We have started teaching a common curriculum with our BGE classes, so I had to do a bit of thinking as to how I was going to teach a Scots lesson in the midst of a Greek Mythology unit!  However, I found through the Scots Language Centre, a link to BBC retellings of Pandora's Box and a few other in Scots - recordings.  I really didn't want to do a stand alone lesson - I want to see Scots embedded in the curriculum instead of being something that just appears for no apparent reason.  The class are S1 mixed ability.

We read the department-wide printed version of the myth yesterday and did some language work around it as per the department-wide PowerPoint.  Today we started the lesson with a Scots dictionary and pupils in pairs raced to see who could find the meanings of five Scots words first.  Using this as a starter and an introduction to the topic really worked well.  We spent quite a while talking about the words they had looked up, other words they know and use - and it was apparent that there are huge differences in the amount of Scots they use.  Some were able to list word after word after word, others were less confident.  It also became clear that they are not all sure which words they use are Scots.  It was interesting, and something I'd like to dig into more.

They really enjoyed listening to the modernised Scots Pandora, and had absolutely no problem understanding it.  Their main task was to storyboard Pandora, in Scots.  Once they got past the worry of not knowing how to spell in Scots - I told them just to be consistent - they really enjoyed it - they very quickly resumed the conversations and debates from the beginning of the lesson about words used at home, and shared words.  I have a pupil from Nigeria who hasn't been with us long, so there was a lot of fun had getting him to pronounce some words  -and then him telling them the equivalent word in Nigerian.  Most of the storyboards are not finished.  The ones I've shared are all from pupils who have literacy difficulties and usually trying to get any writing out of them is a huge struggle.  Today, maybe because spelling wasn't an issue, and because everyone was in the same boat over the spelling, they were off and running.  They are not finished, and some haven't used many Scots words, but it's a start.  The typed one has no drawings yet - This particular pupil, even when using IT, does not like to write.  She seems to have more Scots than most in the class, and I have never seen her so animated.  She is a pupil who is often reluctant to join in class discussions and I wonder if this is because she thinks she doesn't speak 'properly' .  

We are going to continue doing some of the myths using the Scots - and the final "assessed" task is to write the 13th labour of Heracles.  My pupils will have the option to write in Scots. I think that some of them will jump at the chance.  I have attached (I hope) a couple of the storyboards (unfinished) and the lesson plan and powerpoint.  Although we didn't entirely get finished, I think it was definitely worth letting the spend the extra time in discussions that were lively, relevant and inclusive.  

Like Verena, I found it more beneficial to embed Scots into our everyday classroom routines and vocabulary, but with how we are delivering the curriculum this year, I have had the chance to teach Scottish History across the school.
I have shared the task sheet that I prepared for the priamry 6/7 class. I do tasks set like this to encourage independence throughout the IDL. 
Delivering the task sheet in Scots was a new step for us and the children did find it a little tricky to begin with and bizzarely, they all suddenly had very exaggerated Scottish accents! However, they soon settled and a few comments were made that once you stop seeing it as strange, they didn't have much bother with understanding what it meant. There's a few words in there that we wouldn't normally used but becuase it was in context, they were able to give it a good go. 

Overall, they really enjoyed getting to embrace the Scots and when discussing the more interesting parts of history with our neighbours, they tried harder to embrace the Scots throughout the writing areas of the task even though I hadn't set this as a LI. 

Also, like Verena found, a few were reluctant to start because they didn't know the correct spelling. I had set that as a LI expecting the English to be correct so we amended our SC in the class - English words to be correct and Scots words were 'have a good go'. Next lesson, they have asked that they use more Scots words so we have agreed to write responses to the King of England in Scots. 

Overall, it has been taken up really well by the class. I think there is still a reluctance to use it beyond these sort of lessons incase they get into bother for not speaking properly. I am hoping they become more confident as we continue. 

S2 class working within Second and Third Level. We had been studying the seasonally relevant poems ‘The Bogeyman’ and ‘The Vampire’ by Jack Prelutsky so we moved on to WD Cocker’s Scots poem ‘The Bogle’. I delivered the lessons in Scots (to the best of my ability!) and we spent some time sharing prior knowledge of Scots and Scots vocabulary. To strengthen this I did a match up task using commonly-used Scots words from Geddes Thomson’s ‘The New Boy’ (matching Scots with the Standard English equivalent) and this seemed to boost pupils’ confidence. They not only recognised MOST of these words but many realised they use some of them regularly and hear them at home/in the community.

After the poem was introduced and listened to, pupils were split into 4 groups, each of which was assigned a stanza. They then had to summarise the ideas in their stanza and used context clues and online research to find the meanings of unfamiliar words before sharing their findings/ideas with the rest of the class. They then had to identify examples of simile, onomatopoeia and alliteration (in line with their work on Prelutsky’s English poems) and analysed some of these. As an extension, some chose their favourite line or image from the poem and created posters based on these. I finished by getting them to do an evaluation of the lessons which also allowed them to compare the poem (and the character of the bogle) to ‘The Bogeyman’ and ‘The Vampire’. They were asked, for example, which was the scariest character and what made it the scariest.

Their response to the text and the lesson was really positive. Only a couple questioned the relevance – I think this is probably because aligned so well with the other poems they had studied (ie they didn’t see it as an add-on). The majority also said that they found ‘The Bogle’ scariest. A few commented that the Scots sounded “angry” or “aggressive” (!) while others noted that because a lot of the words were new to them the poem sounded “mysterious”. Most pupils did, understandably, say that they found the Scots poem “more difficult” than the others because of the unfamiliar words.

Next time I would spend longer on the background/importance/relevance of Scots as I feel I focused more on the poem’s ideas and poetic techniques than the effects of the Scots. I would also spend more time on the characterisation of ‘The Bogle’ and encourage pupils to use Scots in class discussion and potentially in their written work. (I would’ve required more time to do this but is something that could be built towards.)

Going forward, I plan to incorporate more texts in Scots into thematic studies (as part of departmental practice we tend to look at 2-3 texts which are thematically linked with BGE classes). This should avoid pupils seeing Scots lessons/texts as add-ons or one-offs and will help build upon skills they are already developing in other contexts. Obviously this would require time to develop new resources but this is something that could potentially be rolled out across the department, provided there is buy-in from other teachers.

I have a lovely s3 class who are very high level (level4+) and I am teaching them one lesson a week of Scots, focusing on learning the history and building up descriptions and expanding their Scots vocabulary. We have had a few experiences of creative description lately which have included describing scenery, labelling parts of the body and detailing the weather. However, their favourite was when we focused on describing people. 

We started with a basic vocabulary starter task where they matched up Scots words with their English meaning via a Google form. This helped to build up their vocabulary and warm them up. I was keen to give  them all a chance of success so they felt good about moving on to the main task. The form marked itself for them and gave them a score, so they didn't feel pressured to share answers and got immediate feedback. Most of them had a good understanding as a result of our previous Scots lessons. I got them to work in pairs to describe their partner. I built up to this by showing them descriptions of members of the class and asking them to guess who it was about, using show-me boards to build confidence and increase participation. They then wrote a more detailed description of their friend. I gave them the option of performing their description and I was delighted that a large number of the class felt confident about speaking in Scots. They were delighted when their plenary task was to describe a teacher and have everyone else guess it. 

I am intending to have them produce a piece of creative writing at the end of this unit, however after seeing how keen they were to speak Scots I am rethinking this and I am considering giving them a spoken option, probably presenting a weather report. In redoing this lesson, I would give them some more scaffolding of me reading out the Scots rather than just writing it - I think this will come as I build my own confidence with it too. 

Hello all! Your ideas and resources look amazing - I'm so impressed. 

Due to a week of council visits and parents' evening, I am really behind with this task. I'm doing a series of lessons with my supported set S3 class and it has been challenging, to say the least! 

I'm aiming to get my resources together and post them tomorrow, along with a detailed description of the lessons and how they worked. 

Thanks for your patience!

I am really sorry that this is so late... and that I managed to miss the unit 2 tutorial! I don't know how I did that. Apologies.

I'll post my reflection on the planned set of lesson here and attach the plan, such as it was. I hope this is what the Application Task is supposed to look like.

Unit 2 Activity 7 Reflection

The language activities provided in Mylene’s PowerPoint were, I thought, appropriate for any learner approaching Scots for the first time – so I began with the Scottish Book Trust broadcast about Halloween on Halloween this year. Pupils engaged well with the texts, trying to write down every Scots word and pronunciation they heard, competing to see who could get the most. This was a self-motivated competition, mostly amongst the boys, which I hadn’t thought to exploit.

We then took a second look/listen at James Robertson reading Room on the Broom in his Scots translation and carried out the learning activities supplied. However, the PowerPoint format meant it was difficult to accommodate different pace of learning, so some got bored while others were struggling to get the work done. I transcribed the PowerPoint into a worksheet for the next day, which proved more successful.

When I started to distribute other Julia Donaldson texts, the pupils became very excited at the prospect of trying their own translations. However, we very soon discovered that it is very difficult to translate INTO Scots, as you must have a good Scots vocabulary before you start; neither the Dictionary of Scots online nor the school’s Orkney Dictionaries have an English à Scots feature, so finding the Scots/Orcadian equivalent of, say, “swamp” or “whale” was nigh on impossible.

We have only spent one lesson so far on the Julia Donaldson texts, but I think we are not going to be successful in creating properly Scots versions of them. It might be the case that they manage to translate the structural language – by which I mean the pronouns, prepositions, parts of verbs, particularly modal verbs – while the words that really carry the meaning – the nouns and adjectives – might be more difficult to translate.

“The Highway Rat wis a baddie,

The Highway Rat wis a thief…” etc.

I'm aiming to get a N3 Scottish Studies award with my supported set of S3 pupils. This is a small class of learners who struggle with a range of factors, from intellectual learning barriers to attendance limitations; within the context of my school, I have been tasked with raising attainment for this targeted group of learners. I am doing  this by incorporating N3 Scottish Studies into the S3 course to support Literacy outcomes and eventually a full qualification by then end of S4 (I will keep the class for 2 years). 

I have always enjoyed using Education Scotland's wee video, 'A History of Scots' and initially planned for my class to create their own questions that would hopefully be answered in the video. Sadly, this was too open a task for my wee scones, and after a period of faffing, I gave them a more structured set of questions to answer (attached).

The reaction to the video was positive, by and large, and some of the contents prompted fruitful discussion about the impact of history on language; we are close to Dunfermline and I was taken aback to discover that none of the pupils were aware that James VI had lived in Dunfermline and that our area was so rich in history. None of the pupils had previously considered the influence of history on language. Likewise, the inclusion of Robert Burns prompted a lively discussion of Scots poems read in primary school (The Sair Finger, Ma Hoggie, etc) that pupils seemed to recall fondly but were reluctant to perform! One pupil, who recently moved to Scotland from Zimbabwe, felt a bit guddled to discover she was actually operating in TWO languages during class (English is her third language, French her fourth, so I guess Scots is now her fifth!) so I'd be interested to know how other teachers approach Scots with EAL learners.

Next steps have been to read Sam Best's story, 'Oslo 1943' from the Scots Language Centre website. So far we have pulled out some Scots words and created definitions, and summarised the story; next, pupils will create their own storyboard/cartoon versions using some of the key Scots language. Because it's set in Norway, we will go on to explore some of the linguistic links between Scots and Scandinavian languages before incorporating French and German influences. 

I've attached the questions for the Listening exercise and the PDF of Sam's story. Sorry, I'm rubbish at whizzy powerpoints so I haven't got any! Happy to answer any questions, of course. 

Finally, my apologies for how late this is, folks. It's been a nightmarish start to the term, full of parents' evenings, CAT sessions, council visits and a nice wee dose of norovirus for good measure, so I'm very, very behind!