Thirsk Languages

Voici la presentation d’aujourd’hui:

Here is our very own Lewis with the trophy that he won in the Linguatrivia competition and a link to the article on the Thirsk School website. Bravo Lewis!!! Well done to all those who entered, you are a credit to your school! Read on to see all entrants in the link below:
http://www.thirskschool.org/news/

Good morning year 7. Many of you will be looking at rooms in a house and describing where you live. There are some excellent websites that can help you do this.
1.First of all of course we have www.linguascope.com – you should have our username and password already.
2. There are also a couple of other websites that are useful for practising this vocabulary. Go on www.languagesonline.org.uk (copy & paste the link into a new tab). Click on French/ German at the side and find the relevant sections for rooms in a house (Encore Tricolore 1 unité 3 for French, Mein haus for German)
3. Please also look at http://www.education.vic.gov.au/languagesonline/, click on your language, then look at topic 35 in French or German. This is a great website for making you listen to what has been said.

Hello parents! Hopefully we have answered some of the many questions that you may have had about our forthcoming trip to Strasbourg. There is a copy of the powerpoint used in the meeting below. Please do not hesitate to get in touch if there are any other questions that we can help you with.
Please also watch out for updates and photos live from the trip here on this blog…(you may just get a sneak preview of the mountains of tat/presents that will be heading your way!).

La question: vous voulez voyager à Paris, mais comment est-ce qu’on peut y voyager?
La réponse: Avec un de ces moyens de transport! Il y en a 19. Ecrivez-les en français et puis traduisez en anglais. Bonne chance!

There is a bit of a wave sweeping the MFL department at the moment. We are very keen to find different ways to use our mini whiteboards (MWB). We know that they are excellent for vocab learning and reinforcement but would like to maximise their use. So to this end, I have scouted about on-line and have some ideas. I cannot take credit for some of these ideas as although we are a creative department, we like to reuse ideas too! (Reinventing wheels etc!). Thanks to Amanda Salt for a similar list which gave me a great starting point :0). Teachers and pupils, please feel free to add your own suggestions (via the comments feature at the bottom of this post) as to how you use mini whiteboards in your class. So here goes, 20 ideas ready to use with minimal preparation!
1. Use the MWBs in the starter phase, getting peers to correct & annotate. e.g. revision of clothes with adjectival endings.
2. Teacher v pupil. Agree on a topic to write a sentence about (eg school subject likes & dislikes etc). Both the teacher & the pupil write a sentence and compare afterwards. What were the differences? How can some sentences be made better? Think word order, adding adjectives, adding opinions & connectives.
3. Back to back. Pupils sit back to back and take it in turns to describe a house layout/ clock time etc in the TL. The other pupil listens and draws what is heard.
4. Simple vocab practice – teacher reads out words and pupil has to draw what they hear. Good for reinforcing new vocab.
5. Grammar practice – practise verb conjugations, adjectival endings etc.
6. Sums – great way to practice numbers both in the spoken & written form. Perhaps teacher calls out a sum & pupils write answer in either words or figures. Pupils can also do this for each other or set a list of sums in the TL, needing the answers in the TL of course.
7. Snowball vocab – e.g. write down 2 pets etc learnt last lesson, then pair up & list 4, then in a group and list 8 etc
8. Triptico – use the IWB and the MWBs together. In the triptico program, use the find 10 game and get the pupils to write the odd ones out down on their board.
9. Starter or ending: Give a starter of a sentence or the ending of a sentence and ask the pupils to complete eg. J’aime aller en ville parce que…, …… parce que c’était délicieux.
10. Put sentences on the board that contain an error and pupils have to rewrite the sentence error free.
11. Conveyor belt ppt – show items of vocab on a rolling ppt and when ppt finished, pupils have to list as many as they can in the TL. Then pair & share to see if they can get the whole list.
12. In a longer text, do a ‘find the french’ activity, writing the answers on the MWBs.
13. Write up an answer – what was the question? Pupils write this down on the MWB.
14. Flashcards – teacher hold up a flashcard, pupils have to remember the word & write it down.
15. ‘Chatroom’ – perhaps better with older pupils. Give pupils a theme (eg last weekend) and for 5/10 mins or however long you want this to run for, the pupils can only communicate in the TL via the MWB ie having a silent conversation. Paragraphs must not be long and pupils can interrupt to ask further question (in the TL of course). Perhaps working in groups of 3 will keep the conversation flowing better.
16. Word order practice in German – particularly useful when practising with subordinating conjunctions or learning where to put the past participle in the perfect tense.
17. Draw a sentence eg. when practising prepositions. ‘la lampe est sur la table, le chat est derrière la chaise etc
18. As a very low tech way of all pupils giving answers to a quiz, even if just A,B,C,D etc
19. Practise counting in 2s etc in the TL. Start off with one pupil writing a number, ask pupils to count up or down in 2s or threes and write the next number in the TL. Select a pupil to come and complete the number line at the front.
20. ‘Tell me 10′ give out a topic and see if the pupils can list 10 words. eg. subjects, pets, clothes, rooms in a house, positive opinons, sports, countries, nationalities, items in a pencil case, reflexive verbs in ‘je’, colours, items to take on a holiday, chores in the household, jobs, items you can recycle… the possibilities are endless!

Please feel free to leave me a comment with more ideas :0)

One of the things that I would like to achieve a little more with this blog, is to get more pupil feedback on some of the things that we do in languages. But how do you actually leave a comment to a blogpost and claim a merit for doing so? Easy! When you have read the blogpost, simply click on the comments/no comments words at the bottom of the blogpost where you can fill in a comment. All comments will then come to me and if I approve the comment, you can come and claim a merit for being part of the feedback process. It really is that simple! Go on try it, double dare you! ;0)

A huge congratulations to the team of year 7 French students who took part in the recent Linguatrivia competition run by Linguascope. In March, the following pupils took part in the competition where they had to answer questions on not only their knowledge of the language but also the culture of France – not an easy task! Our team did incredibly well!
It was a tough competition with more than 5300 pupils taking part nationally, including many independent schools. However ALL of our team beat the national average point score, sometimes by as many as 60 points clear of this! So we are very proud of the team for representing Thirsk School so well and they are all worthy winners of a goodie pack & certificate – so well done to the following pupils:
Louise 7JSM, Arthur 7JMC, Will 7MO, Scarlett 7JSM, Ben D 7JSM, Oliver 7JMC, Ben H 7JSM
Harley 7MO, Saffron 7MO, Lewis M 7MO, Lewis P 7MO, and Alex 7JSM

The score of one of these pupils deserves a special mention. Lewis P just missed out on a major prize from the organisers Linguascope but Thirsk School would like to recognize his particular achievement. So our trophy for 2012 goes to Lewis P from 7MO.
Watch out for the news story in the local press soon, as well as on the school website. (Though with nearly 10,000 hits, appearing on the Thirsk Langs blog is surely a prize in itself and guarantee of a worldwide audience!)
Well done to all and we hope to bring the competition to Thirsk School again next year. Leave me a comment ot his post saying what you like about the language competitions we do at Thirsk School and if it is approved, you can come and claim a merit! Easy as pie!

Well, not that long now to go until we set off on our fun filled adventure to France & Germany! Most forms etc should have been handed in by now but there are just a couple of medical forms and EHIC cards outstanding. Please bring them in asap.
Also I have had many hoodie request forms handed in today. The final deadline for all requests and payments is Thurs 26th April. Any forms handed in after this date will not be processed, due to time restrictions needed for printing etc. The children have had fun deciding what to put on the back of their hoodies – Stan (!), Rhino (!!) and Rhubarb (!!!) to name a few. What will yours be? The hoodies will come in a lovely green colour with our tour logo embroidered on the front and of course your name printed on the back.
Don’t forget that the parents meeting for this trip will be on Tuesday 8th May at 6.30pm in A hall. I leave you with a little taste of things to come…

I thought I would kick off the new term with a new challenge! As we are learning about where you live for the first part of this term, I have made a zondle game – Fish nosh – for you to practise your new vocabulary. I have set it to run as a competition which will finish on Tues 24th of April. Anyone from year 7 can enter and all those who do enter can claim 1 merit from me. The winner can claim a small prize. However, if you also leave a comment about what you liked about this game (click on the comments bit at the bottom of this entry) you will also gain an EXTRA merit :0) (hint you can enter as many times as you want).
VERY IMPORTANT INFO: never leave your full name on sites like these, just first name and form should be enough e.g. Bob 7DB. Also if it asks for your email address, just put bob@hotmail.com. You must NOT enter your proper email address as it is not actually needed, all the results and comments (which will be moderated first!) will come to me. Happy fishing!