Flip Flap Fishes and Fish Out of Water

 Time for a bit of light relief. Following on from the success of a post on MegaMutantPenguinSkiDeath, here are two more activities with exciting names to try at your peril. Flip Flap Fishes is a lesson I have done once. And only once. It's THAT sort of lesson. And Fish Out of Water is a no-prep activity I do fairly regularly. So take a deep breath, and here goes...

Flip Flap Fishes is an activity I did once with a group of Year 9 pupils when we used to teach in "sets". It was a small group and it was the summer of Year 9, and not many of them were carrying on with French at GCSE...

For this lesson, you need to clear the desks out of the way. You need some largish pieces of sturdy cardboard. And you need the fishes. You can see some of the fishes in the picture. They are words or chunks printed on A4 paper. About 30 different ones. If you really want to, you can download them from the Association for Language Learning Grammar Wiki. There were infinitives, opinion words and other verbs that are followed by the infinitive, conjunctions and details of where, when and who with.

It was a similar style activity to the compulsory hands on after school French sessions, demonstrating that writing sentences in French isn't magic, but a practical process of assembly following the instructions. And not because I ever thought that there is such a thing as a "Kinetic Learner", but because it is OK for lessons to have variety and a bit of craziness.

Ready? Split the (small) class into 3 or 4 teams and give them a corner as a base. One person from each team has the cardboard. Throw all the fishes into the middle of the floor. The 4 people with the cardboard had to quickly use their cardboard to fan (no scooping) as many fishes to their team as they could. The team had to work to assemble them into sentences. Once all the fish were swooshed, there was a phase of negotiation and swapping of fish, with some hard bargains driven. Then we stuck the sentences up on the board and judged and scored them for length, coherence, and sophistication.

Things like: J’aime faire les magasins à Norwich le week-end avec mes amis mais je préfère aller à la pêche si je peux avec mon père parce que j’adore le tennis.

We repeated this so each member of the team had a go at fish swooshing. At the end of the lesson, another variation was to put sellotape on one pupil's shoes (one from each team) and they had to stomp around and collect as many fish as possible on their shoe. Again to make sentences out of. Beware - some sellotape can take the surface off some shoes. And also once you've taken the fish off the board, remove any blutac before they go back on the carpet. It makes a mess and it stops them being swooshed!

As you can see, a memorable lesson. And I know it's out of fashion to have memorable lessons because they remember the swooshing not the French. But this was French they knew. It was the incentive to put it into sentences and negotiate the words you needed for a more coherent one (see example above - tennis?) that mattered.

Now for the other one. I can never remember what I call this. Sometimes it's Drown the Class. But I think I've settled on Fish Out of Water. It causes less kerfuffle. It's for when pupils are seeing a large list of words for the first time. A vocabulary list, a knowledge organiser, or the unit vocabulary page from a text book. Maybe clothes terms, or for food, or for sport... I tend to go for a large number of words or chunks (30 to 60?) that pupils then learn over a longer period of time. Including words that are not required, but which individual pupils can pick up if they like them.

It's evolved from another activity which I will describe first. First I ask them to go through the list and tick off any words they already know or can guess. And then they get a partner to test them on those words, and just those words, that they say they recognise. I demonstrate the next activity with a pupil. We set a timer for a minute. In that minute, I call out words from the list (in Spanish) and the pupil has to find them as quickly as they can and give me the meaning in English. If they know, it's quicker to just tell me. If they don't know, they hunt through the list. And I count how many they find in one minute. Then they do this in pairs. It's done in synch, as I'm timing them for a minute each. It does rely on them having the understanding of the sound-spelling link to be able to say new words correctly.

So where do the fish come in? It's the same activity, with me saying the word in the target language, and the pupil racing to find it on the list and tell me the meaning. (And then with a partner.) But this time, once I have said the word, the pupil has to repeat it over and over, without stopping for breath, until they find the word and can tell me the meaning. Does it help? Or is it just a bit of silliness? Well, no-one's drowned yet. And it's familiarising the pupils with the list so they can find words in a hurry. It's practising pronunciation and incentivising remembering the new words.

It is similar to Oxford-Cambridge which I will throw in here for free. It's done in threes. The middle pupil is Jeremy. The other two pupils are known by their surname + Oxford, and their surname + Cambridge respectively. All 3 have the sheet of words in front of them. Jeremy says a word. The two pupils hunt for it (or may already know it) and "buzz". Jeremy decides who buzzed first, saying surname + university for that pupil. They then have to instantly answer. Jeremy keeps score.

After these activities, we move to more normal self quizzing or getting partners to test each other. As part of a long process of seeing the words in sentences, reading, listening, speaking, writing like a normal lesson!