Harry Potter and the End of Term Feeling

At this time of year, what with sports day, visits to Alton Towers, and induction tours with Year 6, I find it difficult to keep both my classes and myself motivated, and I try to find activities which will hopefully keep pupils engaged.

Below the video are some materials which I have thrown together, which may be useful for part of a lesson – steal away if they’re of any use! (and apologies for any mistakes).

Suggestions for activities

Text sorting activity

Correct text order

Dictionary skills

Die Welle

I love using film in lessons, but I believe the audience should participate in some way; too many times, films are used as a method of keeping pupils quiet towards the end of term, which for me diminishes the art and craft of film making.  I want to encourage my pupils to watch foreign language films, even after they stop learning the language.

So here’s one of my favourites.  I absolutely love this film, and use any opportunity to show it to my students, because they usually love it too.

I find it interesting and useful for the classroom on many levels:

1. First and foremost, it’s a great story.
2. It’s set in a school, so has a lot of young protagonists, which is usually a bonus for hooking pupils in.
3. The students are from a range of backgrounds (social, cultural, family).
4. Tranferring the original story from USA to Germany provides an extra dimension when considering autocratic government/leadership.
5. It opens up avenues to discuss some of Germany’s historical past, and to dispel some myths.

I use the film in a number of ways, depending on the class I have:

One year, I used the film as a stimulus for an extended piece of writing, before watching the film.

I showed my class some stills from the film, and told them nothing other than the names of the characters and that the setting was school.  I told them they could be either one of the characters, or a friend of one of the characters. I suggested that they think about describing the people, their relationships, the school, and what a typical day would be like.  For more able, I added that they might want to use their imaginations to describe something unusual that happened at school.

They loved it!  The less able (it was a mixed GCSE group containing pupils with targets from A to G) did basic descriptions of the characters, whilst the more able had one of the pupils with a crush on the teacher, or one of the pupils stabbing another!

After working hard on the task, the reward was to watch the film, and the pupils were intrigued to see what actually  happened to each of the characters. Some were very close to the truth.

With a much weaker group, I introduced the film and some of the historical/political references which they might have missed, and let them watch it.  Afterwards they used a gap fill exercise to summarise the story.

This year’s Year10 group get to watch it after they’ve done their next Controlled Assessment – 0n school!

Die Fremde

I was really excited last Sunday to be able to attend a free screening of a prize-winning film Die Fremde (literally translated as The Foreigner, but the film was shown under the English title When We Leave).  The screening took place at my favourite cinema, Cornerhouse, on Oxford Road in Manchester.  Here’s the trailer from the official website:

Recognising the difficulties in distributing a film in a multi-lingual market, the Lux Film Prize is awarded by the European Parliament, and covers the cost of subtitling its winning film in each of the 23 EU official languages, and of supplying a copy of the film to each of the 27 EU member states.  The film is then shown to invited audiences during the month of May in each of the countries, and the UK venue was Manchester.

What I found interesting about this film was the subject matter – a Turkish-German woman’s search for self-fulfilment, and the conflict this produces for her among her family and community, where the men traditionally have authority.  Touching on issues of forced marriage and domestic violence, the film also has some scenes of real happiness and love, along with some absolute heartbreak.

Although not officially released in the UK yet, I would highly recommend taking a look when the opportunity arises.  It’s a story which is highly relevant, not just in Germany or among the Turkish community, and raises lots of questions.

Congratulations to director Feo Aladag, Cornerhouse and the European Parliament for making, showing and distributing this beautiful and thought-provoking film.

German links – as suggested by Year 10

As we’re investigating New Media (or whatever the GCSE theme likes to call itself), I set Year 10 some homework which involved them using either Facebook, YouTube or a search engine of their choice.  If you’d like to see the actual task which I set, it’s here.

In brief, most of them decided to find things on YouTube, the links to which I have added to my wiki, so they can have a look and comment over the Easter holidays.

I still couldn’t entice all of them to do their homework, but those that did came up with some interesting things (and some not so interesting, to be honest) and at least it did get them searching for things beyond what they would normally look for.

Here’s the link to the wiki page, if you’d like to have a look at what they found.

And here’s my favourite of their finds so far:

Nur ein Wort

I came across this song by the German group Wir Sind Helden at the weekend.

Not only is it a catchy tune, but I liked the fact that the band members hold up some of the words, which brings additional opportunities for work in class.

The full lyrics are here, and the worksheet I used for gap fill is here.  Hope you like it!

Kobayashi Maru revisited

So 10 lessons down the line, and it’s time to evaluate the attempt to engage Year 9 in their own learning.  If you missed the introductory ramble, you’ll find it here.

I’m really pleased with some aspects of the work.   For example, having the pupils work in peer-designated groups has highlighted which pupils are the ones actually causing the noise.  It just seemed like it was all of them until recently!

I also like the progress that some of the quieter or demotivated ones have made by being in a group with an enthusiastic leader, who went out of her way to include everyone.

I’m not so pleased with the fact that actually getting the pupils to listen at any point, either to each other or to me, is still extremely difficult.  Even though they are fed up with the noise themselves, they haven’t figured out the cause and effect thing yet.

Anyway, here are their comments on the half-term, which I received in response to a questionnaire (I was experimenting with Spicynodes!):

Whatever happens, I will still be meeting the same group of pupils last lesson on Tuesdays and Wednesdays until the end of the year, so I need to keep trying to get through to them.  Guess what I’ll be doing at half-term …

Rediscovering old ideas!

I’m sure this is familiar to you, but I was searching for a starter to get Year 7 going again after the Christmas break and came across my ‘Question of Sport’ picture boards in PowerPoint, useful for both starters and plenaries.

Year 7  loved it – as they were getting one point for each thing they said about the person hidden, competition was fierce to produce longer and longer descriptions!

Please feel free to take the files if you think they’ll be useful.  I’ve colour-coded the squares for different languages – all you need to do is replace the pictures or text on the slides to whatever is appropriate.

Question of … French

Question of … German

Question of … Italian

Kobayashi Maru

Individually, my Year 9 German group (set 2 of 2) are nice pupils, some funny, some a bit odd, but by and large OK.  Put them together, however, last lesson on Tuesday and Wednesday, and they become a different life form.  I have lost track of the number of times I have been unable to actually start the lesson because they come in to the room talking and just don’t shut up.

I’ve tried being calm and quiet, loud and shouty, mixing the groups, working individually – the only thing they seem to engage with is Linguascope.  Great for learning 12 items of vocabulary, but after that …?  Then they complain at me because they didn’t get level 5 on their last assessment.

Those of you who are Star Trek aficionados may recognise Kobayashi Maru – the no-win scenario – and most of the time this is what I feel like with this group.  However, if you do know about the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, you may also recall that James Tiberius Kirk actually beat the Kobayashi Maru – he won the no-win scenario.

So this is my 5 week mission to …  OK, I’ll stop the Star Trek references, but I have devised a plan to see if there is any way I can engage this group more successfully.

I have asked the group to tell me how they want to learn for the next half term.  I have given them the non-negotiable facts (which topics and grammar they need to learn, what level they are expected to be working at, and the fact that there will be assessments at the end).

The rest is up to them.  They have been compiling a list of activities they want to do to show off their learning (role play/drama, board games, posters), and have split the work between groups so that they will each be responsible for teaching the class a different aspect of the unit.  They have also made a list of what they need me to do (eg explain about separable verbs, coach on pronunciation).

Over the holidays, my job is to put it all together, and I’ll be handing it over to them in January.

It could work, it could be a disaster.  But at least I’m trying.  I’ll post updates here as we go along.

Are we just jumping through hoops?

I was going to start with ‘it’s that time of year again’, but nowadays, it always seems like ‘that time of year’.  Year 11 are preparing for yet another controlled assessment, and I am running out of inspirational ways to help them get ready.

I went through all the usual stuff again – “once I give you this task, I can’t help you with anything else”; “you have until next Monday to prepare”; “no, you can’t use those verbs in your 40 words” –  usually followed by “a verb is an action word”! 

And then there’s the issue that always makes me wonder if I’m doing it correctly- “you can’t take home your draft or your planning sheet”.  “But Miss, isn’t most of this in our exercise books anyway…?”

And of course, it is, because that’s the vocabulary and grammar they have been learning in lessons for the past few weeks.  Otherwise I wouldn’t have been doing my job properly.  I feel like I’ve missed something somewhere, but I am assured that I haven’t. 

So therefore I started to ask myself – Are these assessments just hoops to jump through, or are they really giving our pupils the opportunity to respond spontaneously to the target language?  For me, until we see how the examination results turn out, it’s still in the balance …

First blogpost!

As a result of an excellent couple of sessions recently from Joe Dale and José Picardo (thanks, guys) I now seem to have been inspired to get my own blog.  Not sure how that happened!  So the question now is, what to put in it?

Keeping it simple for the first one, I thought I’d share an idea that I picked up from Sara Sullivan at the SSAT National Languages Conference in October this year.   She explained how she put a proverb on the board in a foreign language as her Year 11 class were coming in, and that they loved the challenge of working out the meaning before the lesson began in earnest.  So I decided to try it with my class, and I am really impressed with the results.  In fact, if I have forgotten a proverb, they even ask me why there isn’t one for them!

Here’s a website I use to find proverbs in German.

I also brought back a few postcards from a recent trip to Berlin, which had some nice phrases on them.  My class asked if this one was of me.  Cheeky monkeys!