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We finish tomorrow with our annual Celebration of Achievement when our speaker will be Guy Grieve, who spent a year living in the wilderness of Alaska. Our PT Creative Arts tells me that some girls will be singing “Colours of the Wind”, so I see a box of tissues will be required.
In the meantime the register teacher of S2 was intrigued to overhear a discussion of current affairs,
“I see Gordon Brown has been made Prime Minister”
“Really, I thought he was a Chef”
After last week’s chemistry, it’s time for a bit of art - this clever video clip is wonderful to look at.
Apologies to Sherlock. I love this version of “The Elements Song” by Tom Lehrer, first discovered when I had a please take in chemistry a few years ago and the class were watching it on video, part of a programme about Mendeleev. A couple of years on and I found a flash version of it online, now it and a few other versions are on YouTube, including the Anime version below - just one of the many good things on YouTube that make me scream in frustration that I can’t access it in school (yes I know why not, but there are good things too!)
(Had to add in this one too!)
Inspired by watching S3 present multi-medi a versions of Ted Hugh’s poems, I thought I’d try and get them to do the same kind of thing using a couple of French songs. They heard the two songs and watched the videos, how they now present it back to the class is up to them - despite a good start yesterday, they took a while to get into it today. I hope to do more of this with them over the year, in order to improve pronunciation and listening skills - hopefully it’s a way of exploiting the songs without resorting to questions and cloze passages. So it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with. In the meantime, here are the two choices - what would you do?
Here are some of the PiE memories and photos as written and perfomed by project coordinator Mark Pentleton and Pierre-Benoît Hériaud, teacher at St Andrew’s in North Ayrshire and regular PiE participant.
Last night saw the last ever Partners in Excellence film festival, as the project comes to an end. Students from this year’s immersion visits and film making weekends were joined by many former PiE students as well as staff from Argyll and Bute, East Ayrshire and North Ayrshire and invited guests. Described as a “ground breaking project”, “one of the best ever curricular projects” and “curriculum for excellence in action”, you may well wonder why it is coming to an end, but “our’s not to reason why”, instead the evening celebrated what PiE has become over the years - a community of students and teachers who were able to celebrate language learning and take that learning out of the traditional classroom.
An emotional evening as many relived their favourite PiE memories - something I’d almost forgotten came back when I met up with a couple of former PiE students. A few years ago we held a German film making weekend at the Dolphin House at Culzean Castle - one of the films was a western, how to get that authentic horse riding motion? Two cars, one driven by Gordon, one of the supervising teachers, out of his sun roof appeared our heroine, out of the sun roof of my car appeared Mark, project coordinator, a bit of careful driving to avoid the oncoming visitors to the castle and the shot was in the bag - not something teacher training had prepared me for, but one of many PiE memories.
PiE has been such a part of my life for the last 7 years that it’s difficult to imagine languages in the 3 authorities without it - as the song performed at the end of the festival said,
“we did it PiE way!”
I’ve got all the first aid stuff for our visit packed into mine - holds a fair amount of sun cream, after sun, wet ones, sick bags…etc
On Sunday night 33 S4 pupils and 4 staff head off to Paris. We’re packing a lot into the short time we’re there and technology permitting we’ll be blogging whilst we’re there. In Italy earlier this year, the hotel firewall blocked our blog. I’m a bit more hopeful this time. Until today our Paris blog was blocked in school and unblocking it seemed to be complicated, but it’s working now.
We arrive Monday evening, so drop by and have a look…
