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To share ideas and good practice to raise the profile of Spanish in your school.
Please CONTRIBUTE by adding to the sections available, and contact ruthbravo@yahoo.es if you want to add a section.
DO SIGN WITH YOUR NAME WHEN YOU LEAVE AN IDEA OF RECOMMENDATION!

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Inspirational read: Why study Languages?

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Inspirational read: Why study Languages?

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Why Study Languages? : Hogan-Brun, Gabrielle: Amazon.es: Libros

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Studying any subject at degree level is an investment in the future that involves significant cost. Now more than ever, students and their parents need to weigh up the potential benefits of university courses. That's where the Why Study series comes in. This series of books, aimed at students, pa...

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Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know, by Barak Rosenshine; American Educator Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 2012, AFT (teachertoolkit.co.uk)

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ISMLA Creative Writing Competition 2022 – ISMLA

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You can download the competition details here as a pdf. Welcome to our creative writing competition 2022! We are very much looking forward to reading students' creative work. This competition is open to all of your pupils in Year 10 upwards and they are welcome to enter either in the GCSE or A Level categories.

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Run your own spelling bee competition

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Get a few short texts together, get students in group under timed conditions, most accurate translation wins!

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Students to apply PALMA (place, action, location, mood - are they happy? and Also (extra, like weather) to a given photo, best description wins.
Also: students to submit and describe their own holiday snap, maybe from Spain if possible!

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Stephen Spender Trust – Multilingual Poetry and Storytelling (stephen-spender.org)

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General MFL, French specialist, can lead an assembly remotely, really interesting and inspirational, contact cyrille.rollet@lancaster.ac.uk, Senior Teaching Associate in French

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Esmeralda Salgado, Former Head of MFL & Digital Lead. Advanced Skills Teacher. Microsoft Innovative Educator. Author. Blogger.CPD provider

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MFL Craft @BotonesSalgado

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As you know, I am starting a new job in September as Head of MFL in a comprehensive school near Oxford, Princes Risborough School. Talking to my new team, it was obvious that they are super talented and really committed, as well as the SLT, to raise the profile of MFL across the school. MFL is an option at GCSE and we would like more students to choose it as option at the end of Y9!!

"Languages, a LIFE skill to achieve"

I had a preliminary meeting with my new team in May to establish the priorities of the department using the SWOT analysis diagram: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. This led the path for our vision: For MFL to become a popular, established choice for students at GCSE with great results and make sure that pupils saw the benefits of learning a new language. We came out with a Mission Statement that summarised this vision: Languages, a LIFE skill to achieve. This vision/mission statement would drive our curriculum: students should choose MFL for GCSE because it is a LIFE skill and must be learned and nurtured.

To make the connection between LIFE skill and what happens in the classroom, we agreed that being able to communicate ORALLY at the end of the language journey had to be a must for the students, so our curriculum should be focussed on developing FLUENCY.

To achieve this, we would use our knowledge of Cognitive Science, the benefits of a Lexicogrammar approach to language learning and applying Rosenshine's Principles to our teaching pedagogy, without forgetting the power of gamifying the curriculum, for real communicative tasks, even when these are just a drilling exercise, part of the learning process and, of course, Project Based Learning, as the reason why a unit will be taught, which will connect what we teach to a purposeful, meaningful, real to life scenario. At this point we agreed that we would involve our partner school links as much as possible, so that at the end of each taught unit, students would have the opportunity to speak/present what they had learned to a real native audience.

Tweaking the curriculum: LESS IS MORE and PROJECT BASED LEARNING

Last week we met to actually design a new curriculum for KS3, which would take into consideration all these elements, as well as the elements of our new GCSE for languages.

Below you can find the presentation I use with my team to give a rationale to our new Curriculum. It was lovely to see that actually, the topics for KS3 would be the same as studied so far! We just had to take into consideration the new vocab lists for AQA/Edexcel and tweak some of the content to make sure that as much of that vocabulary list was learned during KS3.

Finally, we agreed to use 5 Magic Powers, our non-negotiables, which would be the common thread across the whole curriculum. I have talked about the 5 Magic Powers before in this blog. I love them, because, not only they are success criteria for productive skills at GCSE level, even with the new GCSE, but they help my students to be able to speak and be fluent, as these powers are so embedded in all our lessons.

If I ask my students: what do you do in your free time? They will always have something to say: an activity, an opinion, a reason, reported speech sentence, more than one tense and some extremely colloquial and common expressions, high impact expressions as students learn a few formulaic expressions for each power element, throughout the curriculum to be used in any context. By doing this, students not only speak but they embed the elements that will score them points later in their GCSE exam. We teach them to speak and give information and, by default, they will score highly in their exam.

Finally, let's not forget, that at the end of each unit, students will have the opportunity to put the language (vocabulary, register and grammar) into practise via a real-life situation task: Taking part in little drama sketch performed in assembly, talking to our partner schools on a given topic/presentation, pitching for the best holiday experience to be featured in a digital travel blog, taking part in a film review competition, taking part in a school treasure hunt with the studied topic as the theme for this etc...

For the Magic Powers to have effect, they will need to be taught and practised constantly, throughout the learning journey at KS3, in all the units: that's why less is more!! Fewer units, more time to learn lexis and grammar and more time to embed skills.

The next step is to create the content for the units: via Sentence Builders, using the material in textbooks, the new GCSE vocabulary lists and our knowledge of the language as specialists and create a mark scheme to mirror the curriculum. To create our sentence builders we are using the site Sentence Builders, super fast to create + lots of interactive activities to go with them! I will share mine once I create them.

This is the language journey to share with students.

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This Blog is about sharing good practice and my own Teaching and Learning reflections. If you or your school would like personalised CPD, get in touch, via Twitter or The Contact Form in this Blog.

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Take extracts from your 6th form End of Year survey, create a poster, display everywhere, point this out during Parent's Evenings.  Example:
"Teachers are very very very supportive"
"Feedback was always clear with specific targets to do"

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Education Perfect Language Championships 

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Education Perfect Language Championships 

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Global competitions, Certificates available for downloading
(for members only)
EP International Official Events: 2023-2024 - EP Help (educationperfect.com)

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At EP, we host a range of engaging competitions for students every year. This gives students the opportunity to take part in exciting events, and compete with peers in different locations around the world.

This article covers upcoming events for our schools located outside of Australia and New Zealand.

International Championships

EP has a wide range of exciting and engaging events planned for the 2023-24 academic year. All schools with an Education Perfect subscription will be invited to participate.

The dates for 2023-2024 are listed below.

If you are a non-subscribing school and wish to participate, please get in touch to see if your school is eligible.

School Networks

Occasionally, we host events for specific school networks. These are often held in conjunction with existing events. Eligible EP users will be invited to compete, with specific events and dates found below:

School-wide or Inter-school Competitions

At any time, you are able to create your own competitions for students within your school - or even inter-school competitions between your students and students at a partner school!

This option is available to all schools with an Education Perfect subscription. For more information on how to set up a competition, check out our article How do I create a competition?

If you have any questions about upcoming international competitions or would like to learn more, please reach out to our team.

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EP International Official Events: 2023-2024

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At EP, we host a range of engaging competitions for students every year. This gives students the opportunity to take part in exciting events, and compete with p

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Residential trips, family stay (Valencia)

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Residential trips, family stay (Valencia)

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Escuela de Español en Valencia | Españolé Ih Valencia – Tu escuela de español en Valencia (espanoleschool.com)

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Valencia

Alegre, soleada y bañada por el mar Mediterráneo, Valencia es luminosa y acogedora. Una ciudad cosmopolita y llena de contrastes en la que conviven historia y tradiciones con innovación y vanguardia. Con una variada oferta cultural, amplias zonas verdes y todos los servicios y comodidades, Valencia es perfecta para tu estancia en España.

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Escuela de Español en Valencia | Españolé Ih Valencia - Tu escuela de español en Valencia

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¿Necesitas aprender español? ✔ Entra y conoce Españolé Ih. Tu escuela de español acreditada en Valencia ⇨ Entra para más información