Conjugation bugs and dice

The KS2 PoS mentions that the pupils should 

"...understand basic grammar appropriate to the language being studied, including (where relevant): feminine, masculine and neuter forms and the conjugation of high-frequency verbs..."

To understand what conjugation is, we did different activities in Y6 last week.

• We learnt an an action  for each of the six verb forms.
• We practised the different forms of the verb "tener" with games like the red herring.
• We sang the verb forms to the tune of Mission Impossible.

In the second half of the lesson we had to use our imaginations to design either a conjugation bug, a conjugation dice or a conjugation creature with six parts. 

The pupils' work is amazing, take a look! Thank you Kimberly Wirries (@SenoritaWirries) for the idea!

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!

Grammar activities in pictures

The new KS2 Programme of Study puts a great emphasis on grammar, so we have been very busy building sentences! Here is how we have fun with grammar in Lancashire:

Lego:

 

To see our Lego movie we made on our iPad, click here.

Paper chains:

Jigsaw puzzles:

Sentences ripped into pieces:

Jenga (blog post here)

Paper clips (idea from Pinterest)

Sentence Surgery (idea from Jumpstart Grammar by Pie Corbett and Julia Strong)

Word class boxes (Poundshop)

Carousel lesson with building blocks, Lego movie maker, glass pens and Jenga

And this is only the beginning, here are my new inspiring books for the quiet windy nights:

West Lancs ALL Primary Languages Hub - 3rd meeting

The next West Lancashire ALL Primary Hub meeting will be on 14/01/2015. We will focus on the grammar part of the new PoS and discuss our favourite grammar activities.

Pupils should be taught to...

...understand basic grammar appropriate to the language being studied, including (where

relevant): feminine, masculine and neuter forms and the conjugation of high-frequency

verbs; key features and patterns of the language; how to apply these, for instance, to

build sentences; and how these differ from or are similar to English.

Languages programmes of study: key stage 2

National curriculum in England

Our hub offers peer to peer support to staff involved in primary languages, please come and share your ideas and thoughts with us! 

This will be our 3rd meeting, everybody is welcome, find out about what we have done before here.

For more information about the Association for Language Learning, go on the ALL website.