Greater Manchester Regional Support Group

Coordinator: Adalgisa Serio
Contact: Adalgisa Serio, Comenius North West, MANCAT (Manchester College of Arts and Technology), Language Department, 2 New Quay Street, Manchester M3 3BE
Tel: 0161 9535995 ext. 2448 Fax: 0161 953 2259
Email: adalgisa_serio@mancat.ac.uk

Alternative contact: Clare Crowson, Altrincham Girls' Grammar School, Cavendish Road, Altrincham WA14 2NL Tel: 0161 912 5912
Email: crowson@staff.aggs.trafford.sch.uk

Regular sessions are held at different venues around Greater Manchester.

Date: 10/10/2007
Title: Help Your Pupils To Say It Right!
Speaker: Odile Hamey, Paloma Frattasi

A very well attended first session for our RSG (30 people in all), hosted at Altrincham Girls' Grammar School. The focus was on how to help children to improve their pronunciation in German, Spanish and French, through activities that teachers can use in their classrooms. We started to chant the German alphabet through a song, passed on pair work activities that children can do to practise the sounds "c + vowels and z" in Spanish, and finally, Odile Hamey from MANCAT showed us the labyrinth of French sounds through PowerPoint, group work on pronunciation lotto, and limericks. A good session all in all and we are already looking forward to the Christmas one!

Date: 06/12/2007
Title: Christmas across Europe
Venue: Goethe-Institut
Time: 16.30-18.00
Speaker: Annamaria Sheikh, Cathy Brady, Lorraine Flynn, Sofia Holmes

A very enjoyable session; we had four expert speakers covering Spanish, German, Italian and French Christmas customs and traditions. The session involved a mixture of facts about Christmas in the various countries, activities and songs - by the end, we could sing multi-lingual versions of Jingle Bells! There were plenty of ideas for people to take away and use immediately in the classroom, as well as worksheets and song lyrics, and the PowerPoints used will be sent to participants. Our grateful thanks to the Goethe Institute for seasonal refreshments of Glühwein, Stollen and Lebküchen! We did note that 20 of the 45 people who had reserved places for this session did not turn up, which was a pity in that we had been obliged to turn others away when it appeared that the session was full to capacity; we will try to avoid this happening again.

Date: 31/01/2008
Title: More Whiteboard Wizards
Venue: MMU Didsbury Campus
Time: 16.30-18.00
Speaker: Clare Crowson (AGSG), Deborah Kerney and others

A very well attended session with 38 participants! Dr. Archana Hinduja, Lecturer and Interactive Whiteboard Expert, Institute of Education MMU, started the session explaining the functions and different types of Interactive Whiteboards together with the wonderful potential of using this tool when teaching primary languages. She also showed a few useful websites for people using the Promethean whiteboard. Then Clare Crowson, from AGGS, and joint Coordinator of the Greater Manchester RSG, led a very lively session on practical activities applied to both vocabulary and grammar points, through dragging, hiding, and matching objects and nouns. A big thank you to Cathy Brady for hosting the event at the Insitute of Education at MMU.

Date: 04/03/2008
Title: Planning an International Day (joint session with Stockport)
Venue: Altrincham Girls' Grammar School Sixth Form Centre
Time: 16.30-18.00
Speaker: Nick Warren, Pascale Jones, Beth Matthews

This was a well-attended session which gave everyone present many ideas for international activities outside the MFL lesson.
We started with a presentation from a secondary teacher of 'books' made by her year 11 pupils as an Enterprise project; these will be put onto CDs and be on sale at our next RSG session in June for 50p each. Next a local primary teacher described last year's French (Bastille) Day in her Junior school, and told us that such a day does not have to involve huge upheavals in routine. The main speaker was Nick Warren from Parkroyal Community School. He spoke in detail about the events his school runs to celebrate the European Day of Languages and to embed during the rest of the week the language taught in discrete lessons in the school. His ideas made some of us realise how much more we could do! Finally 2 teachers from Stockport LA shared the activities they had put on in their respective schools, including a Winter Olympics Day involving local PE students.

Date: 23/06/2008
Title: Swap-Shop: exchanging ideas
Venue: Parrs Wood High School, Manchester
Time: 16.30-18.00
Speaker: All participants

22 teachers turned up for our last session. Primary teachers, teacher assistants and PGCE students came with their memory stick or CD to exchange ideas, PowerPoints and examples of successful activities which were saved and then copied by all the teachers individually before they left. The activities showed ranged for language (examples were given in French, Spanish Italian and German) and content, from cultural awareness to teaching vocabulary, cooking and language learning, interactive activities, games and so on. The attendees enjoyed and appreciated the idea of sharing material, and that the day after they had already something ready to use in their own classrooms!

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