How about a Haiku?

I can't believe it's so long since I last blogged!! Maybe I should try it more regularly, or maybe once in a blue moon is just enough for everybody!

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

Aaarrrggghhh Twitter nightmare.

On Wednesday, in my silliness and probably due to my illess, I stupidly clicked a link to a video that came via a DM on Twitter. I very soon found out that it was a phishing scam, that it had sent out DMs to all my followers with the same link and that my account was now completely messed up. I had to keep logging into my account and from time to time I'd be locked out, I couldn't sent DMs to anyone as I had filled up my quota for yesterday with the nearly 400 that had been sent etc, etc... The final straw came yesterday morning when I again tried to login in and Twitter didn't even recognise my username of Langwitch or my email address. Enough was enough! I decided to take a big step and re-invent myself as @helenalangwitch - same picture, similar name, same silly tweets that people have come to know and love! However, before the end of the evening my old account came back to life! Don't know how and don't know why, so I've decided to remain @langwitch for the foreseeable future(I like the name and think she's fun much more fun that @helenalangwitch anyway). I will keep the other account for emergencies, or who knows I may become one of those people who only follows celebs with that account - can't see as it would be very interesting though ;o)

Anyway, I henceforth promise never to do anything silly like clicking on dodgy links in the future and apologise for confusion caused. I am sure the combination of medications I'm taking at the moment must in some way have contributed to the sorry state of affairs I found myself in, but that's a whole other blog post!

Finally I also want to say thank you to my wonderful PLN for you understanding and for following @helenalangwitch in my time of need.

Twitter Mosaic

I've been looking for something to blog about for weeks and now thanks to @s_downe via @adamsutcliffe here we are. My Twitter mosaic. I think it's great. Apparently you can get them done into a mug - I already have a "general" Twitter mug for work but am thinking a more personal one would really make sure nobody "borrowed" it!!!

Get your twitter mosaic here.