http://www.hellomylo.com/Challenge/French/FR_L2_M3
I am planning to use this MYLO challenge with a very good Year 9 class quite soon. The interactive challenge is called Track List. You can go straight to the link and ignore the rest of this post if you wish. For a quick description, read on...
If you choose Option 2 on the linked page you can get straight into the activities. Students will need a computer and headphones. The theme of the whole challenge is setting up a list of music tracks for training. the main vocabulary areas are music and sport. Grammar includes adjective agreement and tense usage.
The first activities are Get Warmed Up and Let's Talk Music. These establish some key vocab and are worth doing. You'll soon see that it is an advantage to be familiar with the perfect and future tenses. That's one reason I would suggest doing this task late in Y9 or after.
The next task is called Motivating Music and is essentially for reading comprehension and vocab building. I'll give you some detail on this one. Pupils should use the pop-up dictionary when they need it, as they will straight away! The text is quite vocab heavy. They do an interactive vocab matching task first. They can click on the French words to hear them pronounced. I would encourage them to do this, as kids tend to rush online interactive tasks. There follows a brief "find the French" task - pupils type out the words.Accented characters are offered. This is handy and will avoid time spent explaining ALT codes etc. If you make small errors you get feedback, but you have to attempt an answer to carry on. The task ends with some well pitched multi-choice questions in English. You get Kudos points based on your performance on the task. (If you sign up you can compare your scores with others.) This first activity should take at least ten minutes.
The fourth task is called Speaking of Sport. This begins with a good listening task. Pupils click on play then drop words into a "mentioned" or "not mentioned" box. There then follows two matching tasks and two ordering tasks based on the same material (which is very clear and quite authentic). The level of these tasks is challenging enough for very good Y9s, or even older pupils. All in all, a good set of tasks which should take at least 10 minutes.
Activity 5 is called French New Wave. We start with a true/false reading task. nest up is a gap fill with three options for each gap. The options aren't too subtle, but effective enough. They are like the Kerboodle gap fills you get with the AQA French AS course. The next task is a gap fill with the focus on adjective agreements. Then there is a brief drag and drop grammar/comprehension task followed by a matching task with a grammar/comprehension focus. That's the end of that activity. Again, about 10 minutes would be enough, I would guess.
The next activity is called Radio Rhythms. This is about writing accurately and depends on the student having taken on board th language of the previous tasks. There are five questions. Students type in answers and there is a feedback page at the end. More demanding, this, but good stuff.
Then there is a game called On Your Marks. Actually, it isn't really a game, it's just some recap exercises done against the clock. I think this will motivate students, though. If they fail first time, they will want to repeat the task. I failed first time through.
So overall, what do I think of this challenge? It's only very loosely related to the Olympics, but the exercises are well-conceived, it all works well and the instructions are clear. I think pupils will enjoy the tasks, be challenged and learn some good new language from them. All skills bar speaking are practised. I shall book two 40 minute sessions in the computer room. It would be easy to set some follow-up homework afterwards too. They could, for instance, make their own track lists and justify their choices.
Well done, you MYLO people.
I am planning to use this MYLO challenge with a very good Year 9 class quite soon. The interactive challenge is called Track List. You can go straight to the link and ignore the rest of this post if you wish. For a quick description, read on...
If you choose Option 2 on the linked page you can get straight into the activities. Students will need a computer and headphones. The theme of the whole challenge is setting up a list of music tracks for training. the main vocabulary areas are music and sport. Grammar includes adjective agreement and tense usage.
The first activities are Get Warmed Up and Let's Talk Music. These establish some key vocab and are worth doing. You'll soon see that it is an advantage to be familiar with the perfect and future tenses. That's one reason I would suggest doing this task late in Y9 or after.
The next task is called Motivating Music and is essentially for reading comprehension and vocab building. I'll give you some detail on this one. Pupils should use the pop-up dictionary when they need it, as they will straight away! The text is quite vocab heavy. They do an interactive vocab matching task first. They can click on the French words to hear them pronounced. I would encourage them to do this, as kids tend to rush online interactive tasks. There follows a brief "find the French" task - pupils type out the words.Accented characters are offered. This is handy and will avoid time spent explaining ALT codes etc. If you make small errors you get feedback, but you have to attempt an answer to carry on. The task ends with some well pitched multi-choice questions in English. You get Kudos points based on your performance on the task. (If you sign up you can compare your scores with others.) This first activity should take at least ten minutes.
The fourth task is called Speaking of Sport. This begins with a good listening task. Pupils click on play then drop words into a "mentioned" or "not mentioned" box. There then follows two matching tasks and two ordering tasks based on the same material (which is very clear and quite authentic). The level of these tasks is challenging enough for very good Y9s, or even older pupils. All in all, a good set of tasks which should take at least 10 minutes.
Activity 5 is called French New Wave. We start with a true/false reading task. nest up is a gap fill with three options for each gap. The options aren't too subtle, but effective enough. They are like the Kerboodle gap fills you get with the AQA French AS course. The next task is a gap fill with the focus on adjective agreements. Then there is a brief drag and drop grammar/comprehension task followed by a matching task with a grammar/comprehension focus. That's the end of that activity. Again, about 10 minutes would be enough, I would guess.
The next activity is called Radio Rhythms. This is about writing accurately and depends on the student having taken on board th language of the previous tasks. There are five questions. Students type in answers and there is a feedback page at the end. More demanding, this, but good stuff.
Then there is a game called On Your Marks. Actually, it isn't really a game, it's just some recap exercises done against the clock. I think this will motivate students, though. If they fail first time, they will want to repeat the task. I failed first time through.
So overall, what do I think of this challenge? It's only very loosely related to the Olympics, but the exercises are well-conceived, it all works well and the instructions are clear. I think pupils will enjoy the tasks, be challenged and learn some good new language from them. All skills bar speaking are practised. I shall book two 40 minute sessions in the computer room. It would be easy to set some follow-up homework afterwards too. They could, for instance, make their own track lists and justify their choices.
Well done, you MYLO people.
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