A LEVEL SPANISH IMMERSION RESIDENTIAL 2012

"Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know it just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers" - Richard Bach

When I started to think about this blogpost, this quote jumped off the (virtual) page at me. The main aim of our 2 day residential is really to inspire our A level Spanish pupils by showing them how much they already know as well as letting them see how they can work round it if they can't think of the word.

As usual, we did a vast number of different activities this year with our group of 25 students. As well as the 3 Spanish teachers, there was our Spanish assistant from last year, Vicent, as well as two past pupils, Rachel and Jonny. We led 45 minute workshops with groups of 8 pupils. Mine featured some thinking skills activities on Eva Perón, thanks to the wonderful John Connor, as well as using the Spanish Talking Photos I found on the MFL Twitterati Spanish Dropbox and a series of plenary topic cards.

Para hablar

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As well as the workshops, we had a series of activities aimed at encouraging the pupils to speak.We had a treasure hunt and teambuilding activities as well as watching a Spanish DVD.
This year's survival activity was to choose the top 5 items if your plane crashed in Canada.

2012 SUPERVIVENCIA

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We awarded spot prizes for the text speak activity:

Txt spk

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By far the highlight of the immersion each year, this year's Dragon's Den style activity was to produce a toy using the resources provided:

2012 inventor español

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This is the group who made a theatre

This group made a rocket

This group pitched an idea for a safari jeep

The winning group went for a car. We felt that their pitch included the most Spanish and that was what pushed the final decision

Other activities that we had planned but didn't have time for included a team building activity

Grupos atados

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as well as a language activity

Mentiroso

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I cannot stress enough the amount of enjoyment I personally get from our immersion residential. The sense of pride in seeing pupils blossom, the realisation that some are struggling and need a little more attention in class from now til study leave, the joy at seeing the change from Lower to Upper 6, no matter what the level, the sheer energy that 25 pupils gathered for a common purpose can bring to a group, and the love of a language that we share. If you are thinking about doing something similar, don't think - do it!

TEACHING LITERATURE

Someone posted a query this evening on the MFL Resources forum about teaching literature at A level. Here are my thoughts, for what they are worth:
I am really interested in this, as our ML dept seems to vary greatly in their approach. I tend to get the pupils to copy chapter notes into the book plus any of their own insight in advance, then spend the double period discussing the chapter in terms of why we have picked things out. I have a workbook of exercises they then do. I also give them a set of mindmap sheets, each with a topic the exam board has listed to cover, and they keep these updated with info as we meet in in the course of the novel, using colours for different types of info eg quotes.

None of this is wildly exciting, but I do do some activities such as Random Name Generator (RNG) where they need to talk or write for a minute about whatever topic/character the RNG throws up. You can also do activities such as cutting up a sheet with a lost of events and then placing said events into chronological order, or where you read a statement and they need to write the character it refers to on a mini whiteboard. With Como Agua Para Chocolate, I get the pupils to take a character each and do a MySpace page in Spanish, writing the blog as if they were the character. You can also do group work where one lies on the floor and others draw a body outline round them, then they write all the pertinent information on the shape for that character, quotes in one colour, adjectives in another, facts/events in another. Finally, tools such as Goanimate and Toondoo are useful for showing storylines and character development

A LEVEL SPANISH IMMERSION WEEKEND

This year, we nearly didn't run our annual A Level Spanish Immersion Weekend, due to various factors, not least a lack of available accommodation and a move to our new school building. However, an unprecedented show of enthusiasm from my beloved Upper Sixth spurred me on, and last Monday and Tuesday saw a group of 24 pupils, 2 staff and 3 past pupils join together to speak Spanish for the 2 day event. Talking in English is punishable by singing in Spanish in front of the group.

As always, the itinerary was built around the series of workshops which the pupils moved around in small groups over the course of the 2 days. This year, we decided to take a different approach to our standard thematic workshops, and each workshop focused on a skill area (listening, speaking, reading, connectives and grammar) I found it much easier to deliver and felt that it allowed for greater differentiation within the groups.

As well as the workshops, pupils watched 2 Spanish DVDs, listened to Spanish songs with activities such as reordering and blank fill, played Spanish board games and competed in teams in a quiz. Their favourite was a Spanish clapping game called Presi Presi, and it was played time and again, to the great enjoyment of all involved.

Another activity which proved very successful was a mix between Dragon's Den and The Apprentice. Pupils worked in the same group as for their workshops, and were given a box each and told to imagine it was any product. They needed to style the box, create a TV advert and a slogan. Pupils worked with enthusisam and creativity for over two hours on this project, and then used the FLIP cameras to record their ads before returning together to view the ads on the data projector.

All in all, the residential seemed to be very successful from a pupil point of view, and all the staff involved left on a real high. A personal moment of pride for me is that the 3 past pupils delivering two of the workshops are only in their second year at uni, and are a constant source of help and support to our department. I thoroughly recommend this immersion experience- once again, it has proved to be one of the highlights of our academic year.

Learning from others

I first heard Chris Fuller talk at Joe Dale's Isle of Wight conference 2008, and he inspired me hugely. His enthusiasm for teaching and passion for Spanish was so much in evidence, and led to me incorporating many of his ideas into my own teaching and department. He has kindly uploaded some of his presentations to Slideshare Here is one on creativity and A level, an area where I personally feel it is too easy to get swept along with the whole exam preparation, and forget about the more interesting approaches to language learning.

Creative post-16 MFL ideas

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WHITEBOARD CHALLENGE TASK 1

Well, classes are well and truely started so I decided it was time to meet the Whiteboard Challenge head-on, and tackle Task 1, which involved using sound on the IWB. This toned in well with recent posts on the forum I belong to, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mflresources/, about recording and the Modern Languages classroom.
I decided to target my new Lower 6 class, for a variety of reasons, not least because I have taught them for so many years now, that if it all went pear-shaped, at least we could have a good laugh about it! Also, it can be hard to use technology efficiently at this level. Here's what I did..

This was only my second lesson with Lower 6 this year, and we had just started with descriptions the previous day. I selected 12 celebrities, and I used the software to record a series of descriptions, both physical and otherwise, about 6 of the celebrities. The pupils had to listen to the descriptions, and select the appropriate person from the list of 12 each time. After we had checked the answers, the pupils then worked in small groups to write descriptions about the remaining 6 celebrities. For homework for next week, pupils have to prepare a presentation about someone they admire. They can either hand this in in written form, or record themselves using their mobiles and save it in LearningNI (virtual learning environment in Northern Ireland).
Now for the technical bit.. and as it is wont to do, the technology played me up a bit when I needed it, in that the internet was so slow, it took me about an hour to view Jess' video about the first task. Howver it was definitely worth it, as I then found it easy to follow her instructions about using Audacity with IWB software. We use Activstudio 3 in school, and it was very straightforward to record my own voice reading the descriptions, using only the inbuilt microphone on my laptop, and then export the mp3 files to the Resource Library in Activstudio.
I thoroughly enjoyed this first foray into the world of voice recording, and starting from these humble beginnings, I look forward to incorporating it much more widely in the future. No more complaints about a lack of vocabulary-specific listenings!