Easy Christmas Shape Poem for Your Language Lessons
Christmas Shape Poetry for French, German and Spanish Lessons Poetry is part of a country’s culture, but poems are not often embedded well or easily into language lessons. I’ll be honest, I don’t enjoy teaching poetry to my language students. I find that it’s tricky for them to understand. I believe they feel disconnected from the poetry they have encountered so far and therefore find reading poems inherently difficult. Particularly since, by their very nature poetry makes meaning by hiding meaning. Okay, so, reading and analysing the language and meanings in poems isn’t for me. However, I don’t see why I can’t use a form of poetry in my French…
21 Must-Use Reading Activities For Your Language Lessons
Fun Pre-Reading and Post-Reading Activities for All Language Classrooms I love language lessons which involve an element of reading. This is because there are so many opportunities for learning and improving language acquisition with topic-related texts. Reading activities are the perfect starting point to learn rich topic-related vocabulary (adjectives, nouns, verbs etc), pick up new grammar structures,ย steal ‘star phrases’ย and ultimately improve comprehension and improve language acquisition skills. According to Moeller & Meyer (1995), reading, even at a slow pace exposes students to more sentences, grammar, and new vocabulary per minute than the average short class, TV show, or song. So, if you are in a rut with how you present…
Fun Games for The MFL Classroom
Fun Language Games for The MFL Classroom To Engage Learners Games are defined as ‘activities that one engages in for amusement or fun’. Nowadays, when learners think of language lessons, they don’t usually synonymy them with the expression fun. So, why not change their thinking? You can do this, fairly simply, by including some low-prep, fun language games for the MFL classroom into your teaching repertoire. Josh Beattie, Assistant Director at the Department for Education stated in 2018 that not enough pupils are taking languages, because “they either consider them boring, dislike their teachers or think they are too difficult.”ย Although I definitely don’t think that teachers have to have…
Low-Prep & Fun Open Evening Ideas for MFL
10 Fun, Low-Prep MFL Open Evening Ideas Wow future linguists with the FUN ideas and activities below which are extremely low-prep and most of which are very low-cost for MFL Open Evenings I rarely enjoyed taking part in Y4/5/6 open evenings at secondary schools, as I always thought they were a waste of time. This was until one student who came to our school in year 7 said they loved the activities that we had for them when he came to visit the MFL department with his family on a school open day. He also mentioned that he had never tasted the French, German and Spanish foods that we put…
Fun Speaking Activity for First Lesson in Language Classrooms
Want to get some weird looks and questions from your family when packing for a new term of college? Get some toilet roll out…! Ready for a fun speaking activity during first lessons in any language classroom. The ‘Loo’ Roll Speaking Activity For First Lessons Today, I started back at college, teaching a speaking and listening course. This ‘loo’ roll activity for speaking was the first fun speaking activity that I learnt during my teacher training course in 2009. I often use it to get students to talk about themselves from the outset of a new course or class. It works for post beginners, intermediate and advanced speakers and allows them…
Great Speaking Ideas for First German or Language Lesson Back
Start As You Mean To Go On with Any Of These 5 Amazing Speaking Activities for the First German Lesson Back (or French, English, Spanish or any other language!) How I do enjoy the first German lesson back after a summer holiday! I also love my first French lessons back and my first English lessons back too at the start of a new term! It’s a great opportunity to show your passion for the language you teach and re-enthuse your students to feel the same way. Who has ever done a ‘find someone who’ speaking activity in their first German lesson back? Me. It meets the criteria of speaking task.…
Useful Time Fillers for All Language Classes
Use Time Wisely with These Time Fillers for Every Language Classroom From my experience of teaching French and German GCSE and A Levels, I know there is not a lot of need for time fillers. Mainly, because there is so much content to get through! Nevertheless, I believe the time fillers below would be useful for any language classroom, either as a filler activity, or to use as a teaching activity to practise speaking, listening and writing, as well as revision of vocabulary, and translation skills, for example. 1. Chinese Whispers Aim:ย To communicate a word, sentence or chunk of speech from person to person and see how much of the…
Teaching Tips of The Week For The Language Classroom
Teaching Tips and Ideas To Use In The Classroom Each Week I come across brilliant teaching ideas and teaching tips that would be fantastic to use in the modern language classroom or English Language classroom daily. Unfortunately, I don’t do anything with the majority of them; mainly, because there are so many and they are hard to keep track of! Whilst there are many teaching ideas which are gimmicky, there are many that could be used to break away from monotonous lessons with the same activities week in, week out. For this reason, I am challenging myself to collect lots of these teaching tips in one place; here, for myself…
Qualified German and French Teacher – Simplifying Language Learning
