What went well last week #10

Bonjour,

These are a few activities that worked really well for me last week. 

This is for me to remember in my practice what games, songs, etc. work and also share my ideas with you. 

Most of the ideas below are really simple, they are tried and tested in various schools and they work!

The rights of the language learner:

Janet brought this poster to our attention last year and I thought that the new school year would be a good time to introduce it with new classes/schools.

I used it with some UKS2 classes this week and it generated some interesting conversation also I made sure I referred back to it throughout the lesson.

I like the last point: ‘Can you think of any others?’ Someone in Year 5 said ‘ the right to find it hard’ and I thought that was a really good one! 

‘Eiffel tower’ to encourage participation:

As a visiting teacher I wanted to have a simple system to reward participation, good work, etc. Something that could work alongside the school’s own system: traffic light, names on the board, etc.

I came up with the Eiffel Tower, with its 3 levels going up from the 1^st floor to the top floor.

Each week I’m going to choose 3 people to go on the Eiffel tower. I’ve printed and laminated the picture and blu-tacked it at the front of the classroom. I can simply write names with a white board pen and wipe it off the next week.  

‘Word’ tennis:

At this time of the year we are doing a lot of revision and I am conscious that for a few children it feels like ‘haven’t we done this before?’ so I thought of a fun ‘game’ to revise personal questions and answers

It’s NOT new and you’re probably doing this already but I think it is great for going over a list of vocab, numbers, etc.

We played ‘word tennis’ – It works really well when you ‘big it up’ (Let’s imagine that we’re at Wimbledon, stand every up and do a warm up, Who’s going to be the champion, etc.)

You can play: teacher vs. class, with a volunteer, children play in pairs, watch a match at the front between 2 children, etc.

Also, we added a stopwatch and set a match to 30 seconds, the last person to speak is the winner!

Songs: missing out words, being the ‘voice controller’ !

At the beginning of the year, the Janet Lloyd Network team had their own inset day and some of us contributed and shared something we were ‘good’ at. Joanne Hornby (@joanne_hornby) who is THE ‘Queen of Drama’ and our own in house songwriter/singer shared with us how to best set up the scene for singing.

She shared a game she plays once she’s introduced and practiced a new song a few time.

The teacher stands at the front and turn the volume up/down of a pretend volume dial: from quiet to normal to louder voices.

I tried it this week with our new greeting song and it was so much fun!

Also we had a go at singing missing out word but still doing the actions, that was fun too ! 

Simple ideas but SO effective !