Monday, 30 March 2015

ALL West Lancs Primary Languages hub meeting- songs

In March our primary languages meeting was about how we use songs in our teaching.

Here are the suggestions of the participants, who were all given a microphone for their contributions:-)


  • Take Ten in Spanish, French or German (http://www.take10.org.uk/) - fantastic DVDs showing dances and songs, and the book is full of great ideas! We watched Jean Petit qui danse with the dance, a similar video is here:

  • Grupo Encanto: there are lots of videos on Youtube here. At the meeting we did the actions for "Soy una taza"- food or restaurant topic and "Chuchuwa" - body topic and "Este puente..".

Other suggested songs by Grupo Encanto: "Con mi dedito", "Vuela la luna", "Había una vez un avión".


  • Boca Beth on youtube





  • Ay las frutas


  • To practise vowels: Un burriquito como tú by Peret



  • Los Trotamundos: we watched a number song and "Un limón y medio limón". The songs come with karaoke versions! We didn't find a web link during the hub, but I managed to find one at home later here.
  • a French one: tchik et tchak for body parts

More suggestions:
  • sing new vocabulary to familiar tunes 
  • do a military march with the new vocabulary
KS1 songs on my previous blog post here.

More ideas on Sue Cave's page, she runs the Thames Valley Primary Hub and they had a songs hub the day after ours! http://www.cavelanguages.co.uk/thames-valley-primary-hub

Before the meeting, I asked the Facebook LiPS (Languages in Primary School) group about their favourite songs and groups, and here are the answers:

 French:
(Sylvie Bartlett Rawlings)
(Vikki Bruff)
  • Alain le Lait is fantastic - songs sooo engaging! Can buy , but loads of free videos by him on you tube. I down load with ilivid & keep
(Helen Boddy)
  •  My P5 class is loving La Vie en Couleur http://comptines.tv/la_vie_en_couleur - not the easiest lyrics, but raised the roof on the classroom singing it this week. Lots of fabulous songs on this site.
(Lisa Adams)
  • My year 3s are loving Léon le Caméléon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHII3ydsL8U

 (Barbara Cheded)

(Laetitia Le Moal Davies)
  •  Ratounet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce_aFZR3xQA&feature=youtu.be
In Spanish 

 (Sylvie Bartlett Rawlings)
(Lisa Stevens)
(Laetitia Le Moal Davies)
(Letizia Mendez Tiley)


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Sunday, 29 March 2015

eTwinning- basic guide for beginners

A week ago Janet Lloyd invited me to talk about eTwinning to language teacher colleagues in Warrington. (Read her blog post about this event called "Making Links Abroad".) I talked about projects we are working on and then I showed some screenshots of the etwinning website, just to make the registration easy. I have decided to copy the slides here on my blog because on Twitter or in the Languages in Primary Schools (LiPS) Facebook group there are always teachers interested in setting up partnership, finding pen pals or starting projects. I would like to show you that it is easy to become an eTwinner teacher!:-)

Here are my simple instructions:

Go to the etwinning website! You will see this:


Click on "Register now" in the right corner!
You will have to fill in a few of these pages, it won't take more than ten minutes, I promise! Have your head teacher's or school's email address handy, you will need it, the head will get a confirmation of your registration.

Create a profile!

You will find this option in the menu bar.
This will take you about 20 minutes, you can write as much or as little as you want to. Other teachers will see this page and can leave a comment for you. You can do the same if you find an eTwinner whose project you are interested in! Here is my profile:

Look for partners!

Go to the "Find etwinners" tab on the menu and you will get this page: 



You can do a search (subject, age, country, etc) or click on the forum you are interested in on the right hand side.After clicking on the forum, you will find lots of teachers looking for partners, look!You can reply to one if you are interested or click on "create message" and start your own thread!



Once you find a partner, you will have to register your project and you can start exchanging photos, videos, documents on Twinspace, which is eTwinning's secure platform. More about this next time!

                             Happy Easter, happy eTwinning!





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Saturday, 28 March 2015

Easter ideas (2)

Hello! I haven't written any posts for more than a month- the longest break since I started blogging 14 months ago.... The reason is that I am covering Spanish 2 days a week, so with my other 3 jobs I am teaching 4.5 days a week, about 700 pupils in 25 different classrooms! While I am doing very well in the classrooms, I am too tired to actually write about the activities...but it is Easter holidays now and I can catch up with blogging:-)

Here I come with the Easter activities:

Haribos- adjective agreement and Easter vocabulary
I found these in Home Bargains last week, only 60p a bag, and the contents are enough for 2 classes!We practised adjective agreement with the bigger ones (KS2) and learnt Easter vocab with KS1. It was a big success! I made the children promise that once they swallowed the haribo, they would always have to remember that the adjectives come after the nouns in Spanish.

 Tricky sounds sorting

A few weeks ago Clare Seccombe tweeted a link to me with fantastic vocabulary learning ideas: 
http://talesfromaspanishteacher.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/vocab-stations.html?m=1. 
I got inspired to make a sound sorting activity for the children to practise "j", "ll", "v", "z" and "r". The Easter Egg Smarties were not for eating, jut to play with in little groups.

 Nazareños

 A quick crafty activity at the end of the lesson, the template is here.

Monas de Pascua

I made these last year in my oven, but I wasn't teaching full time and my daughter had long afternoon naps... This year I just went into ASDA and got mini donuts ( about £1 per class). They decorated the donuts with icing and they had to use their best Spanish pronunciation when saying the colours. Again, this was an end of the lesson activity and took about 10-15 minutes.

eTwinning project: Easter card exchange

I am a big fan of working with other teachers, and very lucky to have found excellent colleagues like Carmen from Sunderland.
We have worked together before (Christmas singing, Valentine's card exchange), this time we decided to write Easter cards to each other. The Burscough children made a spring dictionary (a good chance to revisit  dictionary skills and get the glitter jars out;-) and we got beautiful cards with the date on, that is what they have been practising in Sunderland. We had a look at how they used the preposition "de" and circled this word on our cards. And most importantly, we enjoyed the Easter chocolate egg in the middle!





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