Boxing Up

This is a technique I learned on a training course for 1:1 tutors, and it is designed to support pupils who find it difficult to come up with ideas and to structure their writing. An example in its most basic form would be using the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill.

boxing up 1

 

 

 

This boxes up into the simple story:

boxing up 2

This could become:

boxing up 3

 

 

This second story follows exactly the format of the first, but with enough details changed to make it a new story.

The source text can be carefully chosen to help with whatever the pupils are struggling with – eg a descriptive piece to help them use more adjectives, or to understand how to include similes and metaphors within a piece of writing.

This technique can be used as closely or loosely as needed to support the child, beginning by boxing up every few words, moving onto every sentence and finally every paragraph until the pupil is confident enough to structure a piece of writing unaided.

Why MFL is good for children with SEN

A few days ago I read something that made me really angry. It was an article written by a parent about how the education system is letting her children down. At first I was sympathetic, and found myself nodding along with what she was saying. I agree that the education system isn’t perfect. I agree that sometimes, some children slip through the net and don’t get the help they need. But then she used the words that are guaranteed to infuriate me: “What’s the point in making them study French when they can’t even read and write English?”

It’s not the first time I’ve come across this attitude, and I’m sure it won’t be the last, but it makes me cross and it makes me sad. I’m an MFL specialist so maybe I’m biased, but I can see plenty of reasons not to withdraw children from MFL lessons – including and especially those with learning difficulties. Let me explain….

What do French, Spanish, German, Italian and Dutch have in common? That’s right…they are all languages. So is English, so already we have identified something that English and whatever foreign language the child is studying have in common!

As languages, French, Spanish, German etc use grammar – just like English. And so here is my first reason for not withdrawing a child from their MFL lessons: in MFL we talk about grammar. We use words such as noun, verb, adjective, definite article, preposition….all the words the child is being taught in their English lessons are being reinforced in their MFL lesson. If they didn’t understand it first time, here is a golden opportunity to go over it again, in a different context. In MFL lessons we talk about the fact that verbs change their endings depending on who is doing them, and compare this to English “I look, you look” but “he looks”, so again there is more reinforcement of grammar. We talk about the different tenses and when to use them, and we look at how to structure a sentence and guess what…..we compare all this to English too. We look at similes and alliteration. We practise dictionary skills. In MFL, more than in probably any other lesson, we reinforce what they are learning in their English lessons.

It’s not just grammar that MFL helps with; it’s spelling too. In MFL lessons we look at spelling patterns and we talk about which ones are similar to English and which ones are completely different. More importantly, we think about how to remember the spellings of the words, and these techniques can be transferred to their English lessons.

It’s not just their English that benefits. When we learn how to count in a different language, or how to tell the time, we’re reinforcing their maths. When we look at countries where that language is spoken we are reinforcing their geography. The children study the culture of those countries (PSHE and RE), investigate the rhythm of language (music) and perform role plays (drama).

The other important thing about language – all languages – is that they are a means of communication. It isn’t just about reading and writing. Communication also involves speaking and listening, and we do plenty of that in MFL lessons. Just because a child struggles to spell, or to hold a pencil, doesn’t mean that they can’t excel at speaking, and just because a child finds speaking and listening difficult doesn’t mean they can’t do well with reading and writing. Last year I taught Spanish to a child who had several learning disabilities including dyslexia. He found writing difficult, but he really got the concept of adjective agreement and was able to show his understanding with the way he pronounced words when speaking, and he was really proud of his achievement. I’ve taught French to Deaf children because the school believed that they should have the same opportunities as hearing children. Some of them found it difficult, but some of them did really, really well with it. What a shame it would have been for those children if they’d been pulled out of language lessons because somebody decided it would be too hard for them.

My dream is for more people to take this attitude. To stop saying “What’s the point?” and to start saying “Why not?” Because maybe, just maybe, MFL could be the one subject the child excels at.

Addition 17-08-16
I came across this article recently, which gives a few more reasons: Why foreign languages have a place in autism education

A Disco in my Classroom

What do Black Lace and sentences have in common? Verbs, that’s what.

Teaching children how to use capital letters and full stops is not as easy as it sounds. Most of them already know that they go at the start and end of a sentence – the problem is that some of them don’t understand what a sentence is (see Why do they do that?).

A basic definition of a sentence is ‘a group of words that contain a verb and make sense on their own’. So far so good, but what if the children don’t understand what a verb is? That’s about where I was with my group, and that’s where Black Lace came in. We cancelled the English lesson, pushed the tables and chairs back and had a disco. We listened to Superman and joined in. We walked and we sneezed and we skied and we sprayed and we swam. And then we listed  all the actions from the song with illustrations for each one to makeverbs a display of verbs. By now the children were able to suggest other words that they thought might be verbs – all of them correct – and we added them to the display.

sentences and phrases Then we agreed that perhaps we should go back to the English lesson, so we sorted some groups of words into “Sentence” and “Not a sentence” by deciding whether or not they had verbs and whether or not they made sense. Now that they knew what verbs were they found this quite easy. Result!

Now that they knew what a sentence was, we were able to go back to the original LO of being able to use capital letters and full stops.

VCOP display

Every classroom in my school has to have a VCOP display. In fact as a supply teacher I’ve been in a lot of classrooms, and every single one of them has had a VCOP display, so I’m assuming it’s something on Ofsted’s ticklist.

Now don’t get me wrong – I like VCOP. I know it has a lot of opponents, but I find it a very useful teaching tool, and like every tool its success depends on how you use it. I’m not a big fan of taking it out of context and treating it as four separate elements that children have to shoehorn into their writing, and to me a VCOP display does that.

My sentence displayThis display is my solution. My children are Deaf and for many of them BSL is their first language. They find English sentence structure difficult, so I have put up this display to demonstrate the structure of a standard English sentence. It would work equally well for EAL and EFL students, and I’m sure it could also be adapted for the MFL classroom, although I haven’t tried that yet.

adjective and subjectI have my Openers at the beginning of the sentence, where they belong, and my Punctuation at the end, also where it belongs. Connectives are underneath punctuation, to show that they are used to join two sentences together. Vocabulary is spread over four panels – Nouns (subject and object), Verbs and Adjectives.

Like everything with teaching, once you’ve done it, you think of a better way to do it, and next time I’ll move the adjective panel to just before the object instead of just before the subject. I think adjectives are probably used more to describe the subject than object, and it means that I could also have a S V A structure (The rose is pink) in the middle of the longer structure. It’s still a work in progress and I do plan to split the subject panel into nouns and pronouns, and the white panel needs an “or number” halfway down. Other than that, I’m quite happy with it so far.

In addition to providing them with a standard structure sentence, it is exposing them to grammatical terms, and already one of the boys in the class has asked what the word “article” means and what it’s for.

So there you have it. Nobody can accuse me of not having a VCOP display in my classroom, but I’ve managed to turn it into something more useful.

Teaching the split e phoneme

This is a method I picked up from Sue Kerrigan at Let Me Learn. It’s simple but very effective and I have used it successfully with a group of children who were finding words like “cake” and “make” really tricky to spell.

I took two pieces of card and wrote “a” on one and “e” on the other and then I attached them with a bendaroo, leaving a letter sized gap between them.

a_e phonemeThen we sounded out some words: grape – g-r-a-p – and wrote the “gr” on a mini whiteboard, put our “a__e” sound card next, which left a space just big enough to write the “p” between them.

We did this with a few more words until they were happy with the idea that the a sound could be made by a split “a” and “e”. By the end of the session most of the children could spell split e words. The rest needed another session to reinforce the concept, but they did all get there.

What spelling tricks have you tried that have worked? Let me know in the comments below – I’d love to hear about them.