Last Wednesday we had our second ALL primary hub meeting in Burscough. First we introduced ourselves, talked about the challenges of the new PoS and gave ideas to each other. Then we all shared a resource we really liked.
Twitter: a big staffroom for teachers, Paula has joined:-), more information about using it here, written by Joe Dale. I am @Erzsiculshaw on Twitter if you want to follow me!
We made an "ofrenda" (altar) for Scooter, a pupil's snake who passed away last year. We said some sentences about him in Spanish, and wrote a few things on pieces of card which we put on the class display. RIP Scooter!
We decorated Día de los Muertos cookies I had baked the night before. The pupils said the colours and the body parts in Spanish while putting the icing on. (I was walking around in the classroom and I said that if I didn't hear them speak Spanish, I would eat up the cookie straight away!)
We haven't had the time to watch videos this week, but here are two from previous years:
La canción de las calaveras:
El baile de los esqueletos (good to practise telling the time)
And I would watch this award winning Día de los Muertos video in class but it makes me cry!!!
I have young children and many times my teaching ideas come
from playing with them:-)
Leaves from the park:
We like collecting leaves in the park, we put them in big
dictionaries for a few days and then we can make monsters with them.
These are my Year 4’s leaf monsters, they are learning body
parts at the moment.
Y6 are sending the leaf bunting to Spain, it will look
really good on our partner school’s classroom display. We have written a few
sentences about ourselves under the leaf people.
Nuts about numbers:
Before we eat the hazelnuts from my garden, I am taking them
to school to play with. We are learning big numbers in Year 5, they have a
laminated placemat with the numbers 1-100 in Spanish and they have to challenge
each other to say the nut number in Spanish and check if the answer is correct.
Bonkers about conkers:
One of my children’s favourite book character is Kippkopp,
the conker boy.On rainy Sunday afternoons we do crafty activities at home,
last week we made some conker people. I will use some of these to revisit
hair/eye colours and today we have made some comic book pages with them in Year
3/4.
I wonder what I will be teaching when my own two kids
grow up and won’t play with me any more...
In two weeks I am hosting the ALL West Lancashire Primary Hub again. Our hub focuses on peer to peer support. Last time we decided that it would be nice to share our favourite resources, so this meeting will be a "Show and Tell"!
I am looking forward to seeing you!
And because the feedback was good last time, I am expecting a huge crowd:-) See you there!
We haven't even recovered from the celebrations of the European Day of Languages, and here is the next big day already: el día de la Hispanidad or Columbus Day on the 12th of October.Every pupil knows that they speak Spanish in Spain, but how about the rest of the countries and how did the language get there?
Next week, in my lessons we will do the following activities:
Watch a short animation of the trip
Here is a very good link to the animated map of Columbus's first trip. Take a look at the other menu options as well, it is a great page that explores his trips and life.
Watch the "History of the Spanish Language"
I found this video on Facebook a year ago, it is a good summary of the history of Spanish. After the video we discuss what they remember and I ask questions for stickers!
The Europe/America exchange: feely bag
Blindfolded volunteers will have to taste/touch/smell the following items that were brought to Europe from America and viceversa:
from America:el tomate, la patata, el chocolate, la piña, el chicle
from Europe: el trigo, el café, el caballo, el cerdo
There are more items on the web page suggested above!
Flags:
Make the flags of the Spanish speaking countries! Look at our bunting, we have almost finished our flags (and got a bit overexcited with the pom poms...).
Any other ideas? Please feel free to leave a comment!
What a week....we had lots of fun celebrating the European Day of Languages! My blog post about our previous activities was very popular (click here), so I have decided to share what we did this year and you might be able to use some of the ideas next time. Here is the list:
Food tasting:
I walked in Burscough Tesco and asked the community outreach worker (Jill) to donate some food for our international food tasting activity. I had done some research on the Tesco website before and these were the products I asked for:
Dates from Egypt- Arabic
Breadsticks- Italian
Spring rolls- Chinese
Tortilla crisps- Spanish
Poppadoms- Hindi
Pretzels- German
Croissants- French
And.... I bought snails from Amazon, for those who really wanted a different experience-an idea from the Facebook Primary Languages group. Most pupils had a go, even the head teacher came in to try some and the class teachers had a small bit as well:-)
Around the world in hot air balloons:
From the book "Languages take you further" the pupils had to learn to say "hello" in 3 different languages, write them down on post its, stick them on spoon or stick men and put them in hot air balloons. The pupils made the mini men, I made the hot air balloons. This idea was inspired here http://edlideas.wikispaces.com/ (by @dominic_mcg) (The Culshaw family are sick of eating yogurts by the way:-)
A balloon visit to another school
After making our hot air balloons, we visited St. John's Primary School and we gave them to the pupils there:-) They made us some hand made cards and stickers. Mrs Murphy, the Spanish teacher in the school prepared a fantastic assembly with all kinds of activities: singing together, learning a German tongue twister, acting out/saying the numbers in Japanese, singing a song in 3 languages, reading a story in Spanish and telling us interesting facts about languages. It was such a lovely experience!
Etwinning project-postcard/song exchange
Three of my classes participated in this project: we made cards, wrote "Happy European Day of Languages!" on them and posted them to 18 schools around Europe. We are still receiving them and they look great on our display. Also, part of the project was to record/upload Frère Jacques in our own languages on the eTwinning website, it is fun to hear the song in Portuguese,Latvian, Polish, Spanish, etc... we will listen to all in the next few weeks:-)
Chinese/Spanish Skype with a class in Birmingham
This was absolutely amazing! Simone Haughey (a lovely teacher I know from Twitter) and I had agreed to do a short Skype session with our classes and sing a song to each other. The test call failed before the lesson but Simone messaged to say we should try it, and it worked!:-)) Now the whole world knows that I will hardly get an Oscar for Best Director as it took me ages to work out the camera on the iPad, and quite a while to realise that the screen is showing them and not us... we were all wearing the same uniform! Simone played the ukulele and sang "Twinkle, twinkle little star" in Chinese, and my pupils repeated the lines after her! She was great! We sang the "Cómo te llamas?" song and taught them Me llamo, Hola +Adiós.
After Simone's Skype call I thought that things couldn't get any better, but the same night I got a message on Twitter from Carmen, another Spanish teacher from Sunderland... she and her class made us a really nice video, check it out here:
http://spanishrv.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/hay-una-cosa-que-te-quiero-decir.html They knew that we were learning about expressing likes/dislikes, so in the video they showed us some really good words on big papers and sang us a song! I was in tears after reading the post, seriously! By the way, Carmen's blog is a gold mine for language teachers, I "steal" something from it every week:-)
Prizes
Stickers, books, passports.... all freebies: you can get them through the link from my previous EDoL post.
Some"I love languages" class displays
Video clips Frozen in 25 languages- it was a big hit!
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