Spanish resources for a lesson on describing and giving opinions on your house. All resources are at the bottom of this blog post.

Hope it's useful. Feel free to adapt / share with colleagues.
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Dannielle
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I've posted previously about the ways I prepare my Year 11s for their GCSEs. This year I have one Year 11 French group, 1 Year 10 Spanish group and 1 Year 9 French group and I've found it to be quite the challenge teaching the current GCSE, whilst also getting to grips with the new one. I'm sure I'm not the only one!

For the current Year 11s our department decided to have all Controlled Assessments completed by Christmas to give us the rest of the year to focus purely on the Reading and Listening exams. 

Before February half-term I gave out these revision packs to help them prepare for their final mock exams. 

French GCSE Survival Kit
Each booklet contains:

• Front cover
• Progress tracker / reflection sheet (see below)
• Revision checklist
• Recognising new vocabulary - strategies sheet
• Recognising Cognates / Spelling Patterns worksheet
• Vocabulary sheets from each topic. Students have been working through these sheets, translating any they know and using Word Reference to translate any they don't. They then highlight the words once they know them off by heart. 

Example of Progress Tracker / Reflection sheet filled in by a Year 11 boy:

For most of this half a term we have been working through the Reading and Listening exercises on Kerboodle. I split the class into Foundation and Higher and had answer sheets prepared for most activities, to allow them to check and green pen their reading answers.

For the listening exercises I normally start with the Foundation students, while the Higher students quietly get on with their Reading exercises, then we swap over. We have a discussion at the start about how they would tackle that exercise in an exam (reminding them to use their 5 minute preparation time wisely!). We discuss and make a note of the vocabulary they need to listen out for and what could be the potential problems with each listening exercise. Then once they've completed the exercise we download the transcript from Kerboodle, translate this together as a group and discuss the correct answers. 

The past couple of weeks each student has been given a pack of Exampro papers to work through. These include QR codes linked to the listening exercises and mark schemes at the back of each section (not included below in the downloads, as these aren't my own work).

Memrise
My Year 11s have been using Memrise at home to develop their knowledge of vocabulary. I track the leaderboards and give prizes to the top 3 each week. I also give students 2 house points each time they complete a course. In lessons I often hear them say, "I remember this one because I saw it on Memrise". I think the repetition really helps the vocabulary to stick in their minds. 

Kahoot
I still use Kahoot with my classes. Students love the interactivity and they're actually learning something! There are lots of ready made Kahoots too. Here's one I made on the topic of Environment.

​​Song Challenge Activity
I was recently lucky enough to attend the New GCSE MFL course in London run by Wendy Adeneji and found it to be incredibly useful. One of my favourite ideas from the day was to give students a big list of vocabulary in the target language, then give them the duration of the song to translate as many of these as possible. Go through the answers and get the students to fill in any they've missed or correct any they got wrong. You could also get them to think of ways to remember this vocabulary. They then add up their score and set themselves a target for next time. You can give them the same vocabulary next lesson/week and hopefully their scores will have gone up. I chose a mixture of words from different topics - most of the words were the ones they have been struggling with when we've done Kahoot quizzes.

Vocabulary Tests
We've been doing vocabulary tests every Monday with the words taken from the back of the AQA French Revision Guide. I give out House Points to anyone who gets 18+/20.

Vocabulary Cards
Students also have access to packs of match up vocabulary cards on all of the topics covered in the exams. 

Trivial Pursuit
I've blogged in the past about my GCSE Spanish Trivial Pursuit. Last year's Year 11s loved playing this and it helped them figure out which topics they still needed to work on. A few people have translated this into other languages, but unfortunately I haven't managed to get this printed off in French yet!

Any other great ideas for preparing the Year 11s for their Reading and Listening exams? Let me know in the comments below :)

Don't forget you can download all the resources mentioned at the bottom of this post. Hope you found this useful! 

Dannielle
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