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
I'm writing this post as a follow up to the previous post about Eric Whitacre's virtual choir. In that, I said that I have borrowed the concept behind all collective singing and am learning to apply it to language learning, that successful blending of many voices into one sound is incredibly powerful and emotionally rich.
This is my first attempt to try and explain what I mean.
First, and at the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, our voices are designed to help us 'connect'. It might be obvious but sometimes what is so obvious can be hidden from us because it is right under our noses.
If our voice is the greatest tool we have to enable us to connect with others and we as language teachers are all about helping cultural strangers connect with each other by finding a new 'voice', a new tongue / langue, then why don't we explore how the use of a 'collective' grouping of disparate voices in the classroom into one voice can empower language learning?
In the UK, the pressure to measure every child's progress against a set of markers whilst laudible in intention, has had a very negative impact on a key aspect of learning: It edifies the 'individual' at the expense of 'community'.
Fine, we all have to stand or fall eventually based on the sum of our personal efforts. But the most effective vehicle for achieving the highest degree of personal growth is to be part of a supportive community. If this wasn't true there would be absolutely no need for schools in the first place.
Learning works best in the classroom if it is a collaborative, supportive, encouraging 'group' experience. That is where powerful learning takes place. We need each other. We function best in communities. We seek them out. We thrive on recognition from others, we understand who we truly are when we understand what value we bring to those who surround us. If education is about anything, it is about helping children to understand where their true value lies in relation to the people in their world, given their unique set of skills and abilities.
Since I have begun to adopt the Call / Response singing techniques I picked up from Sing Up training I have noticed a powerful enhancement of this collaborative atmosphere in my lessons. A couple of examples of exercises I do in my first lessons with new classes might illustrate this.
My first job as language teacher is not to teach children to speak but how to listen. Without that they will never make real progress. Adusting your voice to mimic what you hear from a model is fundemental to successful language learning. Fortunately this is absolutely true of singing as well.
So whilst my first lesson involves a lot of speaking, its actual focus is on how to listen. I begin with French vowel sounds. I show children pictures of Maori warriors and the New Zealand Rugby team and find out what they know about the Haka. We tease out why they do this, and the concept of sounding powerful as one eventually emerge as they prepare for 'battle'. (By the way, if you want boys instantly on your side, try all of this!)
I show them a video clip from Youtube of the New Zealand team doing their Haka and the Tongan rugby team responding with their own chant. We look at the role of the 'captain' calling, why the team respond as one voice and why that is so powerful. What are they trying to achieve?
I then set them a challenge: during this first lesson, all they they have to prove to me that as a class they can respond as one voice and one group action to what ever I say and do as the 'captain'. Can they do this?
To demonstrate this immediately I teach them 4 praise phrases we will learn regularly to say as a group chant to anyone who does something well.
Fantastique / Super / Excellent / Génial.
I teach the first 3 to begin with explaining that they are the same as English words but pronounced differently (cognates are a great way to teach phonics btw) and their task is to copy the word and the 3 part action I do to that word BUT they have to do this is one voice. After a couple of goes very quickly they get the idea.
Usually on 'excellent' I hear someone adding the 't'. Without picking anyone out, I explain that I heard something wrong at the end of the word, we do it again and ask them to identify what the difference is between the English and French way of saying it. The point is that they have to 'hear' it as a group and are corrected as a group.
We then do the French Haka. They have to face me as their captain, half crouching, knees bent, hands on knees and looking fierce. I say the French vowel sounds in turn with a separate action for each: 'a' both hands pushed out in front, 'e' both hands pulled back into chest, 'i' both one hand moves up, the other down to define an 'i' shape, 'o' hands to the side with index finger of each hand drawing an 'o' circle in the air, 'u' the same index finger drawing a 'u' shape in the air.
You can pick out the French 'u' versus 'oo' sound at this point. One tip to teach this: get them to notice what they do with their jaw when saying the 'oo' sound (jaw drops down and forward) versus the 'u' sound (jaw is pulled back)
They then add consonants of their choosing and we re-do the Haka. I explain that there are 2 rude consonants that I hope they don't find so as not to embarrass me with predictable results and eventually 'p' and 'w' are added to the mix!
The point is that right from the word go, the children are learning this 'call-response' technique.
They are having to listen intently to copy me.
They are having to be aware of rhythm, timing and each other to speak with one voice.
They are learning that making these new sounds is comfortable as they can try them out as part of a group; this one voice that allows them the security of trying things out without making a fool of themselves. This is FUNDEMENTAL. If I have one regret in my years in secondary teaching is that I sprung far too early to requiring individuals to speak out loud on their own in front of a class. They should be able to practice everything as a group or in pairs before being required to produce on their own.
We then move onto a very simple group song on greetings which we sing unaccompanied. I use my hands to do pitch change gestures as I sing, they respond, again as one voice, and often copy my pitch gestures too.
When I ask them to tell me what some of the words mean in that song (bonjour, comment ça va etc) anyone who answers correctly selects one of the 4 praise phrases we have done. I say the phrase + 3 part action followed by the pupil's name + do a 3 part 'shimmy' to their name eg: Calvin would become
Everyone repeats the praise phrase and does the shimmy. This is a regular feature of early lessons. I vary it by eventually asking for volunteers to come to the front and lead the whole class in praising someone using a 3 part shimmy of their own invention. Often these are hilarious! Imagine what the child who leads the class feels like as they do this. Imagine what the child on the receiving end of the whole class saying well done in French feels like. This is very, very powerful and we do it in the first lesson.
Class chanting or singing to fantastic music builds a positive, supportive, collaborative community. Learn how to do it effectively and very quickly you will establish the kind of atmosphere conducive to real learning that previously it might have taken me a whole term or longer to achieve with all the attendant emotional wear and tear involved. Seriously colleagues, I believe these techniques can mean the difference between burning yourself out and being a relatively effortless but powerful teacher.
It has been the biggest accelerator to success in my own experience that I have ever encountered. What's more it is FUN! Enjoy.
(Please send a link to this article if it has helped you. If you would like me to come to your school or area in the UK to demonstrate these techniques, please leave your name, school and a contact email on this blog. It won't be published for anyone else to see as I have to allow publication of all comments.)
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
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!
It was really good to meet so many new colleagues up in Oldham on Friday. I hope that you learnt something that will encourage you to integrate music and rhythm into your all your lessons but especially your language lessons.
I have included all the main weblinks that I think could be useful for you. Much of the music is copyright so I can only point you to where you can download the material from.
Some of the material I have composed myself is on offer for free on this website. Other material is due to be launched on the www.souffler.co.uk website soon. If you sign up there I will notify you when that site is up and running. This will include material such as the phonic songs I demonstrated.
Here are links to some of the resources to download direct from here
Anyone who inadvertently lands upon this blog as they wander the net will know that I have been banging on about language teachers and singing. I have mentioned that every UK language teacher ought to sign up for a FREE account with the Sing Up website. I thought I would put up today's post to convince anyone who hasn't yet done so.
4 times a year, Sing Up send out a really useful magazine to subscribers, one of whose features is an accompanying CD with a selection of the music freely available to download from their website.
In the Summer 2010 issue, there was this useful article about how to adapt some of this material for your own use. you could apply this to all the other posts I have put up about building a bank of your favourite backing tracks to support your teaching. For example in the current winter issue there is a full arrangement of Queen's "We are the the Champions". You get the backing track of this for free.
The CD with the 2010 Summer issue included a beautiful 3 part African lullaby called Souallé. I took the 3 part melody, used the free musical backing track and put French lyrics to the tune to create a 3 part French Christmas Carol, "Dors,dors,dors petit fils"
With apologies for the recording quality and my own less than perfect vocals, here is what the vocal track sounds like in French
If you think teaching this yourself might be too much of a challenge, why not pass it over to a music teacher and see if they couldn't use it?
Alternatively try and just use two parts, the main melody and the middle melody.
Let me know if you use this in school. You can send me links to audio/video recordings of any performances in the comments boxes as I moderate all comments and will not publish any links unless expressly asked to do so.
In the last few weeks I seem to have been on creative overdrive. I have been running a Singing and MFL project in a Derbyshire Primary school, working with all yr 3/4/5/6 groups over a 4 week period. With their class teacher, TAs and their French teacher present in the lessons we have been looking at how the use of rhythm and song can become far more integrated into lessons and support learning.
In addition to that, I have just started a new PPA position in a Derby school where I definitely feel I have stepped into a foreign culture as 95% of the pupils are from non-English speaking backgrounds. I have been trying out some of these singing and rhythmic ideas here as well.
The whole experience has honestly been some of the best teaching, with the most fun and greatest positive response I have had in my career. It reinforces my opinion that if language teachers could become more confident leading singing in their lessons, understanding how to do it, what music to use, how to make use of backing tracks to support pupils' learning of new vocabulary and structures, it would be a significant boost in colleagues' own levels of enjoyment whilst also boosting pupil performance and motivation.
I am going to share a couple of tracks that I use to illustrate my point. My overiding reason for doing this work is that a child's first exposure to learning a language should be about fun, about picking up the 'sound' of the language above and, in my opinion, beyond a mere acquistion of vocab. Good pronunciation, a willingness and confidence to 'have go', the creation of a safe environment to do so, are all critical in this first phase of language acquisition. All of this is easily achieved by using music to support learning a language.
There a lot of things I have learnt as I have worked with the national Sing Up campaign in this process.
I have learnt that singing lesson starters are a great way to focus the children, to get them following your lead, to get them cooperating and acting with one voice in response to your lead.
I have learnt how to teach a song properly, breaking it down into manageable chunks. I have learnt what kind of material appeals to children and have been inspired to make use of some material others have produced as well as writing quite a bit of my own.
I have learnt how to source backing tracks from websites that I can, with a bit of work, add lyrics to in order to teach a topic. All of this requires some time and application to learn and apply but the rewards in terms of pupil response are so much fun and rewarding that I heartily recommend it to all language teaching colleagues.
I have learnt how, by using simple audio editing software, Audacity or my own favourite, NCH's Wavepad software, you can clip extracts of favourite tunes, change their pitch, slow them down, speed them up, gradually building your own library of music that you know pupils will feel inspired and lifted by. Muisc and rhythm turn what can be a difficult, boring, repetitive, intellectually challenging process, into one that sparkles and engages.
With colleagues in the Secondary school sector in particular, increasingly pressurised to produce results and justify their place on the curriculum, there is a danger that MFL lessons become a bit too serious. Inject music and rhythm into the diet and the whole atmosphere of what you are doing lifts. I believe what the pupils learn is also achieved more quickly and with greater good will in their part.
At the primary level, I know that the same techniques can be applied to any curriculum area, not simply in language lessons. Most primary teachers are aware of the power of a good song in helping to deliver content, they are perhaps less confident in applying this in another language. Learning to do so will not only help their pupils, it will also allow them the time and space to practise good pronunciation along with their classes as they master the songs.
Here are a couple of websites I use with a couple of tracks that I know work. I can't offer them for download as I would be breaking copyright but you can buy them very cheaply yourselves.
1) I use a site called Audionetwork. They are a production music library whose composers sell their tracks to film and TV companies. You will recognise some of their tunes from programs particularly on Channel 4. The musical content is therefore of a very high order. Thecost of the licence you purchase with each track is proprtionate to the use you will make of it. The Educational licence per track is £.85p. Choose tracks with a strong rhythmic element.
This rap track is called Mischief and pupils love practising dialogues to this tune. It has a slight Eminem feel to it. If you are not very good at singing and want a track to 'speak' to rhythmically, I recommend it.
This track is some boogie woogie piano I picked up from somewhere whose origins escape me. However you can easily pick up something similar on ITunes or from Amazon mp3. Tracks you download can be adjusted using the audio editing software mentioned above until you have something at a speed you feel comfortable using. I use this as a warm up track to practise parts of the body or do Call and Response work with vocab we have been covering (eg: Quel age as-tu? J'ai 8 ans etc) It is difficult for anyone who might feel miserable at the beginning of your lesson (including you!) to feel miserable after a couple of minutes of a track like this!
2) Another site that I collect backing tracks from is karaoke-version.com. This site gives you performance and backing tracks for a vast array of golden oldies to current hit songs. If you click on the country flag at the bottom you can also find a selection of current French, German, Spanish songs.
I have clipped well known tunes from this site and added my own lyrics. Here is an example where I took a section of a track by the Killers called "All these things I have done". This is the original section
I downloaded the Karaoke version, clipped the section I wanted to use in Wavepad, and imported the mp3 into Mac Garageband to add the new lyrics.
For many this last step may be further than you feel able to go. If so, simply use the backing track and hand the rest of the process over to the pupils, get them to write suitable lyrics and see if you can't link up with the Music Department to get the reworked song recorded.
I hope this has given you a taster of what is possible. I am not a professional musician or singer and could never be either. But anyone can develop these skills sufficiently to enable you to add this to your repertoire of elements that will help create language lessons that engage and inspire.
On another post I will share some of the other work covered in the primary project where we have been putting simple vocab to well known tunes, using a song I wrote to teach the 'ch' phoneme to children with 1 year of French, using 4 different styles of tunes from Audionetwork as a basis for singing 4 different versions of the same lyrics on the the topic of 'House' and the same 4 tunes to teach 4 different versions of the same lyrics for the topic of "Town'.
Both 'house' and 'town' are topics that usually leave me feeling somewhat uninspired. These 4 tunes have proved to be a great way of repeating core vocab whilst also adding a bit more colloquial colour to the lyrics.
This is a rap taken from a French mini-musical written for Sing Up. I'm just posting it as an example of the kind of call-response rap that is quite easy for pupils to compose for themselves.
Anticipate a bit of language to include that demonstrates a bit of 'street' attitude. I know my own pupils have really enjoyed singing this particular rap.
I have been absent from my postings for quite a while as I have been very busy with a Sing Up funded project here in Derbyshire. The aim has been to foster links between the MFL department and pupils at the Secondary School with all their feeder primaries.
All the Primary Staff were invited to a central MFL singing training at the secondary school. I have then been to do primary school assemblies, have demonstrated how to exploit rhythm and song as an integral part of teaching any language point in primary lessons for yrs 5 / 6, and the yr 7 pupil are now visiting the schools to teach yrs 5/6 some of the songs they will be singing as they move on to secondary school.
This has to be the most fun thing I have ever done as a teacher! If you haven't discovered yet as an Mfl teacher how useful leading whole classes, whole year groups, whole schools, in unison chanting / singing can be, find out how to do it! I truly believe there aspects to this which should be part of every teacher's bag of tricks.
The response from colleagues, especially from the primary sector, was initially pretty sceptical. As non specialist language teachers, they have a lot of concerns about their ability to step into the gap and pick up the requirement to teach languages from September. A big concern has always been lack of subject knowledge combined with the feeling that their pronunciation is poor. I am pasting some comments here from attendees at a training as I felt that they should encourage everyone to think that perhaps these techniques might be the kind of tools to help far more hesitant staff to really believe they can do this.
There is one sample comment plus a zip file containing all of them
Bear in mind attendees at these trainings were reluctant participants as they attended under direction from their Heads as the training replaced a Staff meeting.
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