Bethlingual - building confident and successful MFL learners

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 ...

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...