With the idea of interesting students in the culture behind the language this is expressing opinions about food whilst learning about food from Spain and Latin America. It gives a great opportunity for students to get their tongues round some great words and they will often enjoy giving opinions about foods they have never tried. It brings out and challenges their prejudices. Key focus on speaking and does challenge students on uses of gustar and other verbs for likes/dislikes + adjectival agreement- it does need differentiating.

I have a challenging Y9 Spanish group made up of all boys. I took them to the computer room and told them they were investigative reporters who were interested in the supernatural and the unexplained. They were then given this task sheet and I have never seen them so focussed. They all decided it was alien in origin and won't be persuaded otherwise, even when I told them about the severed heads.

Spanish version of a questionnaire I did in French. I use it as a stimulus for a CA on speaking but it is also a Higher level reading task with quite a lot of idiomatic Spanish which they love.

New GCSE and 'literature', we are doing education with Y7 so I have created this reading skills focussed ppt using extracts from les excuses de petit Nicolas Use of white boards and an element of competition stops it from being too teacher led and the great thing about Nicolas is if they like him he can come up again- we are doing les vacances with Y8 so we might add in a petit Nicolas on holiday extract

KS3 or KS4- vocabulary for personality- use anyway you like Divided in to cognates and non cognates

They say they are making it harder to get those top grades so here is a way to make even teaching something reasonably straight forward like adjectives of personality a little more A*- or indeed 1 as it will be in a few years apparently.

Don't we often underestimate how difficult they find it to use a dictionary and isn&'t it always annoying when they say they can&';t find the word and they are in the wrong half of the dictionary. We use Petit Nicolas in Y7 so this is why he appears in this ppt but also we always do teach classroom objects. So to have fun and teach how to look up nouns the task requires them to look up words like conker and marbles because that is just what Nicolas would have in his bag apart from his ruler and so on. I then thought they could look up what teenage Nicolas would have.

Way to get students to talk about how they use technology. I took the 2 questions about dumping on Facebook and would you ban mobiles in school and got them to do a speed date around the room to practise asking and answering then we did a straw poll to see who would really dump a boy or girlfriend on face book and they loved it. This was follow up to doing Higher listening practise Edexcel 2011/2012 one on use of mobiles in class 2012 and one on using social networking sites 2011. Also nicked and adapted from a freebee from Mary Glasgow magazine about dumping on Facebook

This resource is designed to help teachers deliver the unit on dictatorships in Latin America and forms of protest for AQA and as stimulus for the individual oral project in Y13. I found it fascinating to do the research and hope that you will find it equally fascinating to use this resource. It provides original texts, that I have created based on extensive research. Sadly many of the stories are similar, shameful CIA interference, total disregard for indigenous human rights, dictators that were put on trial but not punished. There was also Operación Condor, where dictators across Latin America worked in close collaboration to pursue their victims. The nature of protest in Latin America also tells amazing stories as do some of the films included in this resource. Enjoy

I've got a big class for GCSE Spanish in September and this is my attempt to get them to revise the basics before the start of the autumn term so we can hit the ground running. If you were thinking of giving Y9 some Summer work in preparation for GCSE you might find this useful to use and or adapt.

A way to get disaffected Y9 students through the last few weeks of term. Does not have to be done at the end of the year. You may well want to change bits to fit what you have done with your classes. Also the bit about Viva Argentina relates to current world cup and so will be out of date soon and is my wind up of the boys in one of my Y9 classes. Could be all in Spanish to make it more challenging and be used in KS4 or indeed KS5.

I created this to help my Y11 prepare for a CA on what they do at weekend. Attempt to help them create more extended answers

Knicked the idea from GCSE text book and then created a whole series of resources around a group of Spanish speaking characters marooned on an island. You can then do daily routine of the survivors, water sports rather than conventional sports/Who caused the plane to crash and why/ who is having an affair with who and so on-relationships. It lends itself to anything you like in the end. Suddenly boring topics become more fun and students have really run with the idea. will add more of my stuff on this soon

They speak for themselves really. I am having a set printed on card and laminated so I can use them for mix and mingle/ speed dating activities. You could use them for writing, for pair or small group info gap style activities as well. Of course they could also be used at start of a GCSE course and you can always add such things as profession, place live etc.

Higher reading resource taken from French newspaper and then edited with questions in English

Y10 GCSE Spanish but could be used with more able in KS3. Describing your house can be dreary so I came up with the idea of a description of the prison that Pablo Escobar designed himself. It really worked as they found the story fascinating, and were able to predict the content with a few nudges. They were then willing to go on and be more creative with their own descriptions.

Food and poetry designed for our Y7 who are doing food this term but could be adapted. Le petit nicholas- again Y7 when doing school- followed by watching the excellent and funny film of le petit Nicholas that they loved because we'd looked at the story first I have added presentation for a teach meet -showing elements of the above but also ideas for using fairy stories- and source of material This is the year that will be doing literature at GCSE

SOS salud is short agony aunt letters related to diet with giving advice. El tabaquismo- you might think this is more AS but sometimes able GCSE students are surprised by how much they understand particularly as this is a topic they know about and the language is taken and adapted from a newspaper article on the net so is full of cognates. The questions also clear up some of what they might not understand.

Instead of approaching Daily routine as a lexical task which is what we often do with Year 7, this approach focuses more on verbs and daily routine is simply the context, so in the end what matters is that they can apply the rules not that they know 10+ phrases for describing routine. My Year 7 can now define a regular/irregular and reflexive verb. They know what an infinitive is and what to conjugate means. We then went on to look at the gap fill more closely so that they can add connectives and time phrases to a description of their daily routine as I am sure you all do. The difference now is that when they prepare for their speaking assessment at the end of this term they will hopefully, some at least add activities they do in the evenings that I haven't taught them.

Not particularly original but I have quite a lot of fun reading out the story for the listening activity and being a Spanish 'Vicky Pollard'- also I find the card sort really gets them thinking about metalanguage and how verbs work- I find mind mapping a really good way to get them to figure out the rules instead of giving it to them- pre-populate a mind map with sub headings so they only have to fill in details and that works well. I also like getting them to work with infinitives and verb tables because they don't use them effectively if you don't actively show them how.