we will carry this through to another eTwinning Project specifically aimed at improving Speaking and Writing Skills for GCSEs.

Sadly I’m unable to go on the return leg – I’ve been off gallavanting around Europe too often already this year, so am indebted to my colleagues, Fiona and Julie for taking the return trip and for their invaluable support during the exchange week itself.

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Phonics, slidecasting and podcasting

Posted on October 3rd, 2009 Langwitch View Comments

Over the last year I feel like I’ve neglected the things that started on me on this journey that has revived my enthusiasm for teaching MFL – namely my school blog Langwitch and podcasting. However, over the last week I have begun to revive them, slowly but surely.
Through the wonders of Twitter I have come to know Suzie Bewell, SSAT Lead Practitioner for MFL from All Saints Language College in York. She has worked a lot with her pupils teaching phonics to improve pronunciation and has seem great improvements. With this in mind I trawled Amazon over the summer holidays and found a Jolly Phoniques manuel which was more or less identical to the kind of thing my 4 year old son was doing last year at Nursery (he’s very bright, you know-he’s now writing essays!)
Once I’d got over the initial shock of being back at work I decided to embark upon teaching my Jolly Phoniques. As I teach French and German (yes, I know and Spanish and ICT…) I felt it important to do justice to both languages, so I set to work on the German as well as the French. For my German, I took as my inspiration a resource that I found on Suzie’s Wiki Do Once and Share and adapted it for my needs and for my French I used the Manuel Jolly Phonique all the way. The pupils so far have received it well – particularly my Year 10 class, whose pronunciation, to be quite honest was dreadful! We do lots of chanting with actions and spend lots of time going over actions when we get to tricky words that need a reminder of how to pronounce them and it seems to be working well.
Next is where the blog revival comes in! (Just incase you were wondering!)
I got to thinking how I could help my pupils even more with their pronunciation and began to wonder about making a slidecast, using the PowerPoint I’d used in class, together with the classes chanting. Never having done a slidecast before, I was nervous. However, I went onto Slideshare and just followed the instructions. I uploaded the PowerPoint, uploaded the mp3 soundfile (which I mangaged to improve the quality of, after they were initially too quiet, using the Levelator, as recommended by Joe Dale) and syncronised it all, just as I was told. I think the results are great – and if I can do it, anyone can!
Next I decided that my pupils could also do with even more practice so I create (re-vamped) 2 podcasts – one for French (Radio Langwitch) and one for German (Langwitch Radio), to avoid confusion – so that they can download their chants and pretend to be cool listening to music when they’re really practicing their French and German! Of course everything is now on my school blog for my pupils to use and enjoy with the whole family.

Les Jolly Phoniques

Les Jolly Phoniques

View more presentations from Helena Butterfield.

And Phonik!

Phonik

View more presentations from Helena Butterfield.

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Using Wallwisher

Posted on September 18th, 2009 Langwitch View Comments

On the MFL Forum this week I read about Wallwisher in a post by Jimmy P. Subsequently I decided to try it out as a “welcome back” activity with a couple of classes. It’s a work in progress but here is what we’ve got so far. Yr Y10 set 4 class and Y8 set 1 classes have contributed so far but I will be encouraging my Year 7 class, who’ve only just begun, to contribute in the coming week. I got some lovely sentences with parce que from some Year 8s, however our interweb was playing up a lot this week in school so not all got their’s added, which was a shame…these things are sent to try us!
I’m thinking it might be a nice idea for the EDL next week to see how many differents introductions in differing languages we can get.
Here it is, anyway. I’ve closed comments on it for the moment but they will be re-opened during my next lesson in the ICT suite.

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Snail Mail

Posted on May 11th, 2009 Langwitch View Comments

Sometimes it doesn’t have to be all about the technology…

There’s a lot to be said for hearing the post plop through the letter box at 2pm and finding you’ve got a lovely letter to open…and then opening it to find some beautiful letter that has been thoughtfully and carefully crafted just for you.

Well, this is how I and my top set Yr 7 French class feel when we receive our letters. We’ve set up an exchange of class letters with our partner school in France. It’s such a simple idea and hundreds of people have done it before but this is the first year I’ve ever set up a letter exchange as a class. It’s easy, we just do our extended writing tasks at the end of units as proper, real letters for proper, real people and then we get replies. The great thing is that doing it in class time means no-one’s penfriend trails of and is never heard of again and everybody sends something and receives something. The excitement that goes round the room when I arrive with a package fresh from France is amazing! And the pupils acutally WANT to write in French and make it right etc, etc… Which is what it’s all about at the end of the day, isn’t it? Using languages for real communication.

Now I know that there are some who might say “can’t this be done via email? It’s quicker” etc…but, personally I have to admit that nothing beats a real letter in real handwriting with lovely drawings and pictures etc…, yes , I’m sure that, in time we will graduate to some emails and even the odd video-conference but for now we are still enjoying our lovely old-fashioned letters and keeping them safe to look at in years to come and remember our French penfriends by!

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eTwinning workshop at Stockton CLC

Posted on March 10th, 2009 Langwitch View Comments

eTwinning

Today, I was privileged to be invited to our local CLC to speak to Stockton’s GTP (Graduate Trainee Programme) trainee teachers about our school’s eTwinning experiences. It was nice to work with Jenny Compton of the British Council and Val Brooks, Deputy of the Stockton CLC and fellow eTwinning Ambassador as well as to meet some of the new talent coming through from our local LEA Graduate Trainee Programme.

I promised that I’d upload my presentation onto this blog for the participants to look at in more detail at their own leisure and thought it would also be good to put down some of the areas that I ellaborated more on, as I spoke.

I covered how I got involved in eTwinning initially, as a part-time teacher to give me some focus and how now it has become an integral part of my teaching life. I think it’s important to stress, particularly for Secondary teachers who don’t seem as widely involved in eTwinning across the UK as they are in the rest of Europe, that it is quite easy to mould your eTwinning projects into the curriculum without it being onerous and without it impacting negatively on exam results. Infact, I firmly believe that eTwinning can enhance exam results as well as enhancing enjoyments of subjects. It is also something that is ideal when thinking about ways of delivering the new KS3 curriculum and it can be cross-curricular and be something where pupils really can try out their creativity and love of the internet and all things computer-based.

I think that the presentation probably speaks for itself. There are links to our highly successful prject from last year, Je blogue, tu blogues…let’s blog! as well as various projects that our pupils did whilst involved in the project. In addition there are links to one of our current projects that involved no MFL at all “How green is your world?” .

I think it’s really important to remember that, whilst ideal for the MFL teacher as a way of stimulating real contact with native speakers of a similar age, eTwinning can be used in many creative ways using English as the means of communication (just about everyone wants to got their pupils practising English if at all possible). One of our most successful international projects is one with a school in the Netherlands that covers Victorian England and the First World War through our History department and doesn’t involve the use of Languages at all. Also, a little idea I have in my head for cross-curricular links…to work with a department in school on a project from that curriculum area but work in French or German or Spanish (maybe with schools from across Europe, whose language learning is on the same level as our pupils). That’s just my sneaky way of getting pupils to use the language they learn without even knowing that their doing it!

Here is the presentation…

Ian Ramsey’s eTwinning Experience

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I have also add this presentation to my Langwitch Wiki and you can find it here.

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How Les Choristes saves my end of term every time

Posted on December 20th, 2008 admin View Comments

Each year as the end of the Autumn and Summer Terms approach, we are reminded to keep the pupils working until the last day of term and are “discouraged” from showing “recreational” DVDs. We in the MFL Department, however have a cunning ruse, showing films in the target language (not necessarily originally in that language) with subtitles to aid listening skills and pronunciation, thus making them “educational”.
My friend and colleague, Pauline, discovered “Les Choristes” a few years ago and it never fails to captivate the imagination of even the most unenthusiastic French-learner.
For anyone who doesn’t know the story, it’s the tale of Clément Mathieu, a failed musician who goes to work at a school for naughty boys. It follows his time there as he he discovers that, through music he can reach the boys and begins to turn them around.
Although rather tame in comparison to the high drama of many Hollywood films it still manages to “pull in the audiences” every time. This term I even had my boisterous Yr9s request “Les Choristes” over “A Night at the Museum” how amazing is that? And one of the boys even admitting to the film being “mint” plus others saying how they cry at the end when Pépinot leaves with Mathieu. I don’t know what it is about the film that captivates them too much, maybe it the fact they’re gaining tips on how to be naughty, maybe it’s the rude words that seem so much ruder than normal because they’re written down in the subtitles rather then just heard as they normally are. However, I like to pretend that it’s actually hearing the French spoken properly and that it is in some small way helping them on their journeys to become better language learners. (The music’s pretty fab too)
Here’s a flavour of the film I found on YouTube..

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Sock puppets finally done

Posted on November 20th, 2008 admin View Comments

I have finally managed to get the Yr 8 sock puppets videos completed and uploaded. We made our puppets, made the scenery and finally recorded the video last week. Unfortunately we couldn’t get our hands on the digital video camera so had to just use a digital camera which actually worked OK.
This was our (their’s and mine) first attempt at making a real live video and am very proud of the pupils’ efforts they worked really hard and feel that they have achieved something fantastic (which they have).
Here is the final product…

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