coucoucircus.org - Bienvenue This site gives you access to the theme tunes and lyrics of hundreds of French TV programmes, in particular a lot of children's cartoon series.
Flash Video Big Books This is a great site for anyone interested in using story telling as a key component of their courses. Some free stuff but the books you have to buy are pretty cheap and excellent quality. Highly recommended.
Wordle - Create word clouds This is a fantastic little site for anyone wanting to be creative with Language. It creates key word diagrams on any topic in an arty way. It is a great way to introduce a topic or allow kids to create a keyword list to help them prepare for a speaking test
Apparently some visitors visiting this post haven't been able to see the video file using Internet Explorer as it is in .swf format.
To view it in Internet Explorer, go to the 'Tools' menu on the IE toolbar at the top, scroll down to 'Internet Options'. in the window that opens up ...
click the security tab and then click on the 'custom level' button. In the box that opens scroll down to 'Active X' controls
and check the 'enable' option for this website. If this is too much of a flaff and you are worried about security issues, then download this copy of the video here.
You can open it using Internet Explorer once downloaded. You will be promted to allow Active X for this file. Say 'yes'. It should now show. In future I will have to avoid that format!
Hi
Just thought I would share an idea I am working on for a yr 6 class I am teaching. They have been doing the topic of sports and opinions.
I was listening to the song by Me Gustas Tu by Manu Chao and thinking that this was a brilliant simple structure for teaching likes/dislikes. For anyone who doesn't know the song you can see it here.
I switched the structure round from 'I like ...... and I like you' to 'I don't like + sport : Me neither.
I downloaded the backing track for the song from Karoaoke Version.com and then created a simple Smartboard Notebook file.
Here is a video clip to demonstrate the file and how I would use it
If you read this blog regularly you will know that I have been talking about how using professionally composed and recorded backing tracks as a basis for practising any language on any topic has become a feature of the lessons I teach.
The attraction of this is that the music is an 'empty vessel' to which you can add any content defined by you rather than being bound by someone else's lyrics. In fact the same pieces of music can be used for many different songs.
I think all language teachers have some kind of musical affinity. The 'ear' you need to pick up an accent, to hear and feel the rhythm and pace of a language, is something very similar to having a musical ear.
Probably many of you have dabbled at writing songs for your own classes. In my own experience of doing this, writing the lyrics was not so much the problem as getting a good tune. You can adapt well known tunes of course. They are already popular and likely to be known by the pupils which leaves you free to focus on the lyrics rather than teaching the tune.
However you can also start with tunes that perhaps your pupils don't know. If it's good enough, has a strong enough rhythm, backing tracks like this can be really successful as well.
Use the power of someone else's musical talent, add it to your own linguistic skills and create a classroom hit!
In the post linked above, I related how I had run a Sing Up funded 4-week project in a primary school to examine the power of singing to aid language learning. For the yr 5 and yr 6 classes, the topics we were to cover following their scheme of work were:
yr 5 - Describing your House
yr 6 - Describing your Town
I don't know about you but these two topics generally leave me uninspired and I am always scratching around for new ideas to make them more interesting. So it was an interesting challenge to see if my enthusiasm for using singing to inspire language learning could animate these two topics.
I took 4 different tunes downloaded from the Audionetwork music production library. I was able to write the above lyrics to the backing tracks because they all had the same time signature (4/4) ie: 4 beats per bar, and they all had a verse and chorus format. The QUALITY of the tracks makes the LANGUAGE much easier to write. Begin with the music and the rest follows.
Click on the pictures below to see the lyrics generated for both topics
Voici ma maison
Dans ma ville
(For tips on writing lyrics, click on the image)
Here are the 4 backing tracks i) played without lyrics ii) with the lyrics for verse 1 and chorus of the song 'Voici ma Maison' as a sample ('scuse the singing!)
1. An Eminem style rap clip I use a lot
backing track
track with vocals
2. A Greek style clip
backing track
track with vocals
3. A Folk Pop style clip
backing track
track with vocals
4. A Rock clip
backing track
track with vocals
With ONE set of lyrics, we could sing them to 4 different tunes in 4 different styles.
Here are the same set of backing tracks behind the lyrics for 1st verse and chorus on the topic of Town
Rap
Greek
Folk pop
Rock
If you are interested in obtaining the whole songs with all of the lyrics on IWB files (Smartboard / Promethean), pdf, powerpoint, and Task Magic exercise files, I hope to be launching all of this on my other site www.souffler.co.uk soon. I will also provide links to the sources of the tunes on the Audionetwork site.
Was it successful? Here are the comments from the teacher's observing the work with these classes. Click on the image to enlarge
... and from the pupils themselves. These recordings were taken from interviews conducted with them 2 weeks after the 4 week project. The girls are very articulate but had no prior warning that they were going to be interviewed. I was amazed at their insight into what they had been doing.
Go forth and make your own amazing songs! Have fun!
I wanted to highlight a useful Wiki, 'Sing to Learn' that a colleague Barbara Harper has created to help colleagues share songs and related resources for language learning.
This is screenshot of the French page but there is a Spanish page plus some links pages that take you to many other sites with material you might find useful. Click on the image to enlarge it. You can find the wiki here.
As with all Wiki's, the point of them is to encourage collaboration so if you have a song, some materials or a website that you know of, please support Barbara in her efforts to create a really useful resource. Please tweet this on to other MFL colleagues that you know or send them the page links.
Comparing the two helps point out how impossible it is to translate exactly when trying to make a rhyme. The French version's end of line rhymes determine the message which is slightly different.
Another example of an FL song that you can use to focus on one particular area of pronunciation, this example in French, thanks to Louis Bassoon who posted this comment on my previous post on this topic .....
I love using songs in my lessons, and looking at pronunciation in a song has proved to be a really good way of tackling certain aspects of the language. Have a look at Natasha St Pierre's song "Tu trouveras" on YouTube. I found a version with the words, got the pupils to listen and watch and write down how many times there was a word ending in s where the s was silent (and then, on the second listening, they spotted how many final s were actually pronounced). The pupils were focused, fascinated and asking to sing along after about 3 listenings. They also now have a clear impression of how a final s in French is rarely pronounced - they are now compiling a list of examples every time they spot one.
... so here is the link to Natasha St Pierre singing 'Tu Trouveras' with the lyrics hosted at Youtube.
I think this post from Louis underlines what I was saying that you don't have to dive headlong into comprehension of the text before being able to use songs for a real linguistic purpose in your lessons.
I will be adding a file in a few days that enable you to generate various exercises and worksheets based on this song. Bear with me and come back at the end of the week!
This is a beautiful song from Toy Story 2 about love, love lost and love regained.
And here are the parallel lyrics in French and English.
English version as composed by Randy Newman and sung by Sarah MchLachlan
I would be fascinated to hear how you would exploit this song and at what level of age ability. Leave some ideas that others can benefit from!
For example at what level of ability would pupils be able to make a comparison of the French and English texts to work out if it is an exact translation or liberal interpretation? Is the title translated differently? What could pupils produce creatively using this song as an inspiration? Their own poems? A short film? A letter written between the people involved? A wordcloud of all the words this song evokes?
I have said in previous posts that my ideas on why, when and how to use songs to support language learning have undergone a fairly major shift. Before, finding the correct lyrics was the prime factor in deciding what I might use. In this post I am going to suggest that before even understanding a song, you can use it to teach children to understand the relation between new phonic and graphic patterns.
This song, "You've got a friend in me" from Toy Story has the advantage that it is really well known and liked in English so the key notion of "Friendship" at the heart of it is usually understood.
In French it is called "Je suis ton ami" and offers a chance to show pupils two common phonic patterns that occur in French and which can cause problems when learning how to read and pronounce them. These are the 'w' sound that occurs between a consonant and the vowels 'oi' and 'ui' eg: 'moi' / 'puis' and the 'y' sound that occurs in words such as those containing '-ieu' '-ill' eg: vieux / vieille
Here is an extract from the French lyrics with words containing these phonemes highlighted. The whole Word document can be downloaded here.
You could either present the song with the highlights already put in or ask pupils to try and pick out and highlight these patterns for themselves as they listen.
If you have any ideas as to which songs might be useful for teaching certain phonemes in certain languages, leave a comment and/or a link below!
NB. Since posting this, I have been informed by those using Internet Explorer that the video doesn't display. The video format is .swf and I think it is something to do with IE security settings, not sure. If anyone can tell me how to get round this, let me know.
The only solution at the moment I can suggest is to download Firefox and use it as a back up browser. There are no problems using Firefox to view this swf file. In future I will try and avoid this conflict, sorry!
I was going to write this post about The Hat software from Harmony Hollow but have since found that downloading anything from their site has been flagged up as dangerous by my anti-virus software. Apparently it installs ad targetting code so am steering well clear of it.
I'm really disappointed as I appreciated the fact that I could use it offline.
You have to be online to use this. The video below explains how to use the software and an idea on how you can exploit it to play a game for teams in class to practise any language on any topic. I'm using it at a fairly simple level to get pupils to read, repeat and practise simple phrases. I'm sure there are ideas of how to use it that require deeper thinking skills. Leave comments and links if you know of any.
First, write out your list of words, phrases in a simple text editor such as notepad. I wouldn't use Word or Pages as you need to have the list of vocab open in a seperate window as you play the game online and it is easier to resize a window in notepad.
Second, copy/paste this list into the Classtools site
Third, click on "save as webpage@ to any folder on your laptop/pc
Fourth, divide your class into teams. Before clicking on the web page you saved to start the game, have the notepad file open that you originally created the list in and ask pupils from one team to predict which vocab item will be selected.
Fifth, click on the webpage to open the classtools page with your text in the slot machine. It will automatically spin and select one item. If that is the same as the team's prediction, they get a point. Remove this item both from the classtools slot machine and from the notepad list. Go to the next team, and so on.
The pupils love seeing how lucky they can be. Obviously the chances of guessing correctly are very low to begin with but get higher as more items are removed.
A variation would be not to delete items from the notepad file. Pupils have to remember which vocab items have already been chosen
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