Well I survived week two… just! I was exhausted come Wednesday, never mind Thursday or Friday. I felt like I was a trainee again, trying lots of different things, some working well, some things that need tweaking, every single lesson being taught for the first time and every single lesson different.
However, I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Out of 14 students, 11 jumped from a level 4 in their writing to a level 6, the remaining thing from a 4 to a 5 (two of whom simply missed a third tense but wrote a good half-page from memory).
I was really pleased when two students had a memory block, and using the combination of grammatical and communicative methods were able to piece together two level 6 pieces all the same. If they would have only had the communicative or memory method to fall back on, they would not have managed in the same way. So at this point, three cheers for a bit of grammar! One student who I had barely seen since Christmas until this course started wrote an immaculate piece with not one error – not one letter, which was a relief, probably for both of us.
I’m really pleased that I have the time to give them full and constructive tailored feedback to help them develop further as there are only 14 students in this class.
The biggest challenge for me this past week was the CLIL cooking session. Trying to remember a recipe, remember to drill the items in the TL, only give instruction in the TL and cook at the same time was very difficult (and I was very slow leading to some students getting bored and complaining of sore legs etc) but I refused to speak English. The final result was good, the students had eventually managed their Tortilla Española with their recipes in Spanish. This week we are attempting a Roscon De Reyes, however I will be giving a lesson beforehand to go through the vocabulary, verbs and methodology for cooking, the students will create their own Pastel Loco before attempting the Roscon in a real-life kitchen.
The students really enjoyed MYLO, in fact a third of them prefer it to Language Perfect because of the interface and the project element. However, Language Perfect now has the entirety of the AQA spec vocabulary on there for all to access, so I need to find away to get the students hooked on this.
The students loved KLOO however, they seemed to forget the link between ‘amos’ ‘emos’ and ‘we’ in the TL and English. I have been drilling them with this all week, and most of them included it in their writing.
This coming week, we will see the end of the ‘holidays’ theme after completing the required AQA FCSE assessments in speaking, listening and reading. The far end of the week, we will be doing the Innocent Voices project as created by Rachel Hawkes, which I am sure the students will enjoy as I did an intercultural version for my Y9s who were not continuing Spanish, and they loved it.
I have no doubt this week will fly by!
Any hints/tips as always leave a comment, it would be muchly appreciated :0)
