The Kate Languages Blog

Reading and listening are an essential part of teaching languages. Here are my ideas for how to teach them in a way that ensures your students fully understand the texts in depth.

As always, I recommend including listening and/or reading tasks as part of my "exploiting one text" method of lesson pl...

Introducing and practising vocabulary is a vital part of an effective languages lesson - it's always worth spending a decent amount of time on this part of the learning process. And don't forget to plan for retrieval practice, too!

The second part of my digital course "Structuring an Outstanding MF...

Starting lessons strongly is one of the keys to ensuring a great lesson every time - essential for student progress, but also for your own mental health as a teacher!

Anyone who has had a chaotic start to a lesson (ie me!) will know that it can throw you off for the whole lesson and you never quite...

Everyone fails sometimes, but it's how we learn from these failures that turns them from disasters into positive experiences.

This blog post is a pretty personal one for me, so be gentle with your feedback haha! 

In Season 8 Episode 5 of the Kate Languages Podcast, I talked about 3 of my biggest f...

Dictations are a great way of checking students' understanding of phonics in MFL lessons, but can be a bit dry if taught the same way each time.

In October 2024, I hosted a workshop all about how to teach dictations in a fun way, with lots of great ideas for how to "train" your students for the dic...

Teaching is a time-consuming job. We all know that, but there are ways to save time without cutting corners or compromising on quality.

One of the most important tools you need to have in your teacher toolkit is having some clear boundaries about what you really want to prioritise in your work. The...

If you've got folders full of amazing PowerPoints and worksheets for the old French, German and Spanish spec (2018), and are worrying that you just have to delete them all and start again from scratch... please don't!!

In this blog post, I want to give you five really easy ways of adapting your re...

In this blog post I wanted to share with you one of my biggest tips for planning as an MFL teacher - how to exploit one text for different skills.

Essentially, exploiting one text is about saving you tons of time as a busy teacher, as you don't need to scrabble around looking for different texts fo...

Our first ever challenge "Sell your first online resource in a week" has been an incredible success! I am blown away by the amazing resources that the participants have created and truly honoured to be able to share them with you here.

The challenge took place over 5 days, during which time we met ...

How can we achieve *real* wellbeing in teaching? 

When I chatted to the wonderful Emily Armstrong about *real* teacher well-being on The Kate Languages Podcast, she had so many amazing tips and ideas, I thought I’d share them again with you here:

1. Focus on workload management - Wherever possible...

If you’ve ever wondered exactly how I create my resources and which digital tools I use, here is a short breakdown of 5 of my favourites!

1. Microsoft Word and PowerPoint - It may be a bit basic and simple, but I create my full workbooks on Microsoft Word and my lessons are on PowerPoint. I do thi...

Teaching is an incredibly stressful job, and burnout is far too common. I know this as I burnt out myself in 2016, and left the classroom for good in 2017. I have spent many years working on being aware of when I might be starting to feel burnt out again, and have tried and tested a number of differ...