Our Spanish pen pals from Ourense

Last year we wrote on this blog about our link with our friends from Prácticas Primary School in the town of Ourense, in the North West of Spain. This year 7 Red and 8 Blue have been our ambassadors in Spain by continuing this pen pal exchange with the Spanish students. 8 Blue have been pen pals with class 6ºB for two years and the two classes met again via videoconference on Friday 18th June. This is the link to the videoconference. Thank you very much to 8 Blue for their enthusiasm and I hope they stay friends with their Spanish pen pals for many years to come!

BA Flag Award

Our year 9 second language students (Spanish and German) are currently embarking on the BA Flag Award course which was designed by BA to help educate students in the necessary language required to gain employment within the travel industry. BA and Heathrow, two of the largest employers in that industry, were, at one time, having to look abroad for suitable candidates that had the necessary linguistic skills to employ. The BA Flag Award was produced in an effort to be able to find suitable candidates from the UK itself. The Flag Award for Schools is therefore based on the Internal Flag Tests developed for staff at British Airways. We, at the Weald of Kent, are proud to be providing our students with the opportunity to gain such an employment relevant qualification. Good luck!

The MFL Team.

Au revoir! / ¡Adios! / Auf Wiedersehen!

Alas, our Foreign Language Assistants are leaving us today. They have been wonderful company in the MFL staffroom here at the Weald of Kent and we shall miss their personalities greatly. Their work with the students has been invaluable and we thank them for all they have done. Pictures will be added to the MFL Hall of Fame shortly... The MFL Team

AS français, Lundi 5 mars 2012

Chers étudiants de français,

Malheureusement ce n'est pas possible pour ni étudiants, ni professeurs, d'accéder au Wifi du lycée. Donc, pour le moment, on ne va pas les utiliser pendent notre cours lundi 5 mars.

Merci et à lundi,

Mlle Hardman

Communications Friday 02 March 2012

Dear 6th Form "Communication" students,

If you are reading this you will be aware that I am not in on Friday 2nd March. My apologies for the lack of notice. This was not a planned absence. We will postpone the celebration lesson to NEXT WEDNESDAY 7th MARCH.

HUGE apologies to the two students who were due to deliver their speeches today. We look forward to hearing them NEXT WEDNESDAY 7th instead.

Cover work for this lesson, however, is as follows:

1) Find a picture online that best sums up "Communication" to you - be it modern / old / tatemodern-esque / 3D / 2D / obvious / coded etc...

2) It might be that you want to take your own photo. If you take your own photo upload it to a website/blog/photosharing site for us to see (making the image public for easy access).

3) Find out how to make your own QR code for link to the site where we can see your image.

4) Please print your QR code out onto an A4 piece of paper with the title: "What Communication is to Me" and your name underneath the title, and bring to next lesson. We may use these for display.

5) Please also email me the A4 document with the QR code on it. I'd like a digital copy for digital display purposes.

That's it! We will look at these next lesson Wed 7th March if time.

Bytes and jpegs,

Miss Hardman

Vocabexpress survey

Dear Year 11 French students,

Hopefully you are all enjoying the language learning benefits that Vocabexpress can provide. Please complete this Vocabexpress questionnaire so that we can evaluate our future use of the site.

Thank you

Mlle Hardman

Ratatouille!

In French with our year 8's today we were talking about the Pixar movie Ratatouille and started discussing where the dish came from and what is was made from. Here is a photo that we found with some explanation.

MFL Teachers Use Languages too!

Mrs Stockwell has done us proud in the MFL office today. The last time she had a conversation in Italian was 20 years ago. Yet today, when in desperate need of an Italian linguist, Mrs Stockwell came to the aid of Mrs Murayama and pulled an Italian conversation out of the bag in order to book hotel rooms in a hotel in Italy. She successfully booked the rooms and we are very proud!

The MFL team!

Why Learn Languages - The Apprentice

Here it is! Another reason why you need to learn languages - you might not fail tasks on The Apprentice. Languages help you get a foot in the door in business!

¡Hola!

Today we had a wonderful lesson in year 9 Spanish where we were looking at Spanish restaurant menus, practising dialogues and learning how to describe a dinner with a celebrity in the past tense. Whilst we discussed this we were looking at the various styles of Tortiallas in Spain and Mexico, how David Beckham(our chosen celebrity!)has learned Spanish for his football career and how the inventor of Doritos has died recently and requested that he was buried with Doritos! We even integrated salsa music into the lesson to add to the Spanish Tapas restaurant ambiance.

¡Buen provecho!