GCSE French Writing Focus - sample essays for controlled assessments & coursework

Scroll down for a link to download a completely free Windows desktop program with lots of interactive exercises and worksheets based on a sample GCSE French essay on the topic of "A bad school day".

The resource can be used with interactive whiteboards or with individual computers (Windows only) and can be installed on the school network.

The downloaded is actually a non-time-limited demo of a full resource containing 16 essays, with free access to 1 of those 16 essays.

Read more »

Spanish resources: New York multi-millionaire leaves $1m to his driver... (Exploiting a news story)

These Spanish resources are based on a news story from BBC Mundo about a New York multi-millionaire who left $1.5million to his driver and doorman:

Ton Christ est juif (French resources based on a short poem)

I was reminded of this poem today when I followed a link from @MarieFrance on Twitter to this post on her blog:
http://mmeperkins.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/01/po%C3%ABme-sur-les-nationalit%C3%A9s.html (which also has a link to a previous lesson / blog post with great ideas for teaching nationality, possessive adjectives and adjectival agreement, as well as a bit of citizenship...)

Anyway, as well as the poem and the link to the previous resources, there was also a link to a TaskMagic2 Text Match file. This really brought home to me a major improvement in TaskMagic3 compared with previous versions: in earlier versions of TaskMagic, any text that you put into Mix&Gap would be converted into one block of text, so it wasn't really possible to make exercises based on formatted text such as letters, recipes, songs, poems etc. TaskMagic3 makes it possible to create all sorts of interactive and printed resources based on these kinds of texts, as you'll see from the resources posted here.

Read more »

French resources: "Catastrophes naturelles: Record de pertes économiques en 2011"

These French resources are based on a news story from 20minutes.fr, about the fact that 2011 hit a record high for economic losses caused by natural disasters:

Getting them settled...

What activities can you use to settle the class as soon as they come in?

How can you give them all something to focus on, so that when everybody is there, and you're ready to begin, you can get on with the lesson?

NB. The context for this blog post is a situation where students turn up to the class in drips and drabs, maybe because they've just had PE, or they're coming from different parts of the school, or they've just had lunch, or whatever. (I don't want to get into a discussion about whether or not we should make students line up outside the class until they are all present and silent, as that is not what this post is about.)

The suggestions below are based on using a projector or interactive whiteboard (IWB), and they are examples of things that you can just put up on the screen and leave there, requiring no interaction with the board or your computer until you are ready to move on.

Read more »

AQA AS style cloze exercises using TaskMagic3

There's a pdf cloze exercise below based on an article from BBC Mundo. It requires students to put a verb or adjective into the correct form according to the context, just like one of the exercises on the AQA AS exam.

The other file is a TaskMagic3 individual exercise file (_tx3). You'll need version 3.2 or later of TaskMagic to open this. It opens directly to

Read more »