New links I like

Just found this sweet American website with loads of songs on it which you can play from the site, and they are not blocked in school for once!!

http://www.bussongs.com

I also randomly came across this site for learning Esperanto which is really good fun, interactive and teaches you alot about how a language can be ordered and structured.  I think this would make an excellent session for European Day of Languages or as an initiation to language learning.  Also it could be a useful tool for testing language “aptitude”.

Afternoon with Wokingham HODs

This afternoon I went up to meet the HODs in Wokingham to talk about the progress they are making on the new Secondary Curriculum for MFL.  They were a great bunch and, despite the incredible heat, we managed to share a wealth of great ideas and practice.  I asked them first what they wanted to get out of the meeting and the challenge of “to be inspired” was set.  Hmmm….  My remit wasn’t exactly to bowl them over with my best ideas, but I shared a few things and was lucky enough to leave the meeting having gained inspiration myself from the excellent practice described.

We started the meeting with a little clip from Eddie Izzard about some of the slightly useless things pupils are made to learn in the MFL classroom from time to time.  This served as a theme for the meeting, as one of the key opportunities of the new curriculum is RELEVANCE!

We also discussed what we want pupils to be able to do in terms of skills and how this is key to meeting the KS2-3 transition needs of pupils.  There is a really useful document on the ALL one-stop-shop site which maps the KS3 Framework onto the new PoS.

One document I find really interesting is the “Pupils Views on Language-Learning” from QCA.  It is a relief to read that pupils want more cultural content, more opportunities to be supported in their productive skills, and to learn more words!  There seemed to be general consensus today that a cross-curricular approach is the way forward, but that it is difficult to provide students with the sometimes very specific vocabulary they want.  We talked about how to give pupils independence in the language, at which point I shared my Phonics powerpoint, which reinforces techniques being widely used in Primary MFL.

Here are some other useful links I mentioned today:

ALL New Curriculum site

PoS at a glance

Working with other subjects toolkit

What are other subjects doing?? Key Concepts and processes detailed here.

Have a look at my “Teacher Stuff” page for a few extra bits and bobs and feel free to leave a comment if you need anything else.