Delivery  

Starters

Guidance on how to deliver each activity is provided in the ‘Starter’ paragraph. This includes teacher’s notes and advice on differentiation for varying levels of ability. The experience of using these ideas in the classroom will inspire further development and your ideas will evolve in response to the needs of those you teach.

Plenaries

Each starter is followed by suggestions for the plenary session and subsequent classroom activities. However, how the teaching sequence might develop between the starter and the plenary is infinitely variable. Whichever direction the lesson takes, the material in this resource will allow the MFL teacher to start lessons purposefully and to close them in an appropriate manner. It is left to the teacher to chart the precise route to be taken between these two points.

Since the plenary is little more than a reflective, ‘What did we learn today?’ session, there is no lesson plan – suggested features of the plenary appear as bullet points. To be effective, the plenary should be a controlled and purposeful discussion of the learning of the lesson and students should be trained to maintain their attention throughout. It is worth taking time to discuss the purpose of the plenary with the class. If the exercise is not valued, the temptation to ‘switch off’ early, to start thinking of the next activity or lesson, or to start packing away, will detract from the efficacy of the plenary. Where resources allow, it may be productive to record a selection of these sessions onto video for use in departmental discussions or in the classroom at a future date.

High-frequency words

Starters which involve ‘high-frequency words’, as listed in Section 3 (Appendix 3) of the MFL Framework, are indicated by the icon . A full list of high-frequency words can be found in the MFL Framework.