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 specific topic (theme, phoneme, grammar point etc). During the same time, write between 3-5 words yourself about the same topic - these are the ‘lucky words’. You can make these as obvious or obscure as you like depending on the ability of your class. After the time is up (I recommend about 1 minute), everyone shows their words, and if students have the same word as you they get a point. 

You can repeat this as many times as you like with different topics (eg. school subjects, adjectives, jobs, pets, film/book/music genres, silent final consonants etc). To scaffold this further, you could even run the task in a ‘think-pair-share’ style, with students having 30 seconds to think of words, then another 30 seconds to work with a partner and write down everything they could come up with collectively. Another variation is to do this ‘pointless’ style: students get points for every accurate word they wrote that you didn’t note down. This is great for getting a more able class to think of more complex and varied vocab.  

The Box Game

This is a questioning game that is great for fast recall. I draw a simple grid of 4 boxes on the board - ie. one line down and one line across (I’ve also seen variations with 6 boxes, if you have a bigger class or more time to play this) and ask questions. 

Depending on the question, students can either put their hands up to answer or have everyone write in on their board. The idea is that the quickest answer gets to have their name in one of the boxes (the first hand up, or first accurate board you see). Once you have filled all the boxes, students get to remove someone and put their name in - they find this super motivating! After a specific time is up, the students with their names in one of the boxes are the winners. 

In my experience, students very quickly get into the fun of the game, and it can even be quite tricky to see whose hand is first, so you can easily encourage lots of students! The important thing is that the teacher’s judgement is final (taskmaster style!) and if students do attempt to ‘target’ one particular name, then just go around the grid in a specific order.

Questions could be very simple or longer. Some examples I’ve used successfully are to translate a word (into English or target language), translate a sentence, give a word containing a particular letter or phoneme, give a word belonging to a specific category (give a time phrase, give a past participle, give an intensifier etc), as well as more binary type questions, like what tense is this, is it positive or negative, is it masculine or feminine etc. 

I tend to use this game if I have 5 mins left at the end of a lesson.

Dictation

This is a super important skill to develop, not only because it is now part of the new GCSE, but because it is great for building sound-spelling links. Anecdotally, if students can visualise the language they hear in their minds, it is easier for them to decode it when listening. Dictation can also help to identify and correct common spelling mistakes. And it’s really easy to add in anywhere to your lesson, with zero prep!

How I run dictation activities tends to mirror somewhat how it is tested in the new GCSE listening paper, in that I will always say the sentences 3 times. I tell students that the first time they hear it they should try to listen to the whole sentence and try to visualise it in their minds, on the second time (which is also a little slower than the 1st and 3rd listen), they should write it down. For the third and final time they hear it, they should check carefully that what they wrote matches what I’m saying. I’ve done this with a huge range of abilities and this strategy works well for all of them - you could even put a reminder of these instructions on the board, for example:

1st - fast - listen

2nd - slow - write

3rd - fast - check

As the teacher I will give short simple sentences from the top of my head for students to write. Sometimes I will write them down on a mini whiteboard as I’m saying it, and show students when I’m done to ask them to compare their spelling to mine and give themselves a tick for every individual word they have written perfectly. While this is NOT how they are marked at GCSE, it does work well for getting students, particularly KS3 students, to pay more careful attention when they are checking - and feel motivated that they have scored eg. 10 marks for a sentence.

Quickfire translations 

This is similar to dictation, however this time you say it in the target language, and students write the English. You could introduce an element of ‘delayed translation’ here too - say the sentence, tell students to keep it in their heads while you count to 10, then they write the English.

Change 1 detail

Start by live-modelling a developed, extended sentence with lots of details appropriate to the ability of your class. You could brainstorm this as a class, or just have the teacher write it. I recommended writing this down on a whiteboard/slide where students can see it. Then ask students to rewrite the sentence, changing one specific detail. Then they can rewrite their sentence again (now slightly different from their partner's and from other students’ sentences in the room), changing a different detail. Repeat as many times as you like - and they will end up with a sentence that is well structured, but (almost) completely different in all its parts to the original sentence. If you have the same sense of humour as me, you may even like to call this task 'the sentence of Theseus...'

For example, if your first sentence was ‘tous les soirs je joue au foot au parc avec mes amis parce que c'est amusant’, you could tell them to change the sport, then change the time phrase, then change the person it's with, then change the person doing the action, then change the opinion, then change the place, etc. 

I like to pick on a few students at the end, and ask them to read their new sentences out to the class for the rest of them to listen and translate. This is great for practicing variety, and thinking in ‘chunks’ of vocab.

In my opinion it’s really important to have a few ideas up your sleeve so you can adapt to students’ knowledge in the moment, and you are able to add in a little extra practice on the fly.

Which one of these zero prep ideas will you try first?