Comenius Northeast Good Practice Guide

Sadly, on the 31st March the Comenius Network officially but to go out on a high, the Northeast Good Practice Guide has been published for the last time. It's a great place to find out about all of the great projects going on in the Northeast of the England in MFL. There is a lot of great stuff in there with loads of Primary and Secondary projects featured.

Oh and I'm in it of course...

ALL Language World

This year I was lucky enough to be able to attend part of the Language World event "Grasping the Nettle" run by ALL. The event took place in Leicester, so at 6.00 am on Saturday morning I got into my husband's car (how posh) and headed off down the M1. Three hours later I arrived in at a sunny Leicester University after following some rather dubious directions!

I was really good to see familiar faces and attend some inspiring workshops. However, I must apologise to those who I did see, due to the events mentioned in my last post, I was not in the most communicative of moods and was actually wondering why on earth I was there and not at some "how to be a better teacher" course!

I was really curious about CLIL. I'd seen the intials but had no idea what it was about, so I chose to attend two workshops covering this topic. CLIL stands for "Content and Language Integrated Learning", which is basically teaching other subjects in French / German etc... I have always been fascinated by this idea and thought it a fantastic opportunity to get pupils using TL in real contexts. I am also aware of several school in other parts of Europe that have a bilingual section so listened and made notes intently.

Firstly I went to a workshop run by Mike Ullman of Hockerill Anglo-European College. He spoke about how the idea of teaching History in French had come about at Hockerill and the success that they had seen both in History and in French as the course developped. He commented in how attainment was not affected in History by the bilingual lessons ( something about which most Headteachers would be concerned), in fact the opposite was true and attainment actually improved! He also spoke about how it was important to start small and get bigger, quite rightly pointing out that it had taken a decade to get to the postition that they are now in. Altogether a really thought provoking workshop, which left me wanting to know more. So...

I headed to another workshop on CLIL to get a slightly different approach. This was led by Judith Woodfield of Chenderit School, who is Geography teacher. This session looked at the practicalities of CLIL and Judith took us through a typical series of lessons on Tropical Rain Forests  for Year 7. It really was amazing the level of language the pupils could understand and produce even at such an early stage in Yr7. We took part in activities that Judith uses with her classes and watched some of the videos that she and the pupils watch. What fascinates me is that Judith isn't even a Modern Linguist, yet she is still happy teaching Geography in French. Chenderit are also beginning to teach ICT in German, which really interested me, as someone who is about to embark upon teaching some ICT next year (but that's a topic for another post when things are more concrete!).

I can't see my Headteacher wanting to go right down the CLIL route at the moment but what I could see is the possiblities for cross-curricular Units of Work that couldfit right in with the new KS3 Curriculum. In fact I'm currently thinking about something on the French Revolution or similar for later on in the school year.

In addtion to my CLIL-filled day, I also attended a workshop run by Rachel Hawkes of Comberton Village College. She took us through her new Yr7 Curriculum looking at the cross-curricular features and their phonics activities. I have to say that I was thoroughly inspired by her. After my "less from hell" on Thursday, Rachel's workshop gave me renewed motivation and I really felt that I could go away and use some of her ideas to enthuse my pupils (although I'll have to translate it into German!). Rather than duplicate what Rachel talked about, here is a link to her blog post  about the conference where you can see the resources she used and read about it "straight from the horses mouth", as it were!

The conference finished on a high with a speech from Steven Fawkes. He was hilarious and inspiring at the same time. I can't even begin to describe it, as I couldn't do it justice. Needless to say, after an awful week, Steven's speech was just the tonic I needed to pick me up...and this time the tears were of laughter! (Good job my mascara was waterproof-ish!)