Maximising resources: minimum preparation, high impact tasks

On this post I am focussing on how to reduce workload  by exploiting minimum preparation tasks to be used in many different ways within a lesson or a series of lessons.   

When planning my activities, I always try to create tasks which require minimum preparation time but which have high impact, so students see measurable results. 

These are 5 of my favourite tasks and how I exploit them to be used for many different activities. More activities, which can follow the following pattern, can be found in Simona Gravina's Padlet here .

Battleships

This classic activity can be exploited in many different ways just with a single grid. This is my sequence which gives me materials to last a whole lesson or even two!

• Listening Battleships: I say a sentence students write the coordinate according to the grid. I tend to do this for 10 or 20 sentences. Sentences are very similar, so students really need to listen to specific verb endings and structures. 

• Translation codes: I give students coordinates BC, A2, D5 etc.. and they translate the sentences, the codes correspond to. To spice up the activity, I turn the activity into a little competition with a merit given to the first 10/12 students completing the task. We then go through the translations together to check out accuracy with many strategic questions based on grammar which help me to check for understanding. I use this question session in conjunction with mini whiteboards. This allows me to revise specific grammar in context. 

• Oral Battleships: Students play classic battleships orally in pairs. Normally they tick 8/9 boxes. They need to sink their partner's ships by translating orally, the sentence corresponding to a specific coordinate.

• Extensive writing: Using their oral battleships choices and those of their partners, students write, collaboratively, an extensive piece of writing using linking words and adding extra information. Students can start planning their writing during the lesson and finish it as a homework task. 

• Mini Whiteboard work based on the grid and beyond: to finish the lesson, or in a second lesson, I check for understanding by asking students to write down, in mini WB, sentences from the grid, which by this stage they are super familiar with, so the success rate is high, which is important to promote intrinsic motivation. I then start asking students to write sentences moving away from the grid as I incorporate content from previous topics: retrieval practice. We finish the sessions doing this orally, for those who feel more confident.

Stealing Sentences

This Gianfranco Conti's classic can also be exploited to fit many activities:

• Level 1: just as a reading activity to focus on phonics and pronunciation and help memorisation of chuncks. Students take 4 pieces of paper and write a number from 1 to 7 (or as many as shown on the board) on each piece. Students move around the room and read a sentence from the board to each other. Students steal sentences, pieces of paper, if the person they read the sentence to, has the number corresponding to their read sentence, written on one of the pieces of paper. The student with more pieces of paper at the end of the activity is the winner.

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• Level 2: Same activity but with gaps, encouraging retrieval of key structures.

• Level 3: After carrying out levels 1 and 2, students play the game again, but this time, they need to translate, orally, the sentences, using the initials as help.

• Writing activity: After doing the oral activities in the different levels, students write down the sentences in pairs, unaided as a self-test task. How many can they remember accurately? As in the example with Battleships, we go through the sentences focusing on key questioning on grammar in conjunction with mini whiteboards. 

• Read my mind: Level 1/2/3 of this activity can be used to carry out this classic activity from Gianfranco Conti too, to be done against the teacher or in pairs. I think of a number, which I write in a piece of paper, and students try to guess the number by saying the sentence in the grid. 

Rock Climbing 

Another Gianfranco Conti activity which leads itself to be exploited easily. I follow this sequence:

• Listening activity: This is led by the teacher. I say a full sentence in the Target Language and students write down the numbers of the different components of the sentence. This listening activity can also be carried out in pairs, where a student says the sentences and their partner identifies the chunks.

• Writing activity: Next, students write sentences based on my combinations. See example below.

• Oral activity: Finally, students work in pairs. They write their own combinations in numbers (sentence a: 1,8,14,24)  and their partners, orally, must guess the correct combination by saying the sentence in the target language. Students love this challenge. 

Wheel of Names

I have written many posts on how to exploit this Digital Tool. See this Video here. I follow this sequence:

• Retrieval practice: I use the wheel of names with sentences in English with key structures, to be translated to the Target Language, for retrieval practice, in conjunction with mini whiteboards and/or orally.

• Oral practice: I share the wheel of names link with students, and they test each other orally. They need to translate a given sentence, answer a question, conjugate a verb etc.. Students normally do this while playing, Piedra, Papel, Tijera (Stone, Paper, Scissors) so the winner of each round takes a turn to carry out a task. 

• Writing practice: Students, individually or in pairs, spin the wheel and write down a given sentence in their books or OneNote. For differentiation purposes, some students may need to translate a sentence and extend it or translate the sentence and change it to a different tense etc.. As in the case of battleships, I may add a competition element! Students love this type of activities versus an old fashioned worksheet!

• Homework task: Students record the sentences orally using the insert audio in Onenote or Flipgrid. Confident students are encouraged to extend their sentences.

• Appsmashing with Genially: Once created, Wheel of Names can be embedded within Genially to create oral board games.

Flippity 

This is another digital tool providing activities, which take only 5-10 minutes to create and can generate tasks for a whole lesson or even more. For a video on how to do so click here. 

• Retrieval practice: I use the Flippity Random Name Picker to write key words and verbs that students must know well. After 5 minutes doing this, I ask students to write a sentence with the given key word/structure using mini whiteboards. 

• Extensive writing: I use the Groups of 2/3/4/5 in Flippity, within Random Name Picker, (increasing the difficulty), so the application will group my key structures into small groups. I set up the timer and students need to write a full paragraph using all the structures in each group in the time given. Rewards are given to those who manage to write a very good paragraph within the limit. At this point, like in previous activities, key questioning on accuracy to check for understanding and consolidating grammar is extremely valuable. The activity can then be followed up as a homework task.

• Oral work: I share the link with students, who carry out this activity orally in pairs within a given time using the timer in the app. For homework, they can also carry out this oral activity recording themselves using the Insert Voice feature in OneNote or Flipgrid.

These five tasks, which do not take long to prepare and are not fancy, although I love beautiful created resources, provide me with a whole lesson worth of tasks + homework. All tasks are engaging but also allow students to learn successfully. As they are easy to prepare, these allow for personalisation of the learning to specific classes. It is what I call minimum preparation time and high impact, sticky tasks.

Lights, Camera, Action! Empowering the curriculum

This post has been inspired by the talented Isabelle Jones who asked in Twitter which Spanish films teachers integrated as part of SoW at KS3. She made me think of film in the MFL classroom, which can be such a powerful cultural tool to motivate students, learn culture, values and of course language! 

However, like any task/activity, it must be very well thought out and truly embedded in the curriculum. I am not keen of watching films, for the sake of it, but planning to watch and study a film while taking the opportunity to exploit it and embed it into the curriculum. 

How to integrate films into the curriculum 

When planning a unit based on a film, I think of three pillars: the planned final discourse, cultural outcome and linguistic/grammatical exploitation.

Pillar one: the final discourse

Firstly, like with any other unit, plan the discourse which you would like your students to produce, linguistically, after watching the film. For me, in most cases, regardless of the linguistic level of my students, this discourse is to be able to tell what happened in the film and give opinions about it as well as recommendations. 

As with any work unit, I need to define the exact final outcome/discourse that students will have to produce and work backwards thinking of activities to get them there. For that purpose, I create a Sentence Builder with this language which will be the backbone of the whole film unit. See this link to see the Sentence Builder I created for Coco this year for our Y9 classes.

Pillar two: the cultural dimension

However, a film is richer than that! So, also think about the cultural dimension and what you would like students to learn culturally from any given film. In this category we can also include values or international issues promoted by the film:

Coco for example, is great to explore the Day of the Dead in Mexico and the Aztec culture.

Voces inocentes is a fantastic opportunity to talk and debate about children in war, the power of friendship and children soldiers. It is also a good film to learn about differences between poor and richer countries and immigration. 

Cuerdas is a fab example to talk about diversity. 

Zipi y Zape it’s great to talk about values such as friendship, family and the world of comics in Spanish speaking countries. In fact, it could be twinned with a Zipi Zape comic story and it could lead to the Argentinian comic Mafalda. 

I always conduct these debates and research in English.  

Pillar three: exploiting the language

Finally, the last pillar to consider when planning a unit based on a film, is the language (vocabulary and grammar) which I would like to explicitly teach and to practise from the film. For this, I use extracts from the film to be analysed linguistically with specific activities, to move later, to practise such structures in different contexts.

This pillar is normally integrated with the first one, as I would like students, to learn such structure and use it in their final discourse and it is included as a seed planting experience in the original Sentence Builder. 

Planning/creating the tasks

I then start planning the different activities to tackle these three objectives. Another strategy I use when exploiting a film, is to make it clear to students that they will need to create a project on the film, so there is a clear product for them linked to the final discourse. I turn this into a competition! 

The project, tends to be a big poster where students write or talk, using a QR codes, on what happens in the film and a recommendation ( basically a review, based on our original sentence builder) and a section on the cultural/international/geographic aspect that we debated in lessons, written in English. All must be illustrated with pictures, etc.. promoting the artistic vein of my students! Normally, I give a choice of format to create this final project: poster by hand, a video, a digital infographic, a physical/digital book etc.. so there’s something for everyone! 

However, for the film to be embedded nicely into the curriculum, pillar one is key! To develop this, I apply the same T&L  strategies I do on any topic. For me these are based on the Lexicogrammar or EPI approach, by Gianfranco Conti.

I exploit the original, planned Sentence Builder, after watching the film, by doing lots of listening and reading tasks on the content of such Sentence Builder (Modelling phase), such as dictations, mini white board activities and quizlets/Memrise for students to learn the key vocabulary. 

I then move into Structured Practice with many of Gianfranco classic activities: pyramid translations, oral ping pong, information gap activities, lots of pair work based on practising sentences from our Sentence Builder. For this, I use digital tools such as Genially, wheel of names or LearningApps among others. Grammar is learned/ practised towards the end of this stage. 

Finally, once students know the structures well, we move to developing fluency and manipulating the language with more activities: speed dating, some of the activities from the previous stage but now with open ending questions, leading to students acquiring the language spontaneously and creatively to carry out their final project. 

Once the language is secured and students can narrate events on what happened in the film, we move to the cultural/ value activities on the film, which would have been already pointed out as part of the Sentence Builders but now will be debated and analysed in English. At this stage, I use YouTube videos, online materials and group discussion activities to promote dialogue and debate! 

The whole process normally takes me 6 weeks, basically, half a term.

An example of this process can be found in my resources from Coco. However, these are not fully finalised. Click here.

Students learn the film unit well and I have had many students who use the sentence builders learned at this stage, to describe a film they recently watched as part of their GCSE oral conversation, which shows the impact such films had in students.

Normally we dedicate 6 weeks in Year 9 to a film project, while we use Short Films and Extra episodes with Y7/8.

Favourite Films for Spanish 

Coco

Voces Inocentes

Valentín

Carlitos

Zipi y Zape

Manolito Gafotas 

Campeones 

Tadeo Jones

Short films

If you do not have lots of time, using short films and some follow-up activities, is also a stimulating way to learn the language! Personally, I use short films for Y7/8 and a whole film unit in Y9, as their language is stronger. Have a look at this pack on short films activities we created for my department.  

These are some of my favourite short films:

Cuerdas

La Leyenda del espantapájaros

La Huida

Los Gritones

Finally, oldies like the Extra videos (available in French, German and Spanish), which can be found in YouTube, are great for a relaxed soap time at the end of a busy term or every so often to chill out! Worksheets for the Extra Spanish series can be found here.

Overall, film can really enrich the curriculum, however it is important to be exploited fully and be part of your teaching continuum. 

Setting up a virtual exchange

The recent lockdowns have really pushed teachers to reinvent the T&L wheel and has forced us to upskill ourselves in many different ways. Unfortunately, one of the big frustrations of this year's restrictions, has been the impossibility to carry out educational visits, especially, abroad, such as exchanges. 

I love exchanges! Although, not vital for the language learning journey of students, per se, they open an invaluable door to the target language culture which can be very difficult to replicate in the classroom, especially given the limited curriculum time that languages generally have in UK schools. 

I have run many successful exchanges over the last 20 years and I can assure you that they have shaped the relationship of my students with languages. 

If you need to find a partner, try to use the application Flipgrid. In there, you have Gridpals, which allows you to find partners around the world, thank you Adeline Mostona nd Jimena Licitra for tío! 

What makes a great exchange? Revamping traditional exchanges!

The most successful exchanges were those where there was a project attach to them.  Students would work collaboratively, before travelling, on a mini project, allowing them to forge friendships and start contact with their partners, thanks to social media, well before they met face to face. In the past, eTwinning was the platform I used for such projects, as they gave us a secure platform to work on and display our work, as well as national and international recognition. Sadly, we cannot use eTwinning anymore... Our eTwinning project would lead itself to an exchange, both ways. During the exchange, we would carry on working on our project, collaboratively, giving a purpose and rational to the whole trip and encouraging partners to work together on a common goal, now face to face, while complementing such work with local outings, excursions and cultural visits.  

Sadly, this year, such exchange format could not take place, as we were forced to scrap the physical visit and eTwinning was not more! 

As we had always worked on a project virtually before travelling, this year we revamped that previous project into a virtual exchange using Google Meet (Zoom and Teams would have worked equally well, here).  We are lucky as we are currently working on an Erasmus project "The Village" so we had a very clear programme disseminated among 6 different Mobilities (Erasmus jargon for exchange), to be carried out in two years, so we decided to do the first two mobilities virtually, instead of travelling to Spain and La Réunion. It was a great success!

10 Steps to set up a virtual exchange

1. Think of a project to carry out as part of your exchange, so that you have a goal to work towards, do not set up an exchange, for the sake of it: there must be a purpose and final outcome. In our case, it is to create a virtual village where the UN Development Goals would have been tackled. Our first virtual exchange focussed on creating, collaboratively, the inhabitants of the this city and exploring a Circular Economy versus a Linear one as the driving force in the Village. The second virtual exchange to La Réunion, focussed on working on Human Rights and how our Village will tackle these. Take this opportunity to establish cross curricular links with other departments and raise the profile of MFL in the school. 

2. Create a simple but collaborative programme of activities to be carried among two or three mornings. We took the students out of lessons as they would have been for a real exchange, so they could work, in block, on the planned activities. Click here for our Spain virtual exchange programme. Click here for our La Reunion virtual exchange programme. 

3. When planning your activities, always plan some simple activities, we call them preliminary activities, to be done, independently by each school, before meeting live. For us, a preliminary activity was to learn, the concept of the development goals and create some videos where students would introduce themselves and talk about what their ideal world would be like in 30 years if such goals were achieved worldwide. We used a Padlet to share the videos and it was a great way to listen to real target language!  We also used Padlet to exchange Xmas greetings!

Similarly, before meeting virtually, we carried a competition to decide the logo of our project, where students designed different logos and voted, via Google Forms for their favourite one, the winning log, became the logo of our whole project/exchange. This is our logo, designed by a boy in La Réunion. 

4. Decide the platform you will use to carry out your virtual exchange: Google Meet/ Zoom/ Teams? and get familiar with the Breakout Rooms in those platforms, as students will need to work with their partners in small groups collaboratively.

5. In order to work collaboratively, and for any activity, use either Google or MS documents which you can share with students via a link and make them editable, so students can write on them in real time. For our first virtual exchange, after watching a video on Circular/Linear economies, not via Google Meet, students came back online and created posters, using a PPT (We gave them a template), collaboratively. 

Each group in a breakout room, created a poster in their designated slides in the PPT. Click here for the original PPT template, taken from Slidesmania.  This is the final document with the posters finished after the activity, all done in Breakout Rooms. 

6. When deciding your programme of activities, always include ice-break tasks to be carried out in small groups virtually, before embarking on the meaty ones! For that, we always suggest a little questionnaire to carry out to partners in the TL or guessing games. 

7. Include at least an activity where students have the opportunity to show their city and local landmarks to their partners. For that, Google Earth is brilliant! For both of our Virtual exchanges, partners showed their cities and famous local landmarks, via Google Earth, in real time, by sharing their screen within our Google Meet sessions. 

8. On the days of the activities, have technical support nearby! Also, make sure all students bring headphones so that you do not get feedback from many students talking at the same time in the same room.

9. Not all activities in the virtual exchange need to be on Google Meet/Teams/Zoom, as this can be very tiring!  Some activities can be carried out independently in each school off line, and then come back online for a  follow-up activity. In our second virtual exchange to La Reunion, students, in each country, created a physical tree where the leaves were the different Human Rights we had previously explored. This took two hours to create. Students then came back online and explained in the TL the rationale of their trees and disposition of the leaves.

10. Start small!  The virtual activities I am sharing on this post, are part of an Erasmus, so the programme is very specific and each virtual exchange related to the next one. However, you can create a very simple standalone virtual exchange programme, as long as it has a specific purpose.  

Although not the same as travelling to the target country, virtual exchanges are great opportunities for international collaboration and they are inclusive, as they are free! It broadens horizons, puts communication skills to the test and forges friendships. 

To have a look at our a previous Erasmus project, United in Diversity, which involved travelling to Spain and La Reunion as part of the project, have a look at this link.

I disagree with the recent Ofsted Report for languages, which stated that language exchanges could be detrimental, as students compare their linguistic ability to those of their partners and the experience may be off-putting. I have not encountered that in my 20 years of teaching experience. The key is to prepare students, linguistically, before travelling physically or virtually, and being realistic about what they can achieve, given the amount of years and time spent learning the target language. If anything, my students always learn lots of vocabulary, albeit swearing words! and their listening skills and fluency generally improve.  Most importantly, they have the opportunity to work with students of a similar age, collaboratively in the TL so nothing but a winning experience!

For me it is like playing the real football match!!! Everyone remembers their big match, but very few people will remember the training sessions. Exchanges is the big match in languages!  What will make memories!