alice’s posterous

Yesterday, I showed the short animation Flatlife to my grade 12 students (17-18 years old)

This is again a brilliant animation from Ideas to Inspire.



It could be used when teaching house and bedroom in another language, as well as verbs in the present tense.
After watching it, students would have to:

• describe the bedroom/ the characters
  
• write a narration for the story in the present tense
  
• think of an alternative ending

I found this brilliant video on Ideas to Inspire



This short animation could be used when teaching household tasks and furniture in another language. After watching it, students would have to discuss the following in the target language:

• the people: who are they? describe them, what are they doing?
  
• the rooms: name them, describe the different objects in the rooms
• opinions: what do you think about the people? are they helpful? kind? unkind?

Today, I've found this fantastic website called Ideas to Inspire teaching and learning.

One presentation worthwhile having a look at is 30 Inspiring Youtube videos to use in the classroom (don't worry if Youtube is blocked in your school, follow this link!)

One video that caught my attention was The piano, a short animation by Aidon Gibbons. There are no words but the characters and the music (composed by Yann Tiersen for one of my favourite movie Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain) bring lots of different emotions.



Tom Barrett (@tombarrett on Twitter) wrote an interesting post on how to create a emotion graph from this video using google forms. It is targeted to a Primary English lesson but I can see myself adapting this lesson to MFL when teaching emotions and moods.

What are your thoughts?

I am teaching the perfect tense to year 8 (12-13 years old) and decided to create an exciting animation on http://goanimate.com
First you have to register, which is very straightforward. Then you can start creating your own animation in minutes. It is really easy to use and so much fun :))
I added my dad's voice to the animation which took a bit of extra time as I had to use audacity to divide the whole recording into smaller chunks (I couldn't upload the whole thing as it was too big). The students liked the fact it was different from the usual PowerPoint Presentation.

Now next step is for the students to do their own animation. I have booked the ICT room for next lesson and students should come to the lesson with their stories ready in French. I will update you on how it goes but the students seemed quiet enthusiast about the idea of having a go at it.