Jan Lewandowski

Caroline Conlon, CILT RSG manager, asked me to put together a workshop on `Ideas for the Festive Season’- given the number of different languages, faiths and cultures in London she asked me to make it suitable for as many languages as possible and cover other festivals, not just Christmas. Quite a tall order, but I enjoyed the challenge and the research was really interesting.

I demoed activities for French, Spanish, German and Italian though most would work equally well in any language. I gave suggestions for `Winter’ festivals from October to February- Eid, Hannukah, Christmas and Chinese New Year.

We sang songs, made puppets and generally had some festive fun through the medium of the different languages.

I’m going to be doing a session at the Newham Primary Languages Day on 7th. July, organised by my friend and colleague Karen Pearce who is the Primary Languages Consultant there.

My presentation will be primarily for teachers who are just getting started in PMFL ; I’ve got plenty of resources which should interest them and some original ideas that I have used in my own classroom.

Rosemary Bevis will also be doing a session. I know Rosemary well from Besançon when she accompanied our group on the `French for Young Learners’ Comenius course organised by CILT . Amongst other work that she has done Rosemary also designed the BBC Primary French website which I find really useful and it is free!

Jenny Carpenter the PMFL consultant from Barking and Dagenham will be doing a session on books and stories.

I’m really looking forward to the day.