Leo the Lion visits Ian Ramsey

Over the last few weeks, Ian Ramsey had a guest who came to visit from Germany. Leo, the Bavarian Lion, came to stay with us on his tour round the world.

Whilst he was staying at Ian Ramsey, Leo took part in many exciting activities. He took part in a science experiment. Next, he went off to the LRC to check some books out and pose for a photo with William Shakespeare. He then ran over to North Site (in the rain) had his photograph taken with the amazing sculpures that some Y9s created last year.

Back in South Site, Leo went to work on Reception in the Office, taking some phone calls. In addition to all of these activities at school, Leo came home with me at half term and went Halloweening. Naturally, Leo also observed the minute's silence on Remembrance Day at 11.00am and even managed to get himself a poppy.

I think Leo had a great time at Ian Ramsey-he particularly enjoyed playing "Past Tense Pass the Parcel" with 8vD3 on Monday last week!

He now heads of to Brazil to experience life there. You can follow his further adventures on his blog by following this link: Leo's Blog

You can see a selection of his photographs below.

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International School Award

Back in January, it was suggested to me that I went to the ISA briefing meeting in London "as I was involved in a lot of the projects in it so would be good for me to know what to put in". A month later, no longer an innocentl by-stander in our bid to gain the Full International School Award, I was launched into compiling the whole portfolio.

For those who don't know, in order to gain the Full ISA you need to complete an Action Plan in September/October of all of your international, curricular-based projects that are taking place within that school year. This is then (hopefull) approved by the "ISA people" and then you spend the academic year gathering evidence of your 7 (minimum) "Key Activities", which  includes things like evaluations from pupils, staff and parents of events, photographs, samples of pupil work. All of this gets put together in a (very large) file and is then dispatched to the British Council in time for the deadline date, some time around the end of the school year. Simples...?

Or maybe not! It took over my life, the file went everywhere with me, I had evaluation forms coming out of my ears and chasing those evaluation forms, well...

However, in Ocotber I learnt that the hard work had paid off and we had been successful in our bid to be awarded the Full ISA - hurrah!!!

[caption id="attachment_323" align="alignleft" width="210" caption="Alistair Armstrong receiving our ISA from George Alagia"][/caption]

The Award Ceremony took place in London on Friday 16th October and was presented by George Alagia and you can see our award being presented on the left. Those of you who know me will know that I have dramatically changed over the last few months...unfortunately I was ill in bed and couldn't attend the ceremony, so one of our Assistant Heads went in my place.

What I didn't realise was that, alongside the certificate we received, we are also the proud owners of an ISA flag which is now flying on one of the school flagpoles and a beautiful crysal. I could take a picture of the crystal today but not the flag as it was dull and raining all day.

[caption id="attachment_324" align="aligncenter" width="210" caption="Our ISA Crystal"][/caption]

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.

Phonics, slidecasting and podcasting

Over the last year I feel like I've neglected the things that started on me on this journey that has revived my enthusiasm for teaching MFL - namely my school blog Langwitch and podcasting. However, over the last week I have begun to revive them, slowly but surely.
Through the wonders of Twitter I have come to know Suzie Bewell, SSAT Lead Practitioner for MFL from All Saints Language College in York. She has worked a lot with her pupils teaching phonics to improve pronunciation and has seem great improvements. With this in mind I trawled Amazon over the summer holidays and found a Jolly Phoniques manuel which was more or less identical to the kind of thing my 4 year old son was doing last year at Nursery (he's very bright, you know-he's now writing essays!)
Once I'd got over the initial shock of being back at work I decided to embark upon teaching my Jolly Phoniques. As I teach French and German (yes, I know and Spanish and ICT...) I felt it important to do justice to both languages, so I set to work on the German as well as the French. For my German, I took as my inspiration a resource that I found on Suzie's Wiki Do Once and Share and adapted it for my needs and for my French I used the Manuel Jolly Phonique all the way. The pupils so far have received it well - particularly my Year 10 class, whose pronunciation, to be quite honest was dreadful! We do lots of chanting with actions and spend lots of time going over actions when we get to tricky words that need a reminder of how to pronounce them and it seems to be working well.
Next is where the blog revival comes in! (Just incase you were wondering!)
I got to thinking how I could help my pupils even more with their pronunciation and began to wonder about making a slidecast, using the PowerPoint I'd used in class, together with the classes chanting. Never having done a slidecast before, I was nervous. However, I went onto Slideshare and just followed the instructions. I uploaded the PowerPoint, uploaded the mp3 soundfile (which I mangaged to improve the quality of, after they were initially too quiet, using the Levelator, as recommended by Joe Dale) and syncronised it all, just as I was told. I think the results are great - and if I can do it, anyone can!
Next I decided that my pupils could also do with even more practice so I create (re-vamped) 2 podcasts - one for French (Radio Langwitch) and one for German (Langwitch Radio), to avoid confusion - so that they can download their chants and pretend to be cool listening to music when they're really practicing their French and German! Of course everything is now on my school blog for my pupils to use and enjoy with the whole family.

Les Jolly Phoniques

Les Jolly Phoniques

View more presentations from Helena Butterfield.

And Phonik!

Phonik

View more presentations from Helena Butterfield.

I think I'm addicted...

...to Wallwisher!
I thought for a long time about a project for the EDL on Friday that could included as many of our international partners as possible and, after having a go a Voicethread and no-one contibuting, I decided to go for something simpler. As I mentioned in my last post, I had a go with Wallwisher this week and I thought it was a great idea for a collaborative international project, so I set one up. It has already begun to have additions made so I'm hoping that by Friday all contributers will have a wonderful resource to share with their pupils and colleagues.

Using Wallwisher

On the MFL Forum this week I read about Wallwisher in a post by Jimmy P. Subsequently I decided to try it out as a "welcome back" activity with a couple of classes. It's a work in progress but here is what we've got so far. Yr Y10 set 4 class and Y8 set 1 classes have contributed so far but I will be encouraging my Year 7 class, who've only just begun, to contribute in the coming week. I got some lovely sentences with parce que from some Year 8s, however our interweb was playing up a lot this week in school so not all got their's added, which was a shame...these things are sent to try us!
I'm thinking it might be a nice idea for the EDL next week to see how many differents introductions in differing languages we can get.
Here it is, anyway. I've closed comments on it for the moment but they will be re-opened during my next lesson in the ICT suite.

Holidays and High Hopes

The Zen Fountain in Les Rosiers-sur-Loire

Where did the holidays go? It seems like no time at all since the summer holidays were approaching too slowly and now they're over.

What wonderful times I had with my family. We went to France for two weeks and seemed to travel the full width of the country. Spending a week in the Loire Valley, 3 days in Disneyland Resort Paris (to give it it's full name) and then 4 days in a tiny little village on the French/German border called Liederschiedt visiting a friend. It certainly was action packed a lots of fun. Best of all I and my family got to speak lots of French and I discovered that my 7 year old really is a budding linguist, able to work out the meaning of signs and words with far more ease than many pupils I teach. It was so amazing watching her use all of the clues that I tell my pupils to use, without me even having to tell her. Also fascinating was the friendship that developed between my two children (7 and 4) and my friend's two (4 and 2 1/2). My children speak next to no German or French and Heike's children speak mainly German and often French. Despite the language barrier all four children played really well together and there were tears shed upon our departure.

Naturally, we had our usual visit to Eastbourne to visit my sister and watch the airshow. We saw the Red Arrows an all of the days we attended the event and enjoyed many other thrilling displays.
After that work seemed inevitable and I began to contemplate the year ahead of me. Where am I going? What am I doing (and why)?
There are some exciting things happening this year - none less so than the fact that I am to teach ICT for 6hrs a fortnight to Y7, Y8 and Y9. In order to do this I am going to have to learn how do use some applications quite quickly. Can't wait! In particular it will be interesting to see my job from the perspective of another subject area. How do they teach in ICT? Is it really different from teaching MFL? In addition ICT is taught in Tutor Groups throughout KS3, whereas MFL is taught in sets from Christmas of Y7, what will that be like? I already like teaching ICT before I've even had one class, as I already have all of the lessons and resources!
Added to that I have acquired a "new" job title, that of "International School Co-ordinator". Basically it means I just continue doing what I'm doing already. Continuing with that theme, we will re-apply for a Comenius Grant, after failing to gain funding last year. I'm currently trying to organise a preparation visit for January which will be entertaining! Also we have an all new French exchange with a school in Caussade near Toulouse.
As far as my MFL teaching is concerned, I have to admit to feeling a little stale, so I want to focus on injecting some enthusiasm into things. Naturally I'll continue to use ICT to motivate pupils and also lead some staff CPD within the department to encourage colleagues to follow suit. I'm also going to do some work on Phonics with my classes. After seeing Rachel Hawkes speak at Grasping the Nettle and being in touch with Suzi Bewell, I've bought a Jolly Phonics French book and a lovely Frieze and am going to spend time focusing on pronunciation with many of my pupils.
So not much then, in the year ahead. It should keep me out of trouble anyway!