South Gloucestershire Regional Support Group

Coordinator: Jo Sowerbutts, South Gloucestershire Local Authority, Bowling Hill, Chipping Sodbury, BS37 6JX
Tel: 01454 863180
Email: jo.sowerbutts@southglos.gov.uk

South Gloucestershire Regional Support Group holds regular sessions at different centres around South Gloucestershire. Meetings are open to everyone involved in planning and delivering MFL in KS1/2: primary head teachers and class teachers, secondary teachers, PGCE students and teacher trainers. We welcome anyone involved in MFL from our neighbouring LAs as well.

Bristol Regional Consultative Group is a networking and discussion group for Regional Support Groups based in Bristol, North Somerset, BANES and South Gloucestershire.

Regional Support Group sessions

Session 1: Wednesday 29 November 2006
Title: Cross-curricular learning and the languages framework
Speaker(s): The Primary MFL Team
Venue: Severnside Training Centre

The Primary Languages advisory teachers presented ideas for cross-curricular lessons. These included parachute games, PE suggestions and a topic around French life culminating in a world-cup football tournament and French breakfast. A wide range of Christmas ideas were shared by all. These included websites, songs, advent calendars and stories in several languages.

Session 2: Monday 8 January, 2007
Title: Using ICT to access free resources. Effective use of ICT in the teaching and learning of MFL – exploration of how ICT can be used effectively to provide free resources. The resources will be provided by teachers for teachers and will include IWB, ‘digiblues’ and internet ideas.
Speaker(s): Claire Smith, Ros Farrell
Venue: Severnside Training Centre

An extremely well attended session for the second meeting (20).
Claire Smith demonstrated some ICT ideas:

• Using Photo Story 3 – a free Microsoft resource
• PowerPoint ideas
• Using sound – Claire demonstrated The Enormous Turnip in Russian!

Session 3: Wednesday 7 March, 2007
Title: Planning an International day/week in your school
Speaker(s): Candy Wild, Sue Etherington, Marianne Lovell, Sarah Champion and Diane Ashman
Venue: Severnside Training Centre
Time: 16.00-18.00

We were delighted to have five colleagues share the ways in which they had organised a variety of different language days and weeks in their respective schools. 

There was a broad range of approaches from Key stage 2, Key Stage 1 and a Special School. Colleagues shared their planning and lots of photographs of children having so much fun. We also looked at websites and webcams that could be useful.

The international days included a variety of experiences from sampling foods from different countries, having a “déjeuner sur l’herbe”, an Eiffel tower challenge to travelling to Spain on a virtual aeroplane!

Plans for the different international days are now available on the portal along with an exemplar letter to parents, giving information and encouraging them to share their own expertise.

We would like to extend say a big thank you to Candy Wild, Sue Etherington, Marianne Lovell, Sarah Champion and Diane Ashman for a lively and informative session.

Session 4: Tuesday 1 May, 2007
Title: Promoting links with other countries through Comenius, British Council and other means. Schools involved in the Andalucian partnership will talk about the impact this has had in their schools.
Speaker(s): to be confirmed
Venue: to be confirmed
Time: to be confirmed

Session 5: Thursday 12 July, 2007
Title: Using classroom based and cheap resources to deliver primary languages
Speaker(s): Sarah Hall - MFL Adviser for Reading Borough and West Berkshire Council
Venue: International Room, Ridings High School, Winterborne
Time: 16.00 – 18.00pm

This second RSG at our new venue, the Ridings School in Winterbourne, was very well attended. Sarah Hall led a lively and interesting session on using easily accessible resources to deliver some of the Year 3 Framework objectives.

Sarah reminded teachers of the main features of the framework and how well it links in with learning activities that teachers probably already use.  She demonstrated a range of games and songs to meet the oracy and literacy objectives. It was a very interactive session, with colleagues being invited to take part in team games and line games.

Resources used included:

• bean bags
• fly swats
• puppets
• soft toys
• plastic fruit
• coloured balls
• multilink

Everyone was given a handout as a reminder of the activities, with an explicit link to a framework objective for each activity or game.

Participants were very positive about the session and we are very grateful to Sarah for sharing such a range of useful ideas with us.

NACELL Regional Support Groups are funded by the DfES and co-ordinated by CILT, the National Centre for Languages in support of the National Languages Strategy.