New Year's resolution ...

Well ... this is something that I have wanted to do for a little while now and have finally plucked up the courage to do.  I resolved to think and reflect more about the learning that actually takes place in the classroom and what works / doesn't work with our children. So, 2013 is here and today is the first day of the 'year', so here goes ...

I love Mondays, I get to work with my fab top set Year 8 French class - they're wicked fun and most of them have a real thirst for learning.  They're also the only KS3 language class that I teach, so I see it as my 'guilty pleasure' as well in the week.  The hardest thing in our school is that we only work with Year 7 and Year 8 children for one hour a week. 

Today we were looking a jobs as our theme, but we are thinking about using the conditional and the constant quest to think about how words are pronounced.  I was amazed by how much this group have retained - they had been doing a project with a non-French speaker leading them, working to create videos in French to promote the English education system and our school, so I was wondering how much they may have forgotten since some 'real French input' in the month of December, but impressively they were fab.  I gave them loads of vocab and just asked them to work together to rank the jobs in order firstly by number of syllables, and then, within the syllable groupings into alphabetical order - it was amazing - their tenacity and focus working together was brilliant.  In all honesty, nobody could suggest that I asked them to do anything 'inspirtional' but all of them were on task, all engaged and, I would even hasten to suggest that they were all working together to improve each other's work and that they were discussing language for the duration.  I get a real buzz when they are so on board and involved - it was lovely. 

The rest of the lesson was pretty bog-standard really - bit of listening, a few games, sentence extensions, races for masculine/feminine endings etc, but the best bit from today was definitely my starter, getting them to work with new vocabulary and to do something completely unexpected with it.

My other resolution this year is to embed the role of 'archivist' (recording and reporting about progress and learning using BookCreator and iDoceo on the iPad) into every lesson ... so far, I've taught one lesson ... and failed.  Oh well, tomorrow is another day ...