A new chat mat to support group talk.
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 I wanted my students to have the chance to revise core vocabulary and build sentences, so I created this pirates game. Students get a set of cards in small groups and take it in turns to turn a card. The card will show an item of vocabulary (in this case food or drink) and they have to be able to use the item in a sentence in order to keep the card. The students were
creating sentences such as "Me gusta comer ....... " "Ayer bebí ..." etc. If the player doesn't know how to say the vocabulary item, then they return it to the bottom of a pile. If, however, a player turns over a pirate card, then they lose all the cards they are currently holding. It's best to put these off to one side rather than back on the pile or the game will go on forever ! The player with the most cards at the end wins. The students loved it, except the poor girl who got four pirates in a row. : ) DOWNLOAD food template Thanks to @atantot for sharing this fun site, where llamas shape to create your message. www.llamafont.com  Group discussions  This is a support mat to assist students in talking freely and expressing their opinion in Spanish. One version can be folded to stand on the table to encourage group discussion whilst the other could be displayed or put in exercise books. DOWNLOAD Question of the day A good starter to get students talking straight away is to give the class a question to discuss, ensuring students are expressing and justifying their opinions. DOWNLOAD German opinions support sheet and questions of the day DOWNLOAD Spanish example questions of the day 30 second speeches Students are encouraged to speak for 30 seconds on a given topic. Students could participate in a 'reading images' task (inspired by the wonderful work by Rachel Hawkes - if you haven't already, I strongly recommend you view her resources TES for more ideas and info) or be given random key words they have to include. Obviously you can vary the amount of support offered, depending on the group. DOWNLOAD example Spanish 30 second speeches. Question grids The grids offer a variety of questions to get student talking to one another. DOWNLOAD Grid 1 DOWNLOAD Grid 2 Room 101 A simple power point to stimulate discussion as to what items students would place in room 101 and why. Many thanks to Jen Sutton (MFLresources forum) for the Spanish support pages. DOWNLOAD Diamond nines With a diamond nine activity, students have to rank the items in order of most important/relevant to them from top to bottom. This task encourages discussion as students can then justify their choices. DOWNLOAD Spanish friendship diamond nine DOWNLOAD German friendship diamond nine If you are looking to implement more spontaneous talk into your
MFL classroom, then there are lots of inspiring resources on TES. Greg Horton and his colleagues at the Wildern School demonstrated successful ways to get students participating in group talk. Google will bring up a wealth of resources on this topic, but there are some sample resources here.  www.jigsawplanet.com allows you to create online jigsaws from any image. Free and easy to use, you can then share the link or embed into a webpage. This has a number of potential uses but would make an excellent homework task. In his blog, Richard Byrne (@rmbyrne) suggests importing wordles. This would work really well for languages but I have been playing around with other options too. Players can opt to look at the completed image at anytime with the tap in the bottom left corner. There are a number of different piece shapes available also and you can alter the difficulty when creating. If you connect two pieces together correctly, they stay together. I have made some examples below.  Suggestion 1 - wordles etc with key words are a good idea but you could also input word swirls, waves or love hearts created on festisite. Suggestion 2 - like the example I made above, you could label images. I made this one by labelling up the pictures with text boxes in power point and then opted to save the power point as a JPEG rather than a show. It was still a little large, so I cropped the image before using. Suggestion 3 - You could input questions and answers or an example piece of writing like for a controlled assessment. EXAMPLE Suggestion 4 - For a more traditional jigsaw, you could make hard copies as an in-class challenge. Print screen, stick onto card and cut up.   On Saturday I attended the MFL show and tell in york organised by the lovely @suzibewell. I listened to fab MFL colleagues sharing a wide range of ideas and came away with lots of inspiring ideas. One of my favourites was the idea of trash or treasure, presented by Clare Seccombe @valleseco. The idea is you tell students which type of words to find, for example adjectives or numbers, and these go in to the treasure chest. For more information, I recommend taking a look at Clare's presentation. I have made some treasure boards in English, French and Spanish which can be downloaded here. I have also created a cardboard treasure chest using the app foldify. For a more kinaesthetic approach, I am going to give these to students along with a plastic beaker for a bin. You can download a pdf version of the treasure chest template.   Selingua is a freeware programme for learning foreign languages. You can increase your vocabulary and grammatical understanding through six different exercises including crosswords. www.selingua.com
Year 11 warmed up today with musical mind maps. Whilst the music played, they had to write down as much vocabulary on the topic as the could. Once the music stopped, they moved to the next map and tried to add more. Each mind map contained different topic areas so they had to study what others had put first so as not to repeat. A great opportunity to enjoy some German music too.
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Karen WhiteheadI have been teaching languages for 13 years. I enjoy finding and developing new ways to engage students with their learning. This page is designed for sharing anything and everything that may be of use to others. Enjoy! 
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