Posts

Zero prep MFL classroom wins

I love a simple quick win - because who doesn’t? As a teacher I know how busy the job can get, and I also know that an activity or resource doesn’t need to take you a long time to create to have a huge positive impact for your students. In this post I wanted to share some useful tasks that genuinely require zero prep. I don’t mean minimal, or very quick - literally ZERO. You can walk into your class after a busy break duty and pull this out straightaway. Personally I use mini whiteboards all the time, and I think they are a super effective tool and routine. In my school it is part of our Teaching and Learning strategy, so we have ‘packs’ of whiteboards and pens out on every desk in every classroom. These activities work particularly well alongside a mini whiteboard routine to maximise thinking, but there are also variations that you can do that don’t require them, if this isn’t something you have available. Lucky Words Give students a time limit to write as many words as they can on a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What really matters for revision in MFL

When it comes to revision, it's essential to give your students as much time as possible to practice their skills repeatedly. I believe that you don't need to do activities that take a huge amount of time and effort to prepare; the most important thing is the opportunity to do lots of varied practice until students feel really successful and confident.  Revision will likely still need some scaffolding, and how much will depend on the class in front of you, but ideally at this stage students are working mostly independently and revision should feel like a challenge. As teachers, we are the experts that help students to understand how revision works, and select activities that allow for the most practice - by either guiding them towards beneficial things to do at home or setting it in the classroom. We are also able to target the activities that highlight student misconceptions and areas of difficulty, as well as areas that are most important for achieving high marks. In my opini...
Post a Comment
Read more

Creating a 'dobble' style vocab game

I enjoy the game ‘dobble’ and I’m sure many of your students do too! Here’s how to turn it into a useful way to practice vocab recall in the classroom.  I play this as a way for students to practice remembering and saying vocab quickly, since it is a very fast game. They also have the benefit of multiple repetitions of key vocab. How to play The aim is for players to find the single matching symbol between two cards. Start by dealing all the cards equally amongst players face down. There should be one card left face up in the middle of all the players. All the players flip over their top card simultaneously, and they need to find the symbol that matches between their card and the centre card. The first person to say the symbol puts the card onto the center card, and the player who gets rid of all of their cards first is the winner.  There are many other variations of play, and I recommend this for groups of between three and five students. Students will get through a game quic...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to calculate grade boundaries

One of the frustrating things about starting a new spec is the lack of grade boundaries to help make a judgement about what grade students are on track to receive. Unfortunately, until there has been a cohort who take this exam and receive a grade, no one will be able to give accurate grade boundaries - we can only estimate. While the boundaries change year on year, they have remained roughly similar for the last 8 years (on the previous spec). It is of course possible for them to change further for a new specification, but this is still our best source of data to create a best estimate for the new one. I have created a spreadsheet which gives a few alternative ways of calculating a 'best estimate' grade - these are best used alongside teacher professional judgements. This may potentially include you knowing your students' target grades, or comparing with previous cohorts. It may also help you to report a more nuanced grade, which is required by my school and I'm sure m...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Top 10 Speaking Activities: Part 2

Image
This blog is a continuation of My Top 10 Speaking Activities: Part 1 I wanted to share some helpful activities that I use often with my classes. The activities I've selected help students to practice and develop different sub-skills of speaking, and are listed here with an explanation and an example. 6. Quelquechose/Algo/Etwas This requires slightly more prep than the other tasks so far since you need a partner A and partner B version of the resource, but worth it since it practices the two new skills of the new GCSE – reading aloud and dictation. There are two similar texts, and students take it in turns to read it to their partner and to write what they heard in the gaps. I also like that the pair who isn’t speaking has a clear and specific role, as I think this is important for engagement in these types of tasks. Students tend to need coaching to not try to mumble or speed through it, so this is done a little later in the learning sequence (when I am happy that students can accu...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Top 10 Speaking Activities: Part 1

Image
I’ve written quite a bit about how to develop our students’ speaking skills, and making sure we scaffold and challenge appropriate to their current understanding and abilities. I’ve also discussed how we can make speaking activities a classroom routine, increasing confidence and motivation by making it so students expect to have to speak, and so they are clear on what they need to do. I thought it would be helpful to write a post explaining my top 10 speaking tasks at the moment as well as how, when, and why I use them. They aren’t listed in any particular order but are roughly in order of when I might use them with my classes if I’m introducing a new topic. (Most of my example slides below come from tasks I’ve done with my lovely year 10 French group throughout last year.) So, without further ado... 1. Repeat if correct (also known as ‘beat the teacher’) This is great at the start of a topic as it’s repetition based, so ideal for drilling new vocab or a particular phoneme. KS3 classes...
Post a Comment
Read more

Building routines for speaking

Building classroom routines is essential. I think when most of us think of routines , what immediately springs to mind is linked to making the classroom a safe and settled space in terms of behaviour, ie . entry and exit routines, register routines, handing out equipment routines. T hese are hugely important and make lessons go much more smoothly – and I think we can utilise routines for speaking too. Over the past few years, I have developed and used a classroom speaking routine that I refer to as the ‘2-minute speaking questions challenge’. I’ve written about this activity before on this blog post – please have a read and see if you may be able to implement this in your classrooms.  The p urpose of this challenge is to develop confidence and accuracy with understanding and (quickly) responding to questions in the target language. It’s been incredibly successful in my school context across a range of prior ability groups, in that all students know several key verbs, c...
Post a Comment
Read more