"Miss, what is my name in Spanish?" - I have heard this question many times, and I answer easily when somebody is called Joe or Charlie, but stay speechless when Imogen or Niamh ask me!
So I check the name day calendar!:-) Click here for one!
A name day is like a birthday, you celebrate it once a year, when your name comes up in the calendar. In Catholic countries, like Spain and Latin America, if your name was given after a saint, you celebrate on the day the church celebrate the saint. The tradition is more popular in some areas than others and has changed a lot over time: if you have a look at the link I copied, you will see that everybody has a designated day, religious or not... The pupils get really excited when I encourage them to find their name days and ask their parents for gifts:-)
When we practise saying the date, or our birthdays, I give these calendars out- I say the name and they have to find the date, or the other way around. It is a good reading/ pronunciation activity and can be done between partners.
Here is a list of some previous pupils and how I found a "Spanish name" for them. When there was no equivalent, I just looked for a similar one.
Happy name day to my friends/colleagues Carmen and Natalia, who are celebrating their "santo" this month!
¡Felicidades!¡Feliz Santo!
And feel free to send me flowers on my name day, I am Hungarian and have celebrated mine all my life - it is on the 19th of November!:-)
This week I am celebrating a birthday: my blog is half a year old!
When I started to write it in January, my goal was to show how I adapt other people's ideas, and I also wanted to share the activities that I had created and tried with my classes. The blog has had over 10000 views, which is absolutely fantastic (even if many of these views came from my mother in Hungary who likes looking at photos of her grandchildren :-).
On this occasion I am sharing some birthday activities with you.
1, The birthday song
¡Cumpleños feliz!
I play it from the Español, Español CD by Carole Nicoll (there are lots of other great songs on the CD, highly recommended!). It also has the karaoke version without the words. The song is on display on the wall in (almost) every classroom.... And here is a story for you: 5 years ago, in my very first Spanish lesson in my new job I wanted to show how well I prepare for my lessons and how much I care about the pupils. I had asked for a copy of the register with the birthdays on and noticed that a pupil celebrated her birthday on the day I started in this Year 5 class. The class teacher was in and a new student teacher came to observe this lesson as well. After introducing myself and doing a starter activity, I made the birthday girl stand up and encouraged the rest of the group to sing ¡Cumpleños feliz! to her. The pupils looked very confused and so did the birthday girl, the class teacher and the student teacher. I repeated the instructions again in English only, just in case they didn't get what I was saying the first time. Inmediately, the class teacher said to me "Miss, she doesn't celebrate birthdays". Then I looked very confused and felt awful I did something terrible right in my first lesson in my new job. I pulled myself together and taught a good lesson still, but I blamed myself for months for not finding more out about the group. After this lesson, the class teacher told me that the pupil was a Jehova's witness, and didn't celebrate birthdays (and Christmas). Well, I am still at that school, I teach Jehova's witnesses in almost every year group and learnt my lesson by now!
Another good song is the months song on the CD "Let's sing and Learn in Spanish", it is a very catchy one, the children love it. They raise their hands or jump up when they hear their birthday months.
Ear-pulling
After the song, I ask the birthday child:
¿Cuántos años tienes?
And then, I pull the child's ear as many times as corresponds to his/her age, and encourage the rest of the pupils to do the same in the playground later (after asking for permission, of course:-). While I pull the ear, we all count in Spanish! The question/answer on the slide is a great introduction to the Spanish letter "ñ",the upside down question mark, and the accent on "cuántos".
Piñata:
I don't do this all the time, because I teach over 200 children, but occasionally I take my Piñata in, and while we sing a song, the blindfolded birthday pupil(s) have to hit the Piñata I hold with the fly swats. I stick the bottom part loosely with tape and after hitting it for 3-4 minutes the bottom will come off and guess what falls on the floor...... Spanish homework sheets:-) And some sweets for the birthday people.
This year I planned to make one in Spanish club but ran out of time unfortunately.
We practised at home, and we will definitely make one next year.
Thank you for reading the blog, here is a cake for you!
Next week we are going to include some Sanfermines activities in our lessons. Here is a quick video that explains the festival:
I can't offer first hand experience like when I invited my friend Becky to talk about La Tomatina, so I persuaded my puppet teaching assistant Valentín to help me with the illustrations and borrowed my daughter's bull from her playfarm:-)
The cape - mystery voice
Instead of the blindfolds or my Spain football scarf, we will use my cape to cover the face of the volunteer who has to guess which classmate says the word/sentence in a mystery voice.
Running of the bulls - PACMAN revision game
We won't chase each other in the classroom and create complete chaos, but we can play PACMAN. 4 "toros" go in the corners of the classroom, they pretend to have bull horns with their fingers. 4 "mozos" go in between them, they put a red scarf on. The teacher or a pupil stands in the middle of the classroom and asks questions. The toros and mozos have to shout out the answers, the quickest one can move a place and "eat" the one standing next to him/her. The last one standing is the winner.
A song: Uno de enero... - dates
I use the CD/book "Preparados, Listos, Ya", I bought from Amazon, it has some good songs and there are great activities in the teacher's guide.
The same song is on YouTube:
And here is the rock version:
After the running of the bulls: at the doctor's - body parts
2 doctors race to the injured "mozo" and put a plaster on the sore body part. The slow doctor has to sit down and pick a new one. The patient volunteer says: Me duele la cabeza, el pie, la nariz, la boca, la mano, la oreja, etc.
It is interesting to hear the pupils' opinions on bullfights, and a good way to start discussions on other cultures and traditions.
You won't see a picture of me running in front of the bulls in Pamplona but a few years ago I went to Sevilla with my (now retired) puppet and signed up for a tour around the bullring to find out more about this tradition. I will definitely show some of my photos in class!
We celebrate the European Day of Languages every 26th of September in my Spanish lessons. EDL is like your wedding, you need to plan it well ahead!
3 months before the EDL:Find an eTwinning project!
Register on the eTwinning website right now, and sign up for an EDL Project. Last year, we participated in one where we had to send cards to other countries in Europe saying Happy European Day of Languages in our native languages. We made the cards in our first two Spanish lessons in September, they were 10 minute activities at the end. We received cards from all over Europe, we loved reading them and finding the countries on the Internet. Look at our display:
The "Languages take you further" book has a cartoon on each page, some useful expressions and numbers 1-10 . Order them from here! They are free but take a while to deliver, so get them now.
1 month before: Get the "I love languages" resource pack from Routes Into Languages. It includes posters, badges, certificates and calendars. The pack is not free but very reasonably priced.Currently these resources are unavailable, I have tweeted Routes Into Languages to ask about the stock, and will update the blog when there is an answer from them.
text speak badges in German, Spanish and French, can you guess what they are?
calendar in 12 different languages
"I love languages" certificates, you can write the chid's name on the back
"I love languages" badges
"I love languages" poster- we added why it's useful to learn a language
1 week before: Language challenge - A week before the big day I took the pages out of the "Languages take you further" book and made a display out of them for the classroom wall. I set a challenge: the pupils had to learn to count up to 5 in a foreign languages, learn to introduce themselves or say hello. They got a prize the following week if they said their words in class in front of everybody.
1 day before:Video about the importance of languages - Download this video from YouTube, no explanations needed:-). In class watch the clip and ask the children what happened! A very popular video, the pupils demand it all the time.
And download a popular Disney song in multilanguage version, I am sure Frozen will be a hit! Here I have my favourite, from Pocahontas:-)
On the day: Raid your kitchen cupboard and find food you can relate to the 5 most spoken languages. Show these in class and ask whether they can guess where they come from.
Mandarin Chinese: rice
English: marmite
Spanish: tortilla wraps
Hindi: Turmeric to season curries
Arabic: couscous
I know my friend Sue is planning a food tasting session , good luck to her:-)!
For more information and interesting facts, check out the BBC Languages page. If you need more ideas on how to celebrate, visit the CILT EDL webpage here.
And while I was talking about prizes so much, here is a competition: Where did I take this picture? Write your answer in the comments and I will send you a badge/sticker/ or certificate!
I am very lucky to have spent a few years in Barcelona, a city that will stay in my heart forever! I went there to learn Spanish a long time ago, but at that time I didn't realise how wrong I was because they were all speaking Catalan around me. I soon fell in love with the language though, went on courses on Thursday nights (they were free:-) and got to meet lovely people. After going back to university in Hungary, I always had Catalan lessons and enjoyed them a lot.
When we learn Spanish in the KS2 classroom, I like promoting the Catalan language .The boys love Barça, the football team, so as a treat we listen to their anthem in Catalan and shout "Barça, Barça, Barça". I tell them that I had the chance to listen to it in Camp Nou a few times and it was an amazing experience.
Around the 23rd of April we celebrate "el dia de Sant Jordi", the Catalan Valentine's day, when the men give the ladies a rose, and the ladies give the men a book! The rose comes from the legend of Saint George and the dragon, and we celebrate Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare by giving books as a gift, they both died on the same day on 23 April 1616 (or very close anyway...). I tell them about Cervantes, I show them one of my favourite books: Don Quijote, which is about 900 pages but makes me laugh out loud a lot , so it is well worth reading.
It is such a special day in Barcelona, the city is full of bookstalls and rose sellers:
In the past few years I took a bouquet of roses in and we did counting, plurals, and colour agreements with them, we played our big favourites: the hiding (hot/cold) game and the secret signal.
This year we will focus more on the books and because it is going to be the first week of the half term, we will have a minibook competition with the following 2 categories:
1, a book about why it is good to learn Spanish or a language,
The deadline will be sometime in the middle of May and I will get our penpals to choose the best one which will get a prize. All the entrances will be rewarded with my special certificates I got at Language World 2014:-). I will post a photo of the children's work in May.
¡Feliç Sant Jordi!
I wrote this post in memory of my Catalan teacher, Eloi Castelló.
In our last lessons of the term we will use eggs, chicks and bunnies to help us remember what we have learnt so far this year. Hiding and racing are all time favourites is my lessons!
Egg hunt in the classroom
I will hide these eggs in the classrooms before the school day starts, the children will have to find them and stick them on the board next to the right numbers.
The card eggs are from Asda, £1 for about 30 of them.
Egg race
A pupil will say a number and the two volunteers standing by the whiteboard will have to pick the number as quickly as they can. I always make them put their hands behind their backs first.
To practise the place of the adjective, a child or I will say sentences like "Tengo un huevo naranja". The 2 volunteers standing by the board will have to race to pick the right egg.
What is the sound?
A game in pairs: the pupils will work in pairs, they will be given 2 different lists and they will have to challenge each other to recognise the sound and point to the right egg. The eggs will be hanging in the corners and on the walls of the classroom. If they point to the right egg, they can go to the next one, if they don't, they have to sing/rap the word, or sing/rap a sentence with the word! I will have a sentence written next to each word to help those who need more support.( My list will have words like amarillo, me llamo, rojo, perro, España, verde, junio, julio, jueves, viernes, hace calor, hace frío, está lloviendo, está nevando, hace viento, el hermano, la hermana, etc.)
Egg and spoon race:
I will put laminated flashcards around the classroom (different topics in every classroom: in the school, in the town, transport... etc). The two volunteers will have to race from one place to the other holding a spoon with an egg on it while saying sentences in Spanish (Voy al supermercado, Paso por delante del restaurante, Llego a la iglesia... etc.). If they can get to all the places without dropping their eggs they get a sticker.
Egg head families
I bought these eggs from one of the pound shops. In year 6 we are learning qualities and how to describe ourselves and others, this will be a good activity to finish the term. We will decorate them and describe them , and have a contest at the end for "la familia más mona" . There are four tables, they will each work on a family. I used the back of cereal boxes for the descriptions and I connected the egg and the card with a cocktail stick.
Chicken/Bunny Pacman
4 chickens stand in the 4 corners of the classroom and 4 bunnies stand between them by the wall. A volunteer will ask questions in the middle of the classroom and the quickest chicken or rabbit to answer right can move up a place, eating the one standing in his/her way. They move in a clockwise direction, if there is a gap they fill that. The last one standing is the winner. I learnt this game from my colleague Scott Davenport long time ago, he played it with "toros y gallinas".
This is for my Year 6 pupils and Spanish club only, I am not prepared to feed 200 pupils:-) They will have to work hard before they can eat them, because the plastic eggs have Spanish words and sentences inside that will need to be put in the right order. If we have time, we will decorate the cakes with ready made cake icing , I have got lots of half packets left from my son's home made birthday cake. We did some baking on this rainy Saturday afternoon:
Los pollitos dicen...
A song to learn an animal sound: pío pío and to say "I am hungry" and "I am cold".
March is such a busy month! We are celebrating World Book Day, Mother's Day and Easter, and we also have specific topics and different skills to learn. As my penpal Natalia wrote it in her email once : "Siempre vamos con la lengua fuera." I know that Mother's Day is celebrated on different dates in all the Spanish speaking countries; the reason why I am fitting it in now is because it would be nice if the children could take some Spanish gifts home. I teach 8 classes a week and run a lunchtime Spanish club, we will use the following activities:
A tongue twister
Many years ago around Mother's Day I was sitting in a Spanish restaurant where the laminated placemat said "Mi mamá me mima mucho." I am sure we will have fun repeating it and listening to each other!
Gifts to take home in Spanish
I bought a big bag of letter beads a few months ago in my favourite charity shop, I was hoping to use them in my classroom to practise spelling. But because the beads are "girly" I couldn't find any activities suitable for everybody until last week when I thought that we could make bracelets for Mother's Day! Even boys will enjoy this, because they can make a gift for their mums or they can make a flower instead / write a card in Spanish.
you can buy letter beads on ebay
There are two types of flowers: one is for Year 6 where we are learning "porque" and describing ourselves (adjectives), the other one is for the younger ones, we will learn to say "Te quiero, Mamá". The templates are here and here.
A song I love the animation, the tune and the fact that it is subtitled.
There are more ideas on Janet Lloyd's Mother Day's blog post! I am waiting for the postman to bring my "Mi mamá" book by Anthony Brown:-). I will let you know about it.
Update on 13/3/2014
I received the book, it is full of adjectives, a great chance to practise genders and agreement.
¡Feliz día de la Madre! from my garden...this hydrangea was my very first Mother's Day gift five years ago:-)
On Wednesday morning I visited Becky, a friend of mine I hadn't seen for ages. We were chatting and having a cup of coffee when she casually mentioned that she had been to the Tomatina last August. My pulse immediately went up, I got very excited and invited her to my Spanish lessons to talk about this great festival. She said "All right, and when?", I said "TOMORROW!!!" Becky is off to Spain next week for a long time so there was no time to waste... Becky said she could come to both of my morning classes, a Year 5 and a Year 6. They are my longest sessions, 60 minutes each with lots of possibilities:-)
The right atmosphere
Early in the morning I went to Tesco to get some soap and a packet of ham to create our own "palo jabón". Finally these ugly posts in the classrooms gained a real purpose (we keep bumping into them when we play the lighting house directions game). The looks on the children's faces were priceless while I was sticking my ham up on the post before the lesson.Then Becky and me covered the post in soap, a very strong coconut one, the only kind they had in stock in the supermarket that morning:-)
I had asked the men in my family to make me a Lego truck and I filled it with tomatoes. I put the truck, diving goggles and swimming goggles in the middle of the classroom before the lesson started.
At the beginning of the lesson I asked the pupils whether they had noticed anything strange about the classroom, they mentioned the ham, the truck, the tomatoes and the "GIRL"(Becky:-). In year 5 we had never mentioned La Tomatina, in year 6 we had, so they could name the festival based on the clues.
Tomate, tomate, quiero tomate...
Becky gave her presentation, it was fantastic! We saw photos of her with her friends getting soaking wet, sticky and red! My favourite picture was Becky's hair after the Tomatina, she needed 4 washes to get all the bits off! She taught a chant: "Tomate, tomate, quiero tomate.....", this is what everybody shouts while waiting for the tomatoes to arrive. She reminded the children of the "ñ" in Buñol, taught us words like " los mozos", "el camión" and "el cohete" and answered all the questions we had.
Me gusta la Tomatina PORQUE....
After the presentation we asked the children "Te gusta la Tomatina?" and they answered "Me encanta/Me gusta/ No me gusta la Tomatina." Then I said that now we are going to learn to give reasons with our opinions ("Es una fiesta estupenda/divertida/aburrida/sucia"). Those who could say their opinions with a reason were given a tissue tomato or paper tomato and could participate in the tomato fight at the end of the lesson. Obviously everybody's hands were up to express their feelings so we listened to about ten and then just listened to the rest while the children were doing pair work later. The tomatoes have to be squashed before throwing, so it was all right for me to prepare them quickly with tissue paper and not worry about the looks:-)
YO!!! We are rapping!
The day before the lessons I came across my friend Emilie's rap song on twitter and really loved it, I downloaded the app AutoRap and was desperate to try it with the pupils asap. We created a song with our opinion sentences and we found the rapping hilarious.
We had about 10-15 minutes left and the pupils were given a choice: make a tomato shaped mini book or design a Tomatina poster for this year's tomato throwing festival in Burscough!!! In Spanish of course, because we will send the posters to Buñol:-) They are not finished yet, we will spend about 15 minutes on them next week and will put more images up then.
La Tomatina in the classroom
Our last activity was to actually throw the tomatoes at each other! I gave them a whole minute to go totally crazy and they loved it! I will have to use 1 minute of "Tomatina time" as a reward in my lessons in the future:-)
(And I am inviting you to a REAL tomato fight if you think that Intercultural Understanding doesn't bring progress....:-)
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