Learning Outcomes and Planning for MFL in the New Junior Cycle.

It's already happening. This year's first years are the first batch. It's on.

So, with my first JCT MFL CPD (!) done, here's the first thing of what I've taken away and what I'll be doing as a result.*

Learning Outcomes

Sure, we all thought "great, a bunch of new buzzwords!", when we first heard about these, but take a look at them properly. If all your students could do all those things, at a level appropriate to their age and stage, wouldn't that kind of be everything you'd hope for them? Take a look here:

Como Una Cabra 1

When you translate ‘Estar como una cabra‘ directly it means, ‘to be like a goat’ which sounds pretty weird – but thats the point! In Spanish it is said when someone or something is a little strange, bizarre or out of the ordinary. Mostly this term is used in a funny way, if someone is acting crazy or extra silly that day – ‘esta noche estás como una cabra.” (tonight you are a little crazy!)

Your friendly neighbourhood travel guide,

-Citylife Madrid

I love idioms, so when I decided to start a Spanish Language Learning comic strip I looked for a good one to use as a title. Como Una Cabra seemed to fit the bill.

Before I introduce the comic though, I want to give a major shout out to the people at Plasq, who have created the amazing Comic Life software. It is spectacularly good.

I'm using the 30 day free trial download at the moment, but there is no doubt in my mind at all that I'll be shelling out the $30 dollars to keep using it. Yep, $30! That's all, and when you see what I (a non-designer, non-comic artist, non-genius) have done with it, you'll see how great that price is. Better still, this is  their response to a question about commercial use:

Hello there!
Yes, most definitely! Anything you create using Comic Life, you retain ownership (as long as the source images are yours/licensed) and can use and sell for commercial production.
...
Thanks Very Much!

There are a few comic strip creators online, but many of them have carefully defined limits on what you can do with them. Not so with Comic Life. Hurrah!

Anyway, with that enthusiastic plug out of the way...

May I introduce Como Una Cabra, Issue 1!

The theory is that over the next couple of years I'll be covering most, if not all, of the topics and themes covered in first, second and third year of Spanish learning. I'm aiming to use no English in the comic, so that language is encountered in an approximation of real life, with visual context to give meaning.

We'll see how that goes.

Comments welcome below, and if you have a go at using Comic Life I would also LOVE to see what you come up with!

Emoji Literacy

Yesterday I became aware of this shocking statistic:

"ROUGHLY 40 PERCENT OF AMERICANS DON’T KNOW HOW TO READ 
OR WRITE EMOJI (/e’moje/). THAT’S NEARLY 120 MILLION PEOPLE. 
IT’S A SAD REALITY, BUT IT’S ONE DOMINO’S IS HOPING TO CHANGE."

Domino's Pizza has launched a whole campaign on the subject of Emoji Literacy, including Flashcards!

Now the Flashcards, as amusing as they were, are all gone already. But you can still print your own on the emoji literacy website.

But the whole thing got me thinking about how familiar and comfortable emoji are for my students. SO...

Here is my own first edition of Spanish Emoji Flashcards. 

Free to download, print* (laminate if you like) and share! They're just the smiley faces and emotions/ reactions for now, but I may do another set with other things sometime. Or you can, and share in the comments 

* To get the words on the back of the right pictures you'll need to print two sided, turning on the short side of the page. I hope that makes sense cos I really can't work out a better way to explain it!

Using Tarsia Puzzles

Tarsia puzzles rock.

And you think you haven't heard of them, because you haven't heard the word Tarsia before, but you'll totally recognise them the minute you see one! (I think I had a Care Bears one when I was small.)

Here's one:

These things are great for learning vocabulary, and they can be made using English and the Target Language, or English and pictures. Personally, I prefer pictures, as it takes half the reading out of the exercise and levels they playing field a bit for students with specific learning difficulties. It's also a closer experience to the way we use our first language.

There are two ways you can use Tarsia puzzles in the classroom. 

1. Give out blank templates and topics. Each student makes a tarsia puzzle using their template, and vocabulary from their designated topic. You should stress the importance of filling in all the puzzle pieces BEFORE cutting the triangles up. (otherwise nothing will match and it will be impossible!) Once everyone has made a puzzle you have a whole bunch of revision puzzles for the class to challenge each other with.

2. Make puzzles using this fantastic free software

The program allows you to create puzzles in any of these shapes:

and there are other features of this software, which I'll look at another time, that are also really great for the MFL classroom too.

It's designed for maths teachers so I haven't found a way, so far, to use pictures instead of words within the Tarsia Maker software, but it can be done with a little fiddling around and converting to PDF

Here's the Los Colores Tarsia Puzzle from the picture above, but in a printable format, so that your triangles are nice and big. I'm going to recommend printing on light card or laminating (you know how I feel about laminating!)

If you make any good tarsia puzzles that you'd like to share, that would be awesome. Pop a comment below, with a link to Drive or Dropbox!

5 Great Blog Posts I Read This Week.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/garrettheath/

I completely love Twitter, and I use it to stay in touch with current theory and ideas in Modern Foreign Language and English Teaching.

You can follow me  if you like...

Follow @yellospraypaint

...I retweet the stuff that I find personally useful, interesting or amusing, and I put my own blog posts there too.

This week my top five blog posts (in no particular order) were the following:

1. This post from Edutopia is about 7 Apps for Student Creators, is chockablock full of great ideas for using technology in the classroom. Adobe Voice, in particular, seems ideal for taking the stress and "on the spot" anxiety feelins out of oral work in the MFL classroom.

2. LitandTech  had a great post this week on How I used Socrative for Writing Instruction. 

I see their efforts flow onto my screen as soon as they submit them. I can tell right away which students are "getting it" and who needs more help. It's low stakes because they know I'm not grading these, we are just experimenting with a new skill.

3. FrenchTeacherNet had a great post on An approach to translation which keeps emphasis on target language, with examples in French that could easily be created in other target languages.

4. TeacherToolKit (which is rapidly becoming one of my faves) wrote about Twitter for the Classroom with a really simple and easy to follow step by step guide that anyone could follow

And Finally,

5. Transparent Language write a flipping excellent post with loads of vocabulary on the topic of Giving Advice in Spanish.
Seriously, this one made my day :)

Numbers: The Easiest 10 Marks in the Spanish Junior Cert Exam.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamescridland/

I'll say it again...

The EASIEST 10 marks in the Spanish Junior Cert Exam.

The first section of Part III, the written part of the Spanish Junior Certificate exam, is worth ten marks. There are five questions. They are always numbers. 

You are given a number (written in numerals) and asked to write it out in words. 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/andymag/

In the last fifteen years there have only been questions in the following categories:

• Dates
• Times
• Years
• Quantities
• Ordinal numbers

So, it doesn't take much study time to have those covered, and feel confident about it. Those ten marks could be the difference between grades!

And as if that wasn't easy enough, you can have a list of all the exam questions since 2001.

Here it is compiled by year, and here it is by category.

Yep. 
No excuses left! 

Vamos de Compras!

Warning: This exercise will NOT be suitable for a boys school. Contains underwear.

This website is amazing awesome.

Like, I would think it was the coolest even if I wasn't trying to think of ways to make learning fun and interactive.

Seriously, check it out! There are paper doll print-outs to die for, from different eras, in different styles, in colour and in black and white to be coloured in. They gave me a fantastic idea for teaching clothing and revising colours and numbers and, as I was completing my teaching practice in a girls school at the time, I was psyched.

I mean, come on! How beautiful is this?!

Then I did a whole bunch of things wrong. I spent forever printing pages, cutting out clothes, laminating them, cutting out the laminated clothes, working out whether a dress looked like it might be silk, and writing “seda” on the back, writing “lana” on the back of others. I spent ages trying to make sure I had a good cross section of colours and items of clothing too. It took ages (and of course my inspector didn’t show for that class anyway, aint it always the way)

Ask my sister, I had her cutting out too!

Don’t do any of that. There’s no point. Sure, you have materials you can use forever, but I think your class will get so much more out of it if they do it this way instead:

1.   Teach clothes, colours, fabrics, and the questions and answers associated with shopping.

2.   Print off a whole bunch of paper doll papers from PaperthinPersonas. My personal favourites, and the ones I used, are from Marisole Monday and Friends. You can print them in colour if you want to speed things along, or in black and white if you think the class will benefit from colouring them in, or if you’re dealing with a black-and-white-only printing scenario.

3.   Give each girl one or two pages to colour and cut out carefully.

4.   Put the girls in groups of three or four and have each group “open a shop”. They get an A3 page to display their clothes, and can write the name of the shop across the top. They lay out all the clothes in their shop, write prices next to them, and they can decide things like whether they are made of cotton or leather.*

5.   Each girl still has a paper doll which she has cut out. She glues this to an A4 or copybook page, names her and writes three likes and three dislikes beside her doll.

6.   Now the class is split in two. Half the girls “go shopping” and half the girls open the shops. Each shopper is given a budget (you can useplaying cards as currency if you like).

7.   The rules are:

·        You have to buy at least one thing from your likes

·        You can’t buy anything from your dislikes

·        You can only buy something after you ask the price in Spanish

·        You can only buy something you can afford

·        Your doll must be fully dressed at the end.

8.   The shop that makes the most money is the winner.

9.   Each girl glues the new clothes onto her doll for homework, and writes a paragraph about what she is wearing.

* they could also create a little box/space in the "shop" and label it Probadores if they felt super creative.