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
For anyone who doesn't know Sylvia Duckworth, she is a French teacher in Canada experienced in using the AIM language learning program that places a strong emphasis on using the arts to build language structure. The core philosophy as far as I understand it is that language learning needs to be given an emotional context for it to become embedded.
This is easy if you are in the country where that language is spoken, hard if you aren't.
However using visual, aural and physical expression via gestures, movement, music and song, drama, storytelling, it is possible to speed up language acquisition and present the language in a fun, engaging context. If children like it, they'll learn it. Not an earth shattering concept but harder to achieve than say!
So, I have been casting an eye over some of the songs on Sylvia's Youtube channel and am picking out some songs that I think readers of this blog might like.
A big thank you to Sylvia for doing all of the powerpoints so well and for sharing them. Thank you to the composers for allowing them to be shared.
For the full caboodle, have a look at her site! A lot of potential for fun and meaningful language learning for new learners here I think!
All these songs display elements I have been trying to define that make them great songs :
Great tunes/music - TOP OF THE LIST!
A strong central idea that engages, a bit of a story not just a topic - this doesn't have to revolve around a person - Charlotte Diamond's 'Je suis une pizza' is a brilliant example! Things can be given a voice and a story too.
Quirky humour that children will love - Charlotte Diamond getting personally manhandled by the Queen and kicked out of Buckingham Palace for complaining about the miniscule sarnies, brilliant! IMAGINATION has to be BIG in songs for kids!
Seeing something from a child's point of view - John Demado's rap about feeling trapped in his house by having to do chores, the lament of countless generations of kids! Jack Grunsky writing a song based upon a single line that every parent knows, 'Look what I made for you at school today!'
Repetition - the opportunity for children to repeat the lines in 'Je suis une pizza', the frequent repetitions in Alain le Lait's 'En voici' song, the chorus in Max Maxwell's song 'Oh le printemps' - these repeats give an entry point into a song - you can simply ask children to sing along with these to begin with and use the rest of the song for comprehension games, hold up a card when they hear 'x,y,z' etc.
Use of rhythm to drive learning - Juli Power's inclusion of that part of her song where children are asked to count to 16 in time to the music. Sensing the 'pulse' of a song and keeping in time with it are essential musical skills.
For the more examples of songs, visit Sylvia's Youtube channel
It was a privilege to work with colleagues at this event. Here are the session notes and some resource packs for
i) Running a French Singing Assembly
The package is presented in French but can be adapted to other languages pretty easily.
I do this in schools to introduce language learning to children and staff.
All the resources are in 3 formats: powerpoint : Smartboard Notebook : Promethean Flipchart
Download the pack in 2 parts by visiting these links. If you have any problems downloading these contact me using the email address I gave you at the conference and put 'Newquay Primary Languages' in your email header.
ii) Workshop - "Putting the "Mmmm-Factor" into your lessons : Music Makes Meaning Memorable"
Due to copyright restrictions I cannot post either the slideshow or many of the materials I used in this. The notes however give you all the links you need to get started.
Some of the materials are going to be available on my other site hopefully in early May. If you want to be put on the email list to find out when they go live please fill in the contact form on www.souffler.co.uk
Please download the notes from the workshop here. Click on the picture below to see a sample of the first page.
Finally, if you have benefited from this training and think you know anyone who might be interested in booking me to come and further work with them, I'm always open to offers! Please send them the link to this blog post
Hmm! This seems to becoming rather a theme on this site!
As so much traffic is visiting these posts I thought I would flag up a very old post from this site which I put up to help teach French colours in primary schools.
I was using the French Noddy song "Oui, oui" which all primary classes sing with predictable sniggering and general merriment. Here it is:
As a song to teach pronunciation of the 'i' (eee) phoneme it is really useful as most of the lyric rhymes are based on this.
You can also point out the 'w' sound in front of it when adding 'u' (oui) and the following 'y' sound in 'aill' (vaillant).
Here is the link to the old post on this where you can find the lyrics, mp3 versions of the tune and other materials to teach colours.
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
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.
Updates A colleague kindly pointed out that there were a couple of errors in the text of the powerpoint which I have now corrected in the download file. Slide 34 'Kir Royale' not just Kir and slides 49 and 55 'treize' for 'trieze' a typo.
I have also added a simplified version of the same quiz with a few new elements
Following on from my earlier post on using a scrolling text in powerpoint, here is a French Christmas quiz which was kindly shared by a colleague on the Yahoo Mfl resources forum (which by the way will save you as a language teacher hours of time as colleagues here are very generous with time, support and bags of free resources).
I have adapted it so that all of the questions appear on the slideshow but they only appear when the text the pupils are studying has disappeared and the questions then appear as scrolling text across the bottom of the screen. It puts a time pressure on the pupils to read the text, focus on the key detail and anticipate the kind of questions they might be asked. I played it with pupils working as a pair but in competition with each other. They had to write the answers down and after every 3 or 4 slides we would check the answers as a class.
This worked very well with pupils in yrs 5 and 6 at a primary school and I am sure you could adapt it to work with older groups, perhaps putting more of the slides into French.
There is too much material here for one lesson so you may need to shorten it to suit your needs. The later slides do include some ideas on how to exploit the 'find the French for ...' type of question.
Watch a video demonstration of how it works on this video here.
You can download the powerpoint here. If you are prompted to allow macros when you open it, you can block them as there are none attached to this powerpoint. I have no idea why this message pops up! An annoyance of ppt 2003 ...
Here is a Slideshare link to give you an idea of the content but Slideshare will not demo a preview of the animated scroll bar questions or triggers I have used.
I hope I can put up a video explaining a bit more how these features are created. For now you can simply play around with the ideas. Copy any of the slides whose features you want to use in any other presentation you are working on and adapt the pictures and text for your own ends.
You could use these ideas to get pupils focusing on and interacting with any topic you are teaching at any level across the curriculum so please feel free to share this post with other colleagues on your schools. You can use the "Tell a friend" widget to the left to pass a link on.
Following on from yesterday's post on using macros in Word, this video explains how you might exploit this vowel macro in Microsoft Word to do some listening work with a text on Christmas in France. If you have a KS4/5 class next week and are stuck for something to do, this could plug a gap!
Again, whilst the language here is for pupils aged 15 +, the idea could be adapted for much simpler texts and sound files at a simpler level.
My thanks to the person who tweeted the original source material for the sound file and text, and thanks to the host site at ie.languages.com
This is the original sound file
and an extract from the Word file. Download both in the zip file below.
Here is the video link. Right click to open in a new browser window or download.
The link from the mp3 to the media player embedded in the Word document might be broken but there is an explanation at the end of the video of how to re-insert it if you wish. Otherwise just play the mp3 in your own media player.
Have fun!
Joyeux Noël à tous mes collègues qui travaillent si dur dans des sections de langues partout au Royaume Uni et ailleurs!
By creating a new toolbar you can store all of your macros on here. This video shows you how to do it. Right click to either open in a new browser window, or download the video. If you download the video, play it back by dragging the file into an open browser window in Internet Explorer or Firefox, or any other internet browser.
In this post, I link to a video explanation of how to create a simple macro that will enable you or your pupils to play around with parallel texts to practise translating to and from English. Although the example worked through below uses A-level Standard text, you can adapt the idea to any other much simpler text for younger pupils.
Having read some posts about using parallel / bilingual texts on the MFL Resources forum (Yahoo), I found this site http://www.bilingual-texts.com/library/. There are a number of bilingual texts in numerous languages taken from well known novels.
I selected "Le Petit Prince". This is a small screen shot of the Word document you download. The files are free.
To make working with this into more of an interactive exercise, I placed a selection of the text into Word.
I then recorded a macro that would enable me to remove all of the vowels in turn in either the French or the English part of the text.
The video of how to do this is here. Right click on the link and open in a new browser window or right click and choose 'Save as' to download to your computer.
The beauty of this idea in class is that by using the ctrl+z and ctrly+y keys you can instantly toggle between putting the letters back in or removing them again.You can apply the macro to small sections of the text at a time as well, rather than to the whole text.
You could ask pupils to work in pairs/groups to try and read out the correct English or French version using the skeleton as a prompt.
A variant would be to use a video/sound file as a prompt (say in French) and the English version of the translation as a skeleton text.
Another idea might be to use a text that has a lot of connectives in it. Run your macro to find/replace all the connectives and ask pupils to suggest what connectives might be missing. A simple use of the ctrl+z key would then gradually reveal those connectives.
If you are interested in working with Macros and Word yourself you might also be interested in some software I have mentioned before called Teacher's Pet. This plug in for Word enables you to select from a huge range of pre-recorded Macros. I posted an article on this site some while back that you can access here. There is a code on the page which will get you 10% off the asking price should you wish to use it.
Recent Comments