This week Radio Lingua Schools has been working with 15-16 year old students from across Scotland at the S@S Accelerate programme, part of the Strathclyde University’s Innovative Routes to Learning project. The participating students signed up for a week of language-learning activities and over the past few days have taken part in challenges and debates, learned some Italian, Japanese and Zulu, and have created multilingual radio shows in French, German and Spanish.

The students have learned how to produce podcasts using GarageBand, recording their voices, applying filters and adding jingles and sound effects. They’ve had the opportunity to practise their language skills and increase their confidence in speaking. Their podcasts can be downloaded from the links below.

Group 1 – download mp3

An celebrity chat show featuring interviews with Audrey Tautou in French and Antonio Banderas in Spanish.

Group 2 - download mp3

Comparing the relative benefits of holidaying in Madrid or Paris.

Group 3 - download mp3

Strathclyde University Radio interviews with language students about their experiences working and studying abroad.

Group 4 - download mp3

Agony Aunt Tía Dolores solves callers’ problems in a phone-in radio show.

Well done to all the students who have taken part!

Pupils in P5 at St John’s Primary, South Ayrshire, recently challenged Radio Lingua Schools to support them in a project on the human body. The class had been learning about the parts of the human body including the functions of bones, muscles, organs and the skin, and their class teacher wanted to reinforce their learning with a project which would involve various elements of media.

The first stage was to write a song: using GarageBand loops and a midi keyboard, the children created a rhythm and melody, and started to write the words to the song, working along with Radio Lingua Schools director Mark Pentleton. The pupils then spent a few days creating sponge versions of bodily organs. The class teacher wanted the pupils to understand how the parts of the body fit together, so we came up with an idea which would combine the song with a visual element involving time-lapse photography. The pupils were delighted with the result which exemplifies a real cross-curricular project.

Sing along to the Body Song with the lyrics below:

We’ve been learning about our bodies, all about our skeleton:
Bones and organs, flesh and muscles, let’s all sing our body song.

When you’re walking around or running a race
Your bones help you move all over the place.
You’d be very floppy all of the time
If you didn’t have a strong, straight spine.
Your ankle helps you walk, your wrist helps you write;
Your patella helps you kneel and your jaw helps you bite.
So without your bones you couldn’t do much,
And that’s all you need to know.

Every day of your life you are kept alive:
Without your organs you just couldn’t survive.
It’s complicated, so let us explain:
Your eyes send pictures to your brain.
Your heart pumps your blood, which makes you feel good.
Your intestines help you digest all of your food.
So without your organs you couldn’t do much,
And that’s all you need to know.

If you stretch or you jump, or even dance with your friend,
Your muscles help you move, they help you to bend.
You have 600 muscles in your body machine:
to smile you need to use seventeen.
Last but not least comes your skin,
Protecting everything and keeping everything in!
So your body’s made up of all these things,
And that’s all you need to know.

This project did not involve stop motion animation: instead we used the animation features in the presentation package Keynote to animate the characters and record voiceovers. This strategy worked extremely well with the children and the results are excellent. The final “animated storybooks” can be viewed using the links below:

• Pirate Jack and the Black Bird
• Pirate Bluebeard finds the Treasure
• Captain Hook and the Treasure
• Captain Bluebeard and Coco the Clown
• Pirate Redbeard and Spongebob

The pupils spent just five to ten minutes a day working with the podcasts and over the course of the project they learned between 30 and 40 words and phrases of basic Mandarin including greetings, saying their name, asking “how are you?” and giving answers to this question, counting up to 10, talking about the fact that they’re learning Chinese and saying that they don’t understand.

At the end of the four week learning period, the classes were challenged to create their own stop motion animation during a one-day Radio Lingua Schools animation workshop, and the results of these workshops are linked to below. The pupils in each school learned the same phrases so that they would ultimately understand the animations created by the other classes.

We’d like to congratulate all of the children who participated in this project: you should all be very proud of your animation work, especially as you were working in a language which you only started learning four weeks ago!

Castlepark Primary School

• Group 1
• Group 2
• Group 3
• Group 4

Glebe Primary School

• Group 1
• Group 2
• Group 3
• Group 4
• Group 5

John Galt Primary School

• Group 1
• Group 2
• Group 3
• Group 4

Loudoun Montgomery Primary School

• Group 1
• Group 2
• Group 3
• Group 4

Over the next few weeks the children of P4 and P5 in St John’s Primary in Ayr will be taking part in a number of animation activities, leading to the development of the St John’s Animated Encyclopaedia, supported by Radio Lingua Schools. Currently P4 are working on animal habitats, and P5 are learning about parts of the body. Three animation days will lead to the development of individual ‘entries’ in this animated encyclopaedia and it is hoped that over time the children in the school will develop learning resources for their peers covering a range of subjects and topics.

In the first of three animation sessions, Mark worked with P4N to support the development of four entries in the encyclopaedia. The children had developed scripts about animal habitats, and during the workshop they created animations on these topics. To view the animations, click on the links below:

• Worms
• Arachnids
• Beetles
• Octopuses

In the second workshop, P4M created four new entries in the encyclopaedia:

• Ladybirds
• Scorpions
• Dragonflies
• Spiders and wasps

Euroscola days take place around 20 times each year and give the young people of Europe a chance to discuss a variety of themes including sustainable development, education, environment and citizenship. Today 21 countries are represented and there are some 520 students in the hémicycle of the European Parliament.

By way of preparation for today, the Scottish students have undertaken a series of activities which have helped to develop their confidence in speaking French. These have included language workshops, street questionnaires and a cultural and linguistic challenge. Radio Lingua Schools has supported all of these activities. It’s also been our responsibility to maintain a blog throughout the visit and parents, friends and teachers back at home have been following the visit through EuroscolaOnline.com. Earlier today each delegation was presented to the chamber by one or two students from each country. We broadcast the proceedings live from the hémicycle and parents and school friends at home in Scotland were able to join us in Strasbourg.

For further information about the work of Radio Lingua Schools in Strasbourg, see also Projet Citoyen.

In November 2009, Radio Lingua Schools supported Projet Citoyen, an East Dunbartonshire initiative which aimed to raise awareness about European citizenship. With the help of a grant from the European Parliament, a group of sixth year students spent six days in Strasbourg finding out about the work of the Parliament. Radio Lingua Schools’ role was to support the project both in terms of language input on the visit, and by helping the students to document their experiences through a blog which was maintained throughout the trip to Strasbourg.

A key feature of Projet Citoyen was that the students had to disseminate their learning to other students in their own schools, and on a wider basis. They designed a web-based video quiz aimed at younger learners (11-13 year olds), asking questions about Europe and the European Union. The The quiz was developed in conjunction with the History and Modern Studies departments in their schools, and all students contributed by providing questions. During the visit to Strasbourg, the top ten questions were chosen and three students volunteered to present the quiz, working with Radio Lingua Schools director Mark Pentleton to film the questions in various locations around Strasbourg.

The quiz is now being released on the Projet Citoyen website, and it is hoped that schools throughout the UK and further afield will find it a useful resource to help younger pupils learn about Europe. Take the quiz yourself and let us know what you think of the resource!

Radio Lingua Schools has been working with Gavinburn Primary in West Dunbartonshire, supporting their innovative Winter Olympics project. Pupils in primary 3 and 4 are working on a project based around the theme of the Winter Olympics and each class has taken on the role of one of the participating countries. The pupils have been learning about the country and the sports which feature in the Olympics, and we’ve provided a series of language lessons for the children in Norwegian (p3), Russian (p4/3) and Japanese (p4). The pupils will be working on these podcasts to learn the basics of the language over the next few weeks.

The courses are made up of five 2-3 minute lessons in each language, and with Gavinburn’s permission we’re providing the podcasts here so that other schools can make use of them. Let us know if you’ve used them with your pupils! To find out more about the Winter Olympics project and about how the teachers are using Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympics as part of the project, listen to the latest episode of the Consolarium podcast in which Ollie Bray interviews head teacher Gillian Penny.

If you’d like to learn more Norwegian, Russian or Japanese with your pupils, have a look at our mini courses in the One Minute Languages series. The audio for these courses is available for free on the Radio Lingua site, and we provide school licences for the courses too. Have a look at how one school has been using the Mandarin Chinese version of this course here.

Japanese podcasts

Download the Winter Olympics lesson guide here, featuring a list of the words and phrases covered in the course.

Lesson 1

Includes the words for “hello” and “goodbye”

Download lesson 1

Lesson 2

Includes the phrase for “my name is…”

Download lesson 2

Lesson 3

Includes the question “what is your name?”

Download lesson 3

Lesson 4

Includes the question “how are you?” and provides a couple possible answers

Download lesson 4

Lesson 5

Includes the numbers 1-5 and the phrase “good luck”

Download lesson 5

Russian podcasts

Download the Winter Olympics lesson guide here, featuring a list of the words and phrases covered in the course.

Lesson 1

Includes the words for “hello” and “goodbye”

Download lesson 1

Lesson 2

Includes the phrase for “my name is…”

Download lesson 2

Lesson 3

Includes the question “what is your name?”

Download lesson 3

Lesson 4

Includes the question “how are you?” and provides a couple possible answers

Download lesson 4

Lesson 5

Includes the numbers 1-5 and the phrase “good luck”

Download lesson 5

Norwegian podcasts

Download the Winter Olympics lesson guide here, featuring a list of the words and phrases covered in the course.

Lesson 1

Includes the words for “hello” and “goodbye”

Download lesson 1

Lesson 2

Includes the phrase for “my name is…”

Download lesson 2

Lesson 3

Includes the question “what is your name?”

Download lesson 3

Lesson 4

Includes the question “how are you?” and provides a couple possible answers

Download lesson 4

Lesson 5

Includes the numbers 1-5 and the phrase “good luck”

Download lesson 5

Over the past few weeks, a pilot group of primary 6 pupils from St John’s have been developing their journalism skills, reporting on what has been happening in the school in the past month. This is part of a larger project in the school which will see all of the primary 6 pupils involved in reporting the school news in a number of ways during the course of the year.

The team of Newshounds began their journalism lessons by looking at a number of publications including local and national newspapers and a variety of magazines. They learned about fonts and graphic design with a view to putting their knowledge into practice in the development of their own newspaper for the school. Over a number of weeks they collected news from each class, and collated the stories, deciding what to include in the newspaper, and what to leave out.

Working on Pages, part of the Apple iWork suite, the pupils began to put together the newspaper in a half-day workshop last week. The pupils decided they wanted to include sections on “What we’re learning” and “What we’re doing”, providing information on the work and activities of each class in the school.

The final stage in the publication process was carried out yesterday as the pupils proofed the newspaper. Their publication will go to print this morning and will be distributed to all pupils in the school later today.

The pupils wanted to make sure that in addition to print copies, there would be an electronic version available to download. You can download the November issue of St John’s Primary Newshounds here (right-click or control-click to download to your computer). It’s 25mb so it may take some time to download. To view the newsletter you require Adobe Reader (PC/Mac) or Preview (Mac).

December Update

For December’s edition of Newshounds, the production team increased in size as each of the pupils involved took on an “apprentice”. The pupils worked in pairs to research and write each article and to bring together the images and content required for this month’s edition. Download December’s edition of St John’s Newshounds here.

In the early stages of learning a language, learners have a limited range of vocabulary and it’s often difficult to find interesting and motivating ways to practise the few words and phrases they have learned. This was exactly the experience of teachers in St Mark’s, Irvine, and Radio Lingua Schools designed a workshop around providing an additional mode of practice for a group of primary 6 pupils who had just started learning Spanish.

The pupils participating in the workshop only had three Spanish lessons prior to taking part, but in this time they had managed to cover greetings, asking each other ¿cómo te llamas? (what is your name?) and dealing with ages. The workshop aimed to provide an additional opportunity to practise key words and phrases at this early stage of learning.

The first stage of the workshop involved the pupils working with Garageband on a file which included the various parts of a conversation, muddled up. This file had been prepared prior to the workshop, simply recording two voices on two different tracks of Garageband. The same process can easily be achieved in Audacity or other audio editors.

The pupils had to rearrange the recorded ‘regions’ on separate tracks of the Garageband file, making up a conversation between “Carlos” and “Isabel”. The pupils understood the words and phrases contained in the conversation immediately, so rearranging the phrases to make the correct conversation was a straightforward task.

Having completely rearranged the conversation, each pair played their audio file to the rest of the group. They then had to record their own version of the conversation, taking on the roles of “Carlos” and “Isabel” themselves and using the Vocal Transformer plugin in Garageband to make one voice in each group sound a bit more masculine!

The podcasts recorded by each pair can be found below. Just a reminder that in each case one of the voices has a Vocal Transformer filter applied!

Group 1

Group 2

Group 3

This workshop will feature in a forthcoming episode of the Apple Distinguished Educator Learning Series, The Creative Classroom, which will feature ideas and tips for using iLife and iWork in the classroom. More information will be made available in the coming weeks.