So Much to Learn...So Little Time

Mrs Van Der Tramp Verbs - Learning Resources by S2

For what seems like an age now my S2 French class have been attempting to beat the passé composé into submission. We always do at around this time of year ans some students / classes have more success than others.
This year has been a little different as I've made extensive use of self produced and "nicked" resources for my smartboard. (By nicked I mean downloaded from places like TES Resources and Teacher Resource Exchange.)

I have also been desperate to test the creativity of the class.

With this in mind I set them the task of producing learning resources to help others learn the MRS VAN DER TRAMP verbs (for those non-linguists Mrs Van Der Tramp is a mnemonic which helps learn the verbs which take être as the auxiliary in the passé composé). I was inspired by this video I came across on YouTube.

I set out the basics of what I wanted which amounted to the production of a digital resource to teach the Mrs Van Der Tramp verbs. I took quite a lot of time talking about creative commons for images and music and gave them some websites they could use to obtain the aforementioned (creative commons search, jamendo, garageband.)

I also made some suggestions as to useful websites; animoto, goanimate being the main ones. I then left it up to them.

The results can be seen over at RateMyMates along with my commentary on their productions. Please, please, please pay them a visit and leave a comment. The work they have put in deserves it. I am so impressed with their creativity and imagination. (One of the boys who produced the Catcow film has gone on to make another 30+ films on Goanimate.
Obviously there would have to be a few tweaks to be made regarding accuracy and structure of some of the products but the important basics are there.

Go on have a look.

Here they are anyway (I forgot I had already preposted them a couple of days ago???):

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SWIM Talks

A couple of weeks ago I set my Higher French class a task: they were to do a presentation in front of the rest of the class on a topic of their own choosing.

My inspiration for this came from the TED talks, especially Sir Ken Robinson's take on education.
Hence the catchy(?) name for the series of talks, SWIM (Stuff What Interests Me), clever eh?

My reasons were manyfold but essentially I wanted to put my students in a controlled yet stressful situation where they were speaking French, as in their speaking test. BUT I didn't just want to limit their talk to topics from the Higher programme. I thought they might deal with it better if they were speaking about something which actually interests them.

Here's a link to the task sheet I gave them: SWIM Talks

And here are the first two talks from Andrew and Deborah.