Anyway, in one of my few moments of creativity this term, I came upon an idea which turned out to be a winner.
I discovered that it was National Poetry day earlier in October and decided to mark the occasion with my Y10 and 11 classes by writing Haikus. A Haiku is a 3 line poem that has 5 syllables in the first line, 7 in the second line and 5 in the last line (or atleast, that's what Google told me). Obviously, with the serious business of Controlled Assessments to learn off by heart to ensure GCSE grades are on or above target, we couldn't spend a whole lesson on this, neither do I think a whole lesson needs to be spent on this. However it did work really well as a starter.
After giving them their topic (descriptions for Y10 and holidays for Y11....guess our current CA topics are!) and reminding them what a Haiku was, the mini whiteboards came out and they began work. I can honestly say that I have rarely seen them work so hard! You could feel the cogs turning as they counted syllables while trying to get it all to make sense. They joy when they had finished their Haiku....that quickly turned to despair when I'd point out "don't forget, you say the "e" in German" and they had to try a different way of getting in their 5 syllables...
Needless to say, when they all did manage to get their Haiku completed, they were very proud of what they achieved and were keen for me to Tweet them on our school MFL account, which naturally I did.
Here is a link to our Twitter account, you'll be able to find all of the Y10 Haiku on descriptions (you won't have to scroll down far to find them).
@stmichaelsmfl
