But when will I blog?

This is the question!

In March I started to work more or less full time.

In weekly numbers this means 27 classes, 27 classroom changes with all my teaching props and more than 700 pupils. 

I truly enjoy my job and I have lots of ideas for blog posts, but at the moment I don't have the time to write. I will catch up with blogging at the end of July!

Even my boots gave in last Friday:-) 

Celebrating Mexico

I recently found out that it was the Year of Mexico in the UK, (http://www.britishcouncil.org.mx/en/2015). The British Council designed some exciting activities for schools to celebrate Mexican culture, click here to see a PowerPoint, lesson ideas and an art activity!

I always mention el Cinco de Mayo in my schools to talk about Mexico. Read Carolina's blog post about this celebration here (and in fact, read all her blog and join her Facebook group: Fun for Early and Elementary Spanish Teachers, she is awesome:-)).

This year my plans include:

• look at the British Council PowerPoint (link above)
• colour Mexican flags and put them on our display 
• watch these videos about piñatas

• make  piñatas (we have been practising at home:-)

•  or just take mine in and play with it (it has homework inside, not sweeties!:-)

• do vocabulary activities with jalapeños, chocolate, chili, tomato: (Me gusta/No me gusta with pero/porque, shopping role play)
• look at pictures and murals by Diego Rivera, they will fit in well with our clothes topic
  
• encourage the children to participate in a Diego Rivera colouring competition (the images are from here)

• look at Mexican football players in the Premier Leage: there is a list on Wikipedia

Mexico [edit]

• Pablo Barrera – West Ham United – 2010–11
• Jared Borgetti – Bolton Wanderers – 2005–06
• Nery Castillo – Manchester City – 2007–08
• Giovani dos Santos – Tottenham Hotspur – 2008–12
• Guillermo Franco – West Ham United – 2009–10^{[Note 49]}
• Javier Hernández – Manchester United – 2010–
• Carlos Salcido – Fulham – 2010–11
• Carlos Vela – Arsenal, West Bromwich Albion – 2008–11

Any other ideas? Please leave a comment here or tweet me (@Erzsiculshaw)!

Sant Jordi crafts

Last week we celebrated el Dia de Sant Jordi by making dragon bookmarks/puppets I had found on Ideas Para Peques at http://ideasparapeques.es/category/sant-jordi/.

I went to Poundland where I got 48 wooden pegs for £1, and I found the rest of the "ingredients" in the school art cupboard: green and red paper, plastic eyes and paint/ felt tips.

I told them about Cervantes, Don Quijote and Shakespeare and the tradition of giving roses and books to each other on St George's Day in Catalonia.

The activity was useful for us because it helped:

• taking turns, asking and answering questions - the dragons were our puppets and they could open their mouths and speak in Spanish (we even did some shadow role plays on the IWB)
• reinforcing the place of the adjective: they had to write "un dragón verde" on the spikes or the wings 
• writing the date "23 de abril"- no capitals in Spanish!

The activity took us about 15-20 minutes.

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!

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)

•  Français! Français! and ¡Español! ¡Español! By the Language Factory. Not their whole programe but the ones with the 3 music CDs: http://www.little-linguist.co.uk/.../francais-francais-3... they are fabulous. The children have adapted the songs and the dialogues at the start have been really useful.
• Take 10, singing French, à l'école (for every day use).
•  http://comptines.tv for authentic French lullabies and le monde des petits on You Tube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WjhQvv9kexk (free)
•  for KS1 we Love: http://youtu.be/2AxuWAFqCjQand http://youtu.be/mEBi4yooJUI

(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)

• Le robot dans mon chateauhttp://pinterest.com/pin/313211349058236499/
•  2 patates for Ks1http://pinterest.com/pin/313211349058127539/
• Je suis maladehttp://pinterest.com/pin/313211349057053701/
•  j'aime les fruitshttp://pinterest.com/pin/313211349058249992/
• Le boogie woogie des chiffreshttp://pinterest.com/pin/313211349059050641/ 
• dans ma salle de classe http://pinterest.com/pin/313211349057098666/
• Mon sac a dos http://pinterest.com/pin/313211349057373014/
• Quand Je vais a l'école http://pinterest.com/pin/313211349057373017/
• Quel temps fait-il? http://pinterest.com/pin/313211349059027644/

(Laetitia Le Moal Davies)

•  Ratounet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce_aFZR3xQA&feature=youtu.be

In Spanish 

(Sylvie Bartlett Rawlings)

• Español Español CDs
• Grupo Encanto 
• http://www.rockalingua.com

(Lisa Stevens)

• All time favourite that has become synonymous with lisibo - La Vaca Lola https://youtu.be/mQmsLqVXMa8 See blogpost here for the actions!http://lisibo.com/2013/09/baila-la-vaca-lola/
• Also like the songs on Canciones populares infantiles from the Consejería 
• For whole class fun and involvementhttps://youtu.be/8_RWPLfo8Xg Chuchuwa is always great...
• And then there's the Choco Choco La La song I shared at the#ililc5 Show and Tell http://youtu.be/lFWysdCgVNg Here's a post to explain why http://lisibo.com/2015/02/ililc5-show-and-tell-song/ Sylivie's addition to the Choco song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcq02eoALDc&feature=youtu.be
• Just written a post about calming Spanish songs! Might be useful? http://lisibo.com/.../las-manos-spanish-songs-and-rhymes.../

(Laetitia Le Moal Davies)

•  My year 6 like this one http://youtu.be/9ZKw5IldE9Y (Buenos días song)
• This one to introduce yoursel fhttp://youtu.be/ij5R1YTG48Q
•  http://youtu.be/6FEyfy5N3Nc (learn to count)

(Letizia Mendez Tiley)

• Hola, hola buenos días = Early Start Spanish; Nos. 1 - 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETgyBQDY4Bg
•  the Months of the Year:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKznbHvPFwc
•  For prepositions in Spanish:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uzfwLKevUU

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!

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!