alice’s posterous

Continuing with my series "Get active in the classroom!", here is another activity by Marc Helgesen which worked very well to reinforce directions in another language. I did this with my grade 12 group (17 years old). Although they are grown up students, they do need a bit of action from time to time as they tend to be a bit lethargic! We learnt how to give and understand directions in town. Then, as a follow up activity, we did the Tour guide in Madrid. I created cards to put on the walls and tables in the classroom. They were showing La Plaza Mayor, El Parque del Retiro, El museo del Prado, Atocha on them and some shops in Spanish we had learnt previously. It was a double lesson and students had a 5 minutes break so I had time to fix the cards in the classroom without them watching. When students returned from their break, I asked them to stay in the corridor and I explained the following:

1.  Students worked in pairs. One was a tour guide. The other was a tourist. The tourist is blindfolded.

2.  The tour guide directed the tourist around the classroom, giving directions and pointing out things that are interesting. (The tour guide may not touch the tourist). Only spoken instructions are allowed. The tour guide encourages the tourist to touch and pick-up objects. Naturally, the tour guides need to be careful so the tourists don’t hurt themselves, bump into things or other people, etc.

3. When each pair of students had finished their tour, we had a discussion of what makes for good directions, things that were easy or difficult to explain. We also talked about the main sights in Madrid.

Students really enjoyed doing this, they thought it was a fun way of practicing the directions.

What about you? Which engaging activity do you do to practice directions?

As I mentioned in my previous post, we celebrated the European Day of Languages at my school with a little competition I found on the mflresources forum. The students really seemed to enjoy guessing the different languages spoken by the staff and all the staff contributed which made the day successful. You can view the competition sheets adapted from the ones on the mflresources forum below.

In the lower school, each class had planned a little activity based on languages and presented it during an assembly. One class sang "Frere Jacques" in French, another class read a poem in Japanese, another one sang a song in Zulu, another class said "my name is..." in different languages. It was great to see the whole school involved to celebrate languages.

What about you? Was your EDL a success?

Click here to download:

Pupil answer sheet.doc (54 KB)

Click here to download:

Pupil notice.doc (46 KB)

As mentioned on the website :
"The general objectives of the European Day of Languages are:

1. Alerting the public to the importance of language learning and diversifying the range of languages learnt in order to increase plurilingualism and intercultural understanding;

2. Promoting the rich linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe, which must be preserved and fostered;

3. Encouraging lifelong language learning in and out of school, whether for study purposes, for professional needs, for purposes of mobility or for pleasure and exchanges."

Otherwise, you can join a Facebook group to share ideas and a great wiki created by @dominic_mcg to share experiences and good practice with even links to resources from the seven previous EDLs!

What are you planning to do on EDL?

I am not a big fan of textbooks and was thinking of creating my own exercises this year since my new school has very few resources but I found a brillant textbook called Gente Joven in the school library.

Good points about this textbook:

• Everything is in Spanish, there is no English explanation or translation. For me, it is very important to immerse pupils in the target language. This is how toddlers learn how to speak.
  
• The exercises are fun, engaging and challenging. For example, we were describing how people look like and there was an exercise about a casting for a TV serie. Pupils had to say why they would choose this boy or this girl. So not only, they had to say basic sentences describing people, thay also had to give their opinions using "creo que el chico puede ser ... porque...".
  
• The teacher's book is full of great ideas to get students involved with group and independent work. The collaborative listening activity which I posted earlier on this week is based on the teacher's book.
  
• There are also tasks to assess students such as creating the school website in Spanish or recording a radio show for a speaking assignment, along with sheets to mark pupils and to let them reflect on how they performed (again all in Spanish).
  

I also went on the publishing website "Difusión" and found a list of useful resources for free. So only, you have to register to access them.

What about you? do you use a very good textbook or create your own resources?

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

I was reading Isabelle Jones' post about her nomination in the Top 100 Language competition when I discovered I am also nominated but in a different category: language teaching.

I am still  shocked (in a happy way ;) as I started blogging not even a year ago thanks to my dad. I must admit I thought blogging was for pretentious people who wanted to show off their work. Again, I didn't understand the concept of sharing and collaborative work! But my dad pushed me and at first I found it hard to think of ideas to write in my blog. Also, I use Posterous which is the easiest blogging platform as all you have to do is to send an email as your post. When I started blogging last summer, Posterous was new and it feels now like I am part of the Posterous family with Garry Tan and Sachin Argawal co-founders of Posterous.

But my blog wouldn't be nominated without YOU, my regular visitors who always add meaningful comments to my posts and make my blog a great place for discussions and conversations rather than a boring monologue! So a big thank you to Marcy Webb, Shelly Terrell, Sherry Amorocho, Anne Hodgson, my dad, my mum and all the kind people who give their time to comment on my blog :)

By the way, the voting is opened until the end of the month. The best 5 language blogs of the overall top 100 list will receive a Kiva starter account. Kiva lets you help people by financing projects with micro credits.

Click on the voting button below or on the sidebar:

I found this inspiring video on strategies on how to encourage students to speak in a foreign language on teachers.tv.

The teachers at Wildern school put in place "Group Talk": students are in groups of 4 and discuss different topics. They have cue cards and a list of key words and expressions to help them talk. When watching the video, I really liked the approach and the fact that students were engaged in their discussions although it was in another language. When I teach, I do find it hard at times to make my students talk. They will talk in English ;) but they find it hard to have a sustained conversation in another language. I also liked the fact that the students build up their conversations following gradual steps. For example, first they will have to say if yes or no they like sports, then they'll have to give a reason why, then comment on future plans...You can see an example of a "Group Talk" progression chart on http://www.teachers.tv/video/32765 at the bottom of the page, in the section "support materials".

In the video, they are also great ideas to engage boys with active learning like cycling around to get the tenses or the ballet dance to learn the time.

These are all ideas I am ready to try out next year and I find this very exciting indeed!

What about you? What new strategies are you considering using next year?

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 got very exciting when I checked my email box and found an email form one of my year 8 student (12-13 years old) saying:

Hello, miss, here is my montage. I would like you to know that I couldn't find a music that would fit in my presentation, I tried my best.
Anyways, hope you enjoy the presentation.
Take care
bye

See My Montage 5/25/09 online.

For the past few weeks, I have worked with my year 8 class on a project about holidays. I asked them to prepare a spoken presentation about what they usually do on holidays and to add pictures on One True Media. It allows you to create a presentation with pictures and sounds (a bit like Animoto). I recorded my students' spoken presentations on Audacity and saved them as mp3 files. They then added their voices to their One True Media presentations. All of this was class work and I never asked my students to finish the work at home. So I was very happily surprised when I received this email on a Sunday evening! This student had got to one true media on her own and finished the presentation on her own! This is the first time it happens to me and this is all due to the power of web 2.0!

What about you? Have you had students working on their own without you having "to bribe" them? Do you think web 2.0 tools engage our students much more?