With the dreaded controlled assessments out of the way and the final exams in sight, I'm now focusing my efforts on preparing my Year 11s with as much vocabulary revision and reading and listening practice as possible. One thing I'm going to start after half term is my own rewards system just for my two Year 11 classes. Hopefully the prospect of winning a chocolate bar might motivate them a bit! Other Ideas Revision booklets My students have been given two booklets this year: 1. One with their a progress tracker sheet, vocabulary lists and a sheet on recognising tenses, as well as a checklist of what revision resources are available to them; 2. And the other with links/QR codes to useful websites, mini vocabulary tests and Gianfranco Conti's 'revision quickies' sheets, plus some of my own, all separated into the different topics. Revision Starters I made PowerPoints with lots of little vocabulary revision and reading exercises for each of the topics. I often start my lessons with one of these on the board ready. I uploaded these to TES back in 2014 and I'm amazed at how many people have given positive feedback. Thanks people! Memrise I've been using Memrise with my students for quite some time now and it's still my favourite vocab learning site - click here for more details. Kahoot My Year 11s absolutely adore Kahoot and I can barely get through a lesson without them nagging to play it - click here for more details. Dominoes Give the students at least one domino card each and give them a bit of time to translate the words on their cards using a dictionary or WordReference. One student starts by reading out the Spanish word on their card and other students have to listen out carefully as they may have the English translation on their card. Whoever has the card reads out the English word, then the Spanish word. The game finishes when you get back round to the first card. Students should get quicker once they've done this a few times. Vocabulary Cards I have packs of vocabulary cards for each of the topics and I've had these printed on different coloured card, so that it's easy to know which pack the cards are from when they get dropped on the floor. You can download these sets of Spanish vocabulary from my TES. Revision Guide and Workbook Most of my students have a copy of these now and I often use them at my after school revision sessions. I give the students a bit of time to read through the vocabulary pages in the revision guide and we discuss what vocabulary they already know. I've found it helps to think of silly ways to help them remember the new vocabulary. Rebecca Wylie (@reebekwylie on Twitter) talks more about memory hooks on her blog. We then do a mini vocab quiz with sweets as prizes, followed by the relevant reading and listening exercises in the workbook. We also discuss what techniques could be used for each of the exercises. Normally for listening exercises students will note down any key vocabulary and we then discuss things what things they may need to listen out for in that exercise e.g. negatives and connectives such as 'sin embargo'. Crosswords I used the Crossword Puzzle Maker site to create crosswords which I sometimes use as starter activities. I ask students to try to complete the crosswords without looking at the translations if they can. Click here to download Spanish crosswords for all topics. Jenga So far, I've only done this with my revision classes, but I plan to start doing this in lessons after half term. I bought mini packs of Jenga fairly cheaply from eBay and numbered each of the tiles. I say a word in Spanish and if the student knows the English translation they get to remove a Jenga tile. The number on that tile is the amount of points they get and the aim of the game is to gain as many points as possible. Darts I bought a child safe dartboard from Poundland and this has been so popular with my Y11s, particularly the boys. Just do the same as you would with Jenga. Buzzers My students love this as it's so silly. It's a good one for an end of lesson quiz. Students are in teams and each team has one of these buzzers which I bought from Amazon. Ask questions and the first one to buzz in gets to answer. The team with the most correct answers wins. Don't do this one if you want a nice quiet lesson! Quiz quiz trade Each student has a card with a word or a phrase on it and the translation below. Students walk around the room reading out their card and trying to translate each other's. If they both translate correctly they get to swap cards. The more swaps the better. Rebecca Wylie shared the idea on her blog to mark one of the cards as a card not to have at the end of the game, or to have a secret card which could earn them extra points. LanguageGym - Gianfranco Conti's website for vocabulary revision Linguascope - More vocabulary revision games
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Here are some of my resources which you may find useful when teaching the Immediate Future Tense (French), plus some links to other people's resources on TES.
If you have any of your own resources or ideas you'd like to share please feel free to add them to the board below. Here is a sheet from my Independent Learning Folders:
Useful Links
-Check out my blog post on Verb Clouds -Download some lovely PowerPoints shared on TES by The Bexster -Here are some more resources on TES shared by mmullen -BBC Bitesize How do you introduce the immediate future tense? Do you have any nice resources you'd like to share? Our Year 11s have been absolutely spoilt this year with the amount of resources they've been given to help them prepare for exams. As well as the resources in my GCSE Spanish Survival Kit and the 'Revision Quickies' (idea taken from Gianfranco Conti), I've also used the Puzzle Maker website to create these crosswords. This site is really easy to use: just type in the words and the website generates the crosswords for you. All of the crosswords below have been uploaded to our Revision site on the VLE. It's also been useful to have some of these printed out ready for when my Y11s forget to bring their controlled assessment preparation to class.
Here's a video on adjective agreements for Spanish. It's really silly but may help students to remember! There are a few others done by the same guy. Just have a look at his YouTube channel. Here are some of my resources on the conditional for Spanish. Feel free to use them with your classes. Beyonce song - Si yo fuera un chico (If I were a boy) Includes examples of the conditional.
A while ago I stumbled upon some incredible resources on TES made by Gianfranco Conti. These 'revision quickies' are an absolutely fantastic way of helping students to prepare for their exams by learning and practising vocabulary. I've already used up most of his sheets with my classes, so I've been inspired to create some more myself, although they aren't as fancy! See below for the free downloads and let me know if you spot any mistakes! Once my Year 11s have completed their final controlled assessment I intend to spend the rest of the time really focusing on reading and listening skills and encouraging them to learn vocabulary in preparation for the end of year exams. I'm hoping that a combination of these 'revision quickies', my Spanish starter PowerPoints, reading and listening exercises from the AQA GCSE Revision Workbook and Kahoot quizzes, as well as Memrise and Zondle games for homework will be enough to prepare them for what lies ahead! Any other suggestions are welcome!!! Kahoot quizzes - just click the links below: Work and Education Home and Environment Leisure Lifestyle General Vocabulary 'Revision Quickies' The following sheets were created by myself but the original idea was taken from Gianfranco Conti.
I’m sure by now most of the mfltwitterati have heard of Memrise and a lot are using the site with their students. If you haven’t heard of it before, you’re in for a treat. Feel free to look at my old blog post here to find out more. I’ve been using this with my own students over the past year and I usually set it as homework once a fortnight with KS4 classes. One thing that always bothered me was not being able to easily monitor the students to make sure they were doing the homework. Luckily, they have recently added some new features which are specifically for teachers. These new teacher tools allow you to create classes and track student progress, and setting it up is all pretty straightforward. Just register as a teacher, click ‘Classes’, create your first class, then select the ‘Courses’ that you want that class to have access to. All you have to do is provide students with the link or invite them via email. If students are already signed up they just need to log in and type in the link, then they will be added to that class. Once the games have been played you can then view an overall leaderboard for each class (weekly, monthly and all time), as well as a leaderboard for each topic. I’m going to continue setting Memrise as homework, alongside Zondle, with my KS4 classes and whoever is at the top of the leaderboard for that topic at the end of the fortnight will win a prize. All of the AQA GCSE French and Spanish vocabulary has been uploaded so feel free to hand out the following sheets to your students or use them for displays. I typed in the Spanish vocabulary but not the French so thank you to whoever did! How do you use Memrise with your classes? Feel free to leave a comment below. I haven't tried this myself yet but it could be good for listening skills. Give them the script with words missing and they have to fill in the gaps. Back in December I blogged about an amazing website called Zondle and I've been using this with my classes over the past few weeks.
So far, this has had a huge impact on student engagement - in particular, surprisingly, with a Year 11 group, who have been quite tricky over the past year. I had some really positive feedback from them for the first time in ages. I haven't seen them that excited about anything in a while, despite my best efforts. Last lesson I allowed them to go on Zondle once they had finished their work and by the end of the lesson almost all of them were tapping away (except for 2 or 3 who chose Memrise instead - this is also a fantastic website, by the way). I should also add that this lesson was Period 5 on a Friday! Reasons to use Zondle: 1. You can create your own games for free. 2. It allows you to choose the format for each question. 3. There are also ready-made games (some of which are free). 4. Students earn points (zollars) which they can buy prizes with (you choose the prizes! ie. 1500 zollars = lolly pop) 5. You can track your students and make sure they've done their vocabulary learning homework/revision for exams. 6. Lots of fun games to choose from. 7. Allows you to award extra zollars for good behaviour/effort. 8. Allows you to give badges (there are some already made or you can make your own) to your students. 9. You can take snapshots of their results to enable you to see progress over time. 10. You can easily monitor your students' progress and see which vocabulary they need to spend more time on. 11. Students don't need an email address to sign up. 12. You can reset their login details if they forget them. If any of you are interested, I have already uploaded vocabulary for the GCSE Spanish topics and these are on sale in the Zondle marketplace. They are really cheap too and would save you a lot of typing! I had the most amazing Summer last year. My partner and I travelled around Peru for 4 weeks. We were lucky enough to stay in the jungle for a few nights and we successfully completed the Inca trail to Machu Picchu, before finishing our trip at Lake Titicaca. I felt invigorated. When we returned to the UK I told myself I was going to carry on doing things that made me feel like this, and I wasn't going to let work take over my life. Suddenly 4 months had flown by and all I had to say for them was a ton of MFL resources and lesson plans. By Christmas time I was completely exhausted.
Don't get me wrong, I do love my job but clearly I need to make a change. After all, a happy, healthy teacher is a good teacher. Hopefully Martyn Reah's #teacher5aday will be a good place for me to start... #connect When it comes to anything work related, I'm brilliant at connecting. I do it every day on Twitter and Facebook and it has made my job so much easier. However, I need to connect more on a personal level. I am so lucky to have a partner who puts up with my weekly (I'm lying, it's daily) work related rants, yet when he tries to tell me about his day he can barely finish a sentence without me getting distracted and thinking about work. And he never even complains. I really enjoy using Twitter for educational purposes but I need to set a limit, so I'm banning myself from it on Fridays and Saturdays and will cut down the amount of time I spend on it during the week. Instead I'll spend more time with my lovely OH. #exercise Completing the Inca Trail in Summer made me realise how unfit I am and when I came back to England I told myself I was going to get fit. I was going to join a fitness class and try to exercise every day. I was going to go for more walks and stop driving to the Sainsburys just around the corner. But as usual I kept putting it all off as I was "too busy with work". Suddenly it was Christmas and I had done pretty much no exercise during that time, except for running around my classroom attending to my students. I'm going to sign up to a few charity races (Pretty Muddy etc.) so I at least have something to aim for and I'm going to try to be more active at weekends. I've always wanted to try kayaking, so will give that a go, and I might do Go Ape for my birthday. I've also bought a hula hoop! #notice I absolutely loved my time in Peru last Summer. This was mainly because I spent most of the time taking photos, which is one of my favourite hobbies. I also love travelling and discovering new places, so I need to get out more and start visiting places other than the 4 walls of my classroom. I've been saying for the past 2 years that I'd love to go to Bath, but again, work commitments have taken priority. I'm going to try to go somewhere once a month and have a day of photography. I also have Paris to look forward to in April and Cape Verde in July. #learn I need to learn to be okay with not completing everything on my daily to-do list and just be proud of everything I have accomplished that day. #volunteer I will volunteer to do more to help around the house. My partner will regularly make dinner or do the washing while I sit and plan lessons. I obviously really appreciate this but it isn't exactly fair. He works hard too. I've used this over the past couple of years when introducing my students to 'aller'. It's highly annoying but very very catchy and both you and your students will be singing it for weeks! SrMara has a few Spanish videos on his YouTube channel. This is probably the best one. They're a bit silly but if it helps the students remember, then why not? I'm not sure I'd be brave enough to embarrass myself in front of all of my students (and everyone on YouTube) - at least not on purpose anyway! (-memories of accidentally dribbling in front of a class of giggling Year 7s come flooding back-). Here are some of my favourite posts from my old blog site. Feel free to have a look at it and leave me some feedback.
4 Pictures 1 Word - A Great Starter Activity Kahoot - Interactive Quizzes ICT in MFL - ICT Display & useful websites Memrise - Vocabulary Learning GCSE Spanish Revision Resources Jigsaw Reading - An activity which uses reading, listening, speaking and writing skills Maths Karate - Good for numeracy Independent Learning Folders - Read the blog post and download them for free on TES Reading and listening activity - One of my all time favourites! Here's another Spanish cover by Kevin, Karla y La Banda. This time it's a cover of Selena Gomez - The Heart Wants What It Wants. Follow them on Twitter for updates. Here are some blog posts which I've found particularly interesting...
ML Musings Steve Smith Isabelle Jones MFL Tricks MFL Meanderings Karen Whitehead Miss Mclachlan Rebecca Wylie Also check out:
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AuthorYorkshire lass living down South || Part-time teacher of MFL || Proud wife, and mummy of the best boys || Sharing MFL teaching ideas and resources || Creator of @morganmfl || Author of 100 Ideas for Secondary Teachers: Outstanding MFL Lessons. Archives
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