My S2 French class have been continuing with their study of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This has been more an exercise in cultural awareness than in their language skills, but this falls within our remit under the new E's & O's in CfE...(too many acronyms).
As a homework piece I asked them to use Google News to search for an article about DRC which they found interesting. I asked them to print it off, and then to summarise it in their own words. In this way I could see both the original and their summary.
Unfortunately at this point I had rather a large conniption with the class as almost half hadn't been bothered to do their homework, so this lead to a lost lesson and I had to rearrange the groups from a previous activity.
Anyway I then set the groups the task of producing a Congo news show in a BBC World Service style. For which I played them an example off the BBC World Service website.
Dr. Congo News
DR Congo Today
DRC News
Dr Congo News
Today in Congo
Once they had scripted the show I sent each group off with a DoBe mp4 player to record it. (This was more difficult than I had anticipated...proof that not all teenagers are so-called Digital Natives).
Once they had all done that I set them a reflective task. I asked each group to come up with a list of the skills which they used in this whole task, starting from the research bit, and to think about how they use these skills in other classrooms and at home. The idea being to start them thinking about transferable skills.
I make no excuse for none of this being conducted in English. I wanted the kids to learn something about DRC in their own language and also to be able to put to use skills they use everyday without realising it, without having to worry about the language barrier.
The discussion at the end of today's lesson was great and could have gone on longer but I got the impression they were pleasantly surprised at how many different skills they had to use to carry out this task.
Once again "chapeau" to 2S.
If I'd have thought about it earlier I would have used bubbl.us to create the brainstorming we did on skills but didn't have time to get it set up before the lesson.
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