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York Regional Support Group |
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Regular sessions
are held at York
St John University. The first RSG at York this year was very well attended by a good mix of students in training and local primary teachers. Helen Waldram, from Scarborough, came to share with us her thoughts on using Drama in ELL, and to show a video of a performance by her primary pupils of the Musicians of Bremen. Helen showed us how drama can be used to enhance and embellish language activities, encouraging creativity and polishing memorisation and pronunciation. She worked through several examples with us, linking literacy to oracy and intercultural understanding, and the discussions and questions showed how valuable this session had been. She then showed us several useful resources and others shared their ideas. As always, there was a chance for new members to meet the core group over refreshements, and there are always opportunities to network! Date: 27/11/2007 This session was lead by Carolyn Pinkney, one of York LA's Regional Trainers. Carolyn works in a primary school which teaches French & German throughout the school, as well as some Italian. She also coordinates the 5 Primary Foreign Language Assistants who work in 14 York schools. One FLA is from La Reunion and another from New Caledonia, and the rest from metropolitan France. They all bring different skills to the classrooms. Carolyn explained how the applications and funding processes worked, and described how she managed and trained the FLAs. She gave us some excellent tips on classroom activities, resources and cross-curricular opportunities, as well as ideas for small group reinforcement activities. Her PowerPoint included lots of photos, and there was a lively discussion afterwards.The audience was a mixture of teacher training students and primary teachers, and it was useful for students to hear first-hand about opportunities for them to work abroad too in a foreign environment. Date: 05/02/2008 Heidi Gallagher came to give us a presentation on the use of interactive whiteboards for primary languages, usung the new QCA schemes of Work as a focus. As usual, we started the session with refreshments and time to introduce new colleagues and put people in touch. This is one of the most useful parts of our meetings and this time we were pleased to be able to put a secondary colleague immediately in touch with two of her primary feeder schools! Heidi has spent a lot of time producing materials for the interactive whiteboard and we were all very impressed with the results. She emphasised the need to share resources, and how using the interactive whiteboard gave her an immediate lesson plan, as well as the possibility, for example, of making traditional flashcards and card games from the screen pictures. She gave us several hints about techniques, as well as lots of ideas for activities. She emphasised the value of using the QCA Schemes of Work, which is linked to the KS2 Framework for languages. Date: 04/03/2008 Unfortunately the external presenter failed to turn up! But fortunately we were able to turn the situation to our advantage.We spent longer than usual on an informal opportunity to network and update colleagues, putting people in touch with each other and sharing ideas and information. Those who had been to the Primary Languages Show cascaded things they had learned there, and then Carys Tew and Ann Gregory gave an impromptu demonstration of Take 10 en français, which they had both attended at the Primary Languages Show. A PE coordinator was present and able to advise on that aspect, and everyone joined in, as they had been anticipating exercise when they came! They agreed that it is an excellent idea to combine PE and early language learning, and that if the language used is simple, the activities are hugely beneficial for children in both areas. We ended our session talking about ideas for RSGs in 2008-9, and although disappointed not to have run the published programme, we felt it was a useful RSG. Date: 15/04/2008 As usual, we started by encouraging new members to talk to old timers, and then an update on 'what is happening locally'. We were then very pleased to welcome Wendy Adeniji to lead this session on using interactive whiteboards to support primary languages. She showed us a wide range of activities presented initially through PowerPoint and the interactive whiteboard, and then showed us how to create our own resources. This part of the session was particularly well-received, and gave us all something new to take home. As often happens, the simple ideas were very effective, and it is also good to hear other trainers giving similar messages but with a different focus. It was reassuring to see that it was grey and dull in Paris via access to the webcams on the Tour Eiffel, and fun to create new stories with very simple pre-designed backgrounds and Clipart. Wendy's handout gave us pointers for further information and we would like to thank her for her input to our RSG. This was the last RSG of this academic year.
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Coordinator: Ann Gregory