Showing posts with label Welcome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Welcome. Show all posts

Thursday, 19 February 2009

Quite a Few Things You Really Did Not Need To Know About Me


Quite some time ago, I was tagged by Andrew Jeppesen, a Language teacher from Sydney, Australia, Helena Butterfield and José Picardo, 2 other languages teachers from the UK and fellow bloggers, for the 7 Things meme.

Then, I found out that I had been tagged by more fellow languages teachers Isabelle Le Borgne-Pondaven, Amanda Salt, Alex Blagona and Helena Butterfield for the 25 random things meme on Facebook.

Why is it so difficult to talk about oneself as person without sounding unprofessional?
Anyway, I thought I would cheat and combine them all-I know, not what is expected but…
Here goes…

1. As a child, I was fascinated by my grand-parents who lived in the Pyrenees and could communicate in Catalan with people over the border. How cool… That is also why I would still like to be able to speak Catalan and write properly rather than just understand 95% of it.
2. I can play the flute-well, I could-and I took part in school productions like Oliver! in the past. Really miss it…
3. I love singing-in French, Spanish or English!!
4. I love strong accents and I first learnt my English with a Liverpool accent and my Spanish while being in Andalusia. I did not lose my French accent completely, although you may be fooled for a very short time, but acquired a wide range of other intonations and local expressions…
5. I got married in France and my husband insisted in taking his vows in French-my most challenging task as a teacher ever…
6. I love the film Amélie and I found the sound track deeply moving-not really sure why…
7. My best holiday ever was in Sicily: adored the food, the language, the people, the culture… still don’t know whether I would like to gamble it and go again…
8. I won 2 poetry competitions aged 6 and 15.
9. I once was on “Songs of Praises” (Special Christmas edition) with the school choir-not on my own, fortunately!
10. When I was 14, I won a history competition and a free one-week trip to Normandy to visit the landing beaches.
11. I am very short but loved to play basketball at school.
12. I love pasta and seriously think that I must have been Italian in a previous life.
13. I went to Montserrat, near Barcelona on my honeymoon, adapting the Catalan custom that a newly-wed husband should take his wife there. Even my totally un-religious husband loved the place-so special…
14. I do not particularly like large cities probably as I was brought up in a small town.
15. I am looking forward to my children having little cousins to play with-nobody is available at the moment!
16. I love cooking but I don’t get to cook very often…
17. I love Haribo Strawberries because my great-granddad used to buy them for me-and I still miss him…
18. I worked at Perpignan Tourist Office (France) when I was a student and loved helping out the Brits on holiday-They were the only ones to come back and say thank you!
19. I worked in a travel agency for several summers when I was a student. I ended up with a lot of Spanish customers after somebody found out that I could speak Spanish. My boss loved it!
20. I don’t get enough opportunities to practise my disco dancing these days…
21. I hardly drink alcohol at all these days. I stopped when I was expecting my sons and never really drank again…
22. I was really rubbish at sport at school but I could run as when I am determined to finish something, I always do.
23. I would love to go to Mexico and South America.
24. I am in awe of churches and old buildings in general.
25. I am convinced that nobody can improve professionally without developing personally-I am aiming for more wisdom, ambitious, eh?
As this 7 Things meme has been around for a while, I think I have nobody left to tag! I will suggest the following people but please accept my apologies if you have been tagged already ...
Kathleen Holton
Carla Arena
Sam McCoy
Michael stout
Marie-France Perkins

Wednesday, 2 April 2008

Happy Birthday, My Languages!

With this 90th post, I am celebrating My Languages’ birthday.

I started this blog last year and I used it then mostly as an aide-memoire to enable me to keep up to date with all the mfl developments that occurred when I was on maternity leave. I also found it invaluable to keep providing my Faculty with The Big Picture and make them aware of our options for the future.

As I discussed in a previous post , I have used My Languages in many different ways:

*to make a note a good resources for languages and other educational topics ( del.icio.us tags). The advantage of this rather than the links I used to provide in our Faculty bulletin is that the list is regularly updated and can be filtered by key words. My next target is to develop the active use of our del.icio.us Faculty account.

*as a training resource (As a reference for our trainee teachers and to support our recent Faculty INSET on the IWB, the use of Web 2.0 tools and moderating assessment at KS3)

*to keep the Faculty up-to-date with national developments, facts and figures (I regularly include links to posts and links in our Faculty bulletin)

*to help with display

*to identify existing IWB resources for the topics covered by our Scheme of Work

*to keep up-to-date with ICT/MFL good practice

*to encourage networking

*to provide links to enable mfl teachers to keep up to date with what is happening in French and Spanish-speaking countries and practise their languages.

I would like to thank all the bloggers and linguists out there who gave me some inspiration to start and carry on with this project.

My top 10 blogroll of honour would consist of-in no particular order-:


Jess McCullough from Technolote

Lisa Stevens from Vamonos

Helen Myers from ALL and MFL Resources


Helena Butterfield from The Langwitch Chronicles

Marie-France Perkins from Sans Problèmes!

José Picardo from Box of Tricks


Thanks to you all and Happy birthday, My Languages!





Monday, 2 April 2007

Welcome!

Welcome to MyLanguages!

The aim of this blog is to compile and share up-to-date information and good practice regarding the teaching of Modern Languages in the UK.

I will be regularly updating this blog to ensure that all the posts reflect the pace of change predicted for Modern Languages in the "post-Languages Review" era.