Imagechef

Make a greeting like this on http://www.imagechef.com/ic/word_mosaic/

Storybird

It is easy for pupils and/or teachers to make storybooks at www.storybird.com . The beautiful artwork will inspire you.
Here are some examples made by MFL teachers

http://mfl-storybirds.wikispaces.com/

European Day of Languages Ideas

If you are thinking of some ideas to celebrate EDL (26 September) here are some I have come across.

Use Wallwisher to creat a message board like this one
http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/EurDayLangs

And here is a list from teachers
http://edl2009ideas.wikispaces.com/

Learn French, Italian and Spanish on Twitter

Starting today a daily twitter lesson with link to minipodcast for pronunciation.

Follow @learnfrench @learnitalian @learnspanish from your twitter account, twitter.com

Minipodcast here for French, Italian, Spanish

Bonnes vacances!

Graduation

Félicitations à toutes et à tous!

Lesley se cache derrière Roselyne et Ann et Lisa ne sont pas là.

Merci à Lynn d'avoir assisté.

Je vous remercie tous pour votre participation enthousiaste pendant 20 semaines.

Je pars demain pour la France. A bientôt

Wednesday

I have booked the Treehouse in the Sandgate for Wednesday at 5.30. I have counted Claire, David, Tracy, Rhona, Lesley, Helen, Vivienne, Ann in along with a few from Module 1, me and Roselyne. I have to confirm numbers that afternoon. Please remind me on Wednesday to do that!

Results

I am pleased to tell you that you have all passed! Marks range from B2 - A
Very well done!

I am planning to return your work on Wednesday 10th June at 4 pm on campus and move on to somewhere for a bar meal - suggestions in comments please!

The Hungry Caterpillar

I put Tracy's powerpoint into My Teaching files Shared Work folder.
Sparklebox now has hungry caterpillar word cards. I have advised them on some spelling and gender mistakes which they have now updated. Find them here.

Lisa's powerpoint on sports is also in Shared folder too. If anyone else wants to email me their resources I'll give them a proof read and upload. Sharing is caring!

Public holiday Monday

For those of you still to hand in lesson plans please note that the campus will be closed on Monday. I will be in on Tuesday afternoon.

Joyeux premier mai

I tried to send you (or those of you whose email I had note of at home) a virtual card. Generally they don't work in school which is a shame as the pupils could have fun designing one. Even the instructions in French wold be challenging.
I used this site
http://www.moncoindejardin.ca/cartesmai2.htm

Here's another http://www.choco-club.com/cartes/premiermai.htm

Remember I add all my finds to delicious. Today I revisited DLT kids and found a super domino maker amongst lots of other goodies like French calendars.

Micro Teaching

I really enjoyed all your great ideas in your teaching today.  Well done!
I will post Lisa's and Tracy's powerpoints to Shared folder. 

Micro Teaching

Lisa, we didn't try your powerpoint. Can you email me it? kmcmeekin@mac.com

We will try and start promptly at 4pm. Keep calm! I should have said the passmark  is 40% and you don't have to pass each bit. Cumulative marks must reach 40%

Micro Teaching Success Criteria

I think I gave you this already but here's a reminder anyway!

Task: teach a few words/phrases, give lots of practise, decode words cards, pupils use new language in an activity.

Success criteria:
use a good amount of French in interactions
confident use of French, good pronunciation, accurate grammar
task explained in simple terms accompanied by gestures and demonstration,
good interaction with class
words spelt correctly on word cards / worksheet
attractive resources, colourful, big enough to be seen, unambiguous

Checklist:
o learning intentions
o explain the task in simple terms
o with gestures and demonstration
o check comprehension
o gender help
o use praise
o give feedback, correct poor pronunciation
o brisk pace, variation
o “realistic” context
o not too much repetition rather use guessing games
o attractive flashcards or other props
o worksheets, if any, attractively word processed and accurate
o when showing word cards, be sure to discuss pronunciation, make connections to words they know with similar spelling and links to English, (this done in English)
o skills: how will we remember what this means (this done in English)
o interaction with class – use of mini whiteboards or other props, cue cards,
o pupils engaged perhaps in paired speaking or acting as teacher
o at end some AiFL feedback

Sparkle Box templates

Download the Word templates on this page It is the file sb873

To get more pages you can duplicate or new page or even insert a page break. These are the options on mac Word, on PC they may well be different.

If the text box doesn't reappear, try copying it or insert a text box. Better to copy - that way you get the same font and size and formatting. I admit it was a bit of a fiddle to get it to work.

To get them smaller I ask it to print and then change the layout to 4 or 9  or 16 pages per sheet.

I'll upload the ones I have done to my teaching files!

Poisson d'avril!

Poisson d'Avril

View more presentations from Alice Ayel.

Audio files

I have started to upload old audio files to Podomatic. So far I've done the French sound system that I have mentioned before from my French Early Years Course, 2002. Listen here There is a six second pause before I get going!

online

online tools to make exercises

millionaire

classtools

jeopardy

multiple choice quiz

penalty shoot out

blockbusters

quizlet vocab

tools for educators - bingo, dominoes

quia.com/web need to set up a free trial 30 day

quia exercises and others 

Beauvais photos

Have put up the photos of the shops and market here. Feel free to download.

Pâques - Easter

Here are some Easter things here in case you need it soon.

Joyeuses Pâques - Happy Easter!

Nice wee poem- Cétait Pâques

Song le petit lapin de Pâques

En allant chercher mon pain

Make a bunny card here

Today is cancelled

Sorry folks. I've cancelled today because I sprained my ankle last might. It is something that happens from time to time - I have a very unstable left ankle. I couldn't face the trail across the car park and the corridors. (Thursday at St John's will be fine)

I have tried to contact everybody by phoning the schools I could remember and asked Roselyne to do the others. Hope you all got the message in time. Will post some work soon.

Beauvais report

Nous avons passé une journée très agréable hier à Beauvais. Tout s'est passé comme prévu. Il a fait beau. L'avion était à l'heure et les taxis sont arrivés. On a très bien mangé. On a bien rigolé!
Voici quelques photos qui donnent une impression de la journée.

Comic Relief

Former colleague Mark Pentleton who runs the very successful languages podcasts Radio Lingua Network has produced a tongue in cheek course in Scottish for Comic Relief. For £3 donation all of which goes to Comic Relief you can download 3 lessons, plus you get a 25% discount off your next purchase.

Full details here

CD ROM

Was thinking about you not being allowed flashdrives. What about CD ROMs?  Are you allowed to copy files from them? If so I could put  Grammar Ninja and Countdown and sound files onto CD-ROMsComments!

quia exercises

food

dinner

what's for  lunch?

Beauvais arrangements

Check in online, print off both boarding passes.

Get to airport by 6 am and make your way through security. We'll find each other in the departure lounge.

I have booked taxis to wait for us. From past experience taxis are few and far between.

Bring your cameras. What about bringing a wee puppet to pose in photos for class use? 

Got Helen's text message!

Here is meteo France link

Can you find Beauvais in Picardy region, Oise departement?

Croisons les doigts pour le beau temps!

mardi dix mars la nourriture

Pour commencer une vidéo sur des magasins de la rue Cadet à Paris  pour de l'ambiance!

et une vidéo du BBC marché en Guadeloupe 

Ressources:

des images ici sur ESL-kids

et aussi sur ce site français les coccinelles

les courses à faire by Orchard Toys  @ £7 - bon marché!

menu from the zinc bleu à Beauvais

We played a Countdown flash game on the whiteboard. It can be downloaded from my teaching files>shared work. ! Lots of opportunities for using numbers and alphabet.

This was a TV game in France called des chiffres et des lettres before it came to Channel 4!

Aim to make the longest French word from the 9 letters

Lettres: une consonne, une voyelle 

Aim to get the target, using the numbers. Can only use a number once. Don;t have to use all the numbers

Chiffres: un grand et cinq petits et la cible (target) est 

fois x, plus +, moins - , divisé par /

Beauvais photos from last year

Eating out

We'll learn about food this week

Have a look at the BBC ma France videos on eating out

Grammar Ninja

We spent the final 15 minutes on a flash game Grammar Ninja on the whiteboard.  You can play online in English (Knowledge about language, L1)  

You can download it and make up your own sentences. 

You have to identify parts of speech. Beginner level seems to be nouns and verbs only.

Skilled includes articles and adjectives, including possessive adjectives

Master has also adverbs, prepositions, pronouns including personal pronouns, conjunctions and interjections.

I disagree with some of the original labelling. It is advisable to make up your own sentences!

Talk Time Cards

We had lots of fun exploring the possible uses for our new low tech tools, Talktime postcards from TTS.

These are postcard size recordable modules. On one side there is a red record button. You need to hold it down while recording and you get 10 seconds.  On the other side there is the play button. There is a flimsy stick-on pouch to slip in a drawing, picture or photo. We preferred not to use the pouches.  If you click the record button by accident you delete the previous recording but it is easy to record again. Sound quality is not wonderful but adequate.

1 First idea - matching sound to picture, pupils record one card each

I gave all the class of 11 teachers a French flashcard (newly bought in Tesco's sale for £1.25, rather nice, have word on one side and picture and words on the other) and a talktime card. I said aloud the words for each card and they repeated while recording, one at a time.  Then we laid out the flashcards on a table and they swapped the talktime cards about. In turn each played their sound and found the matching card. Then go on to 

2 concentration game with all the cards on the table and find a matching pair

3 blutacked to wall as a talking flashcard resource

4 to support any written text especially when working independently. 

They cost about £3 each depending on how many you order. No way of replacing the battery so don;t know how long they would last.

TTS also has A4 sized ones and smaller ones.

I also ordered the recording button which could be used with a display or to give intructions. You can record 10 seconds and it has a replaceable battery.

We are looking forward to exploring more possibilities! There was a real buzz about when we were using them . I am sure the pupils will love using them especially when they get to record themselves.

Writing about a celebrity

Keep it simple. The idea is that pupils should be able to do this.

Accents online french.typeit.org

Third person singular (he/she)

il/elle s'appelle

il est grand /elle est grande

il/elle a 30 ans

il/ elle a 2 enfants

il/elle travaille comme

il/ elle aime

il/elle joue

il/ elle habite

son mari her husband

sa femme his wife

ses enfants his/her children

Third person plural (they)

ils s'appellent

ils sont mariés

ils ont 2 enfants

ils habitent

ils aiment

leur maison their house

leurs enfants their children

David Beckham est un footballeur anglais. Il joue pour l'équipe américaine LA Galaxy et il habite aux Etats Unis. Actuellement il joue pour l'AC Milan pour deux mois prêté par le LA Galaxy. Son anniversaire est le deux mai et il a trente-trois ans. Il a les cheveux blonds et les yeux noisette. Il mesure 1.83 m. Il est marié avec Victoria depuis presque dix ans et ils ont trois fils qui s'appellent Brooklyn, Romeo et Cruz. Sa femme est chanteuse. Les Beckham sont très célèbres et riches.

Claire's piece
George est un acteur américain. Il a des maisons en Italie est aux Etats Unis. Il a quarante-sept ans et son anniversaire est le six mai. Il est né à Kentucky aux Etats Unis. Il a une sœur. C’est le fils de Nick Clooney, un célèbre présentateur de télé. Il est devenu célèbre grâce à son rôle du docteur Doug Ross dans la série Urgences puis par une carrière au cinéma. George Clooney est "l'homme vivant le plus sexy". Il est grand et il a les cheveux bruns et gris, les yeux marron et il est très beau.
George a joué dans les films ‘Trois Rois’, Océans 11, 12 et 13 et Burn after Reading. En 2005 il a gagné un Oscar pour le meilleur acteur dans un second rôle dans ‘Syriana’.

24 février - mardi gras, songs

Quelle horreur - pas de courant!

Was surprised to find the car park almost empty. Reason: no power due to generator failing (the candle went out?) and building closed sice 11am - nice of them to let me know. As I was leaving thought to phone Roselyne and we were able to use St John's. Sorry I just missed Lesley. Tried to find you but you had escaped on foot, I believe! St John's was fine but no scones!

We were a bit embarrassed to sing within hearing of other staff but we soon drove them away!

I did Dans mon pays d'Espagne and have uploaded text and pictures files to Shared folder. Working on the audio file!

Rhona had investigated the karaoke site with help of her 10 year old son! He liked ma révolution, roc and caravane.

Lynda went for 10 petites fleurs

listen for pronunciation of six and dix before consonant

Tracy went traditional with sur le pont d'Avignon. There is a nice version on the Early Learning Centre CD French fun £5 in store.

Helen and Vivien chose songs from a pack called Singing French

I liked them a lot!

Ann has prepared a dance which we will do next week!

Homework: write some simple sentences in the third person about a famous person. I will post some examples soon.

Il y a un verre de vin qui m'attend! A plus

CPD for your colleagues

Roselyne has asked me to do further CPD for South Ayrshire. There will be 4 free standing sessions on Thursday in March in St John's at 4- 6pm

5th ICT for ML teachers

12th blogging - the why and the how

19th active learning

26th French pronunciation

They are on the online CPD. No charge.

Pass the word!

mardi dix février

We read our love poems. We played the question game from R Tallaron.  We practised team game language and played fisherman's net (H/O p7) and listen and do number colour team game. En rouge, écrivez le numéro dix etc. Easy to mark! 

We then did some dictionary work looking up English words and talked about the skills needed. KAL -  is it a noun or verb? eg water (plants) What does it really mean? eg love-15 Read all the dictionary entries. Check by cross referencing in French - English 

Here's the link to the millionaire game. You can edit it or start from scratch.

Homework for 2 weeks' time:

Choose a song and teach us it. Suggestions here on my songs site 

and notes on possible strategies in this post 

Remember to post your love poems!

Bonnes vacances!

Get a Stopwatch like this or make your own! At: Online Stopwatch

la Chandeleur

information on Candlemas and a nice illustrated recipe for crêpes here

and in English from Alice Ayel's blog

la Saint Valentin

Poème d'amour
Le quatorze février, c est la Saint Valentin, la fête des amoureux. Pour fêter ce jour on va composer des poèmes d'amour selon cette rubrique - 

Sans toi, je suis un jardin sans fleurs

Sans toi, je suis un lac sans eau

sans = without and it can be followed by a noun with no article eg sans fleurs

you could put comme = like after je suis but I think it sounds better without!

A vous maintenant - postez vos vers en cliquant sur Comments

plus d'infos sur cette fête ici

Joyeuse Saint Valentin - Happy Valentine's Day

Je t'aime - I love you

mardi trois février

We started with traditional song lundi matin

Olivia did the register. Helen can you do next week? Merci à vous

We played Claire and David 's ingenious board game!

I prepared a handout on activities for MLPS and we worked our way through that. This is a work in progress and you can add to the lists roughly divided into Listening and Talking, Reading and Writing. In practice most activities cover at least 2 of the skills.

I also suggested the site journal des enfants and looked at the article on the Obama children
Here is their article on the recent plane crash into the Hudson river
All of these web pages are real, interesting, relevant and not contrived or condescending. They are of course challenging and pupils are not expected to understand everything but gain satisfaction from what they can decipher. I think of it as a puzzle and like detective work.

A site to help you read foreign language pages is lingro. First you copy the url of the web page and then launch lingro, paste it in and select French- English.

Click on any word you don't know and a dictionary pops up with suggestions. Brilliant! Here is what the lion page from africanimo looks like in lingro

Another site I like but we couldn't get into is mon jt quotidien meaning my daily newsreel (jt- journal télévisé). This is a bit like newsround with several short video clips changed every weekday. This is a listening only exercise so is harder - good for you though! There are often quirky stories under the tab insolite
Here are a couple of interesting ones
the parrot
the car that crashed into a church roof

Vokis: If you have emailed me a voki it as not arrived ( I suspect it has been automatically deleted as spam). Can you try resending to my home email kmcmeekin@me.com?

I have uploaded the walking dictation and the chain questions to My Teaching Files in a folder called Shared Work. Some other stuff too in appleworks (mac) only at the moment till I get around to converting it.

Wordle at the last moment we had a quick look at wordle.net (Your browser needs to have Java enabled) You can easily create attractive word displays by simply typing words or pasting in a large amount of text. The most frequently used words appear larger - a bit like a tag cloud. You can play about with the layout and colour scheme. It is free, you don't need to log in. You can save your work to the public gallery. Give it a memorable and unusual title so you can search for it again or you can print it (don't have a black background!) or save as pdf

Here are some examples

another way to say good
to illustrate the "ent" sound

I gave out a sheet on organising team games at the very end. There is a sound file in My teaching files Modules> Audio>jeuxdequipe.mp3 to accompany this if you would like to hear the pronunciation by Laure.
Homework - practise these commands and be prepared to use them next week.
Have a play about in wordle if you want and think of ways you and your pupils could use this. Print your best effort!

A la semaine prochaine!

Ryanair latest offer!

Had another look at Ryanair and there is another offer on the return flight on 14 March! £2.50!

mardi 27 janvier - deuxième partie

Apologies to Claire. David was at pains to say the game  was  a joint effort. Also to Tracy who showed us her sterling money activities from last year. Good to see you rethinking previously used activities.

Reminder: if you have anything digital to share please email it to me . I'll make any corrections to French so don't worry about that and upload to my teaching files

(pw valley) so that you can all download

Re writing - a few  grammar points

How to express you have been doing something for a spell of time. English would be something like …
I've been married for 10 years
I've lived in Ayr since 1982
I've been teaching for 5 years
If in English it is "have been … or have done … for a length of time or since with a date" then the construction in French is the Present tense of the verb not past tense as in English and preposition depuis
je suis marié(e) depuis dix ans
j'habite à Ayr depuis 1982
j'enseigne depuis 5 ans

Possessive adjectives my, your etc - there are notes in your booklet for this.
Remember the key is that they are adjectives and agree with the following noun
so mon mari my husband - it the husband that is masculine and son père does double duty for his or her father depending on what went before

use of c'est for he is / she is  ce sont  they are used if followed by a noun or adj + noun

cf il est grand he is tall

c'est un grand homme he's a tall man

ce sont des jumeaux they are twins

VOKI

www.voki.com

Well done to Lesley whose perseverance was successful:-


Get a Voki now!


If you want to try this out -
Create an account (free)
You need an active email to confirm account.
Create.
Give your character a voice - text to speech. Choose language French and a suitable voice. Try different voices.
Beware of typing names - the French voice simulator will have trouble eg to get it to read Kay I typed quai. Probably best to avoid names. Also it will only accept about 3-4 sentences. If words running too fast try an extra space between words. or try a different voice.
If you know how to record your voice on to the computer you could try that. It will let you record longer maybe 60 seconds.
You should also see if it is going to work in school websense etc.
"Publish" when finished "Send to a friend" ie email it to me
Try it out in school - firewall may not like it. Ask for site to be unblocked if ot doesn't work. They are used in schools a lot!

READING
Meant to show you another site. This is a French news website for children. Could be good for similar exercise - pupils will have an idea of what the news story is about, hopefully! For example here is the story about the plane landing in the Hudson river

mardi 27 janvier

Tracy a fait l'appel aujourd'hui. Olivia est-ce que tu pourras le faire la semaine prochaine?

On a corrigé les devoirs puis David nous a montré son jeu. On s'impatiente à y jouer la semaine prochaine. 

J'ai trouvé un site super childtopia avec les mêmes pages en anglais et en français (ainsi qu' en espagnol)

Go to maths> buying and selling for money counting in euros then change language to French.

Quote from HMIe Jane Renton  "Today w're going to do something fun We're going to something really difficult." A good point indeed - the satisfaction got from succeeding at something challenging.

We looked at some real French web pages to see how much we could work out. The idea is from a friend who is Faculty Head at Tobermory High School. This is her blog post

We started on the lion page. We discussed the sort of things we would expect to find on a factfile about wild animals. If we had been in the room with the IWB would have highlighted known words and words that looked like English words on the IWB with suggestions from class. Instead they worked on the paper page. A fair proportion of the page was highlighted. Then we worked out the text with some judicious questions.  A lot would depend on the pupils' level of English vocabulary (eg longevity) and general knowledge but this would be an excellent Literacy across the curriculum exercise. Perhaps differentiated tasks could be assigned different abilities. Then I gave a different animal page to groups of 2 with the task of finding 10 facts.

Other points: there will be words that an average French person would not know, there was a word I did not know on the lion page le garrot = withers! Not a word that crops up often in conversation. 

Will post about the voki later. Dog is demanding my attention!

personal writing

Personal writing homework. Try and base your writing on what you know or have seen.
Type your submission in comments. Keep it simple!
If you have trouble doing accents, copy and paste these!
é è ê à

The Simpsons write about themselves here. Use these as an example! Think we may have done them before.

Here is a bit about me
Je m’appelle Kay McMeekin. J’ai cinquante-huit ans et je suis mariée avec David depuis 22 ans. Nous avons deux enfants - une fille qui s’appelle Laura et qui a 21 ans et un fils David qui a 20 ans. Mon mari est prof de langues à la retraite. Nos enfants sont tous les deux à la fac à Glasgow. Laura étudie l’archéologie et David étudie le génie civil. J’habite à Darvel qui se trouve à 35 km de Glasgow. Je vis avec mon mari et notre chien qui s’appelle Holly. Nos enfants vivent à Glasgow dans des appartements loués. Ils nous rendent visite de temps en temps. C’est tout pour le moment!

Listen to Laure! Ill show you how to do this next week.

Beauvais 14 March

Alors, c'est fait! Je viens de réserver ma place!
Bizarrely the handling charge was £9.50 and it was £10 on Saturday, so it actually cost £29.50

Beauvais day trip

OK

I went to book for 14th March @£20 to discover, as I think Ann was saying in class, that it actually costs £30 with £5 handling charge per person per flight. This is not sounding so cheap at all! 

Shall we hang fire and see if the next offer is better or do think £30 is OK?

Beauvais day trip UPDATE

Tracy and I have been doing some research on Ryanair. All Saturdays in April, May are dear. But at the moment Saturday 7 March is £11 return!! BOOKING PERIOD FOR THIS FARE ENDS THIS SUNDAY 18 JAN. 

The other March Saturdays are £20. This is the same time we went last year and it was fine.
What do you think? Reply in comments below!

When booking make sure you get no bags and priority boarding then you can check in online so you don't need to be at the airport too early!

Last year's visit

YIKES went to book 7 March and price has changed!  14 March is still £20. Again will need to book by Sunday.  Comments please!!

Nasal Vowels Games

Created this in minutes at classtools.net - dustbin template

Click here for full screen version

these one in quia.com
French nasal homonyms - Java game

Match the vowel sound - columns

and this one in quizlet.com

homonyms

Another dustbin game

Click here for full screen version

euros

If anyone can bring some euro coins along tomorrow we can use them to liven up an activity!!

la fête des Rois

La fête des rois, the feast of the Kings is celebrated in French homes throughout January. There is an excellent post about it here

Pictures of the cake here

le roi - the king

la reine - the queen

la galette - the cake

la fève - the bean

la couronne - the crown

Chanson

J'aime la galette

Savez-vous comment?

Quand elle est bien faite

Avec du beurre dedans

Tra la la la la la lère etc

I love the kings' cake

Do you know why?

When it is wll made

with butter inside

tra la etc