El baile de los animales - a Spanish song in assembly!

In Key Stage 1 I always try to do my best to link Spanish to the class topics. It is quite easy most of the time, because they learn about the body, the seasons, animals, weather....but recently I found out that the class topic of my Year 2's is Penguins and their teacher asked me if I could find a song for their class assembly! It is such an honour to be included in a class assembly so I spent ages and ages researching but couldn't come up with a penguin song....The closest I got was one with a crocodile, an elephant and a chicken:-) As the tune got into my brain and there was no way getting it out, I showed it to the class teacher who liked it but suggested that we should change the chicken to penguins, which we did! 

After two weeks of practising, we are all getting more confident (and less dangerous with our elephant trunks).

Here is the song, if you feel like dancing, but don't forget to waddle when it gets to the chickens penguins:-) 

Class topic: Barcelona - dot-to-dot Sagrada Familia

When I said in my last blog post that I had a thousand things to share, I literally meant it! Today I bought a 1000 dot-to-dot picture book, and one of the pictures is Barcelona, which is the class topic of one of my Year 4 classes this term.

Hopefully we will finish connecting the dots before the end of the year, and I also hope I found the right page and it will be the Sagrada Familia, and not the Eiffel Tower as the pictures are not labelled!:-)

I will keep you posted of the progress!

Conjugation with my puppet

After about three months of silence I am back to blogging!!!! My excuses: first I had a bad chest infection around Christmas that lasted more than a month,and then my laptop broke and couldn't get hold of a new one for a while. I have a thousand things to share and I am slowly catching up now...wish me luck!

Grammar and conjugation are important in the KS2 Programme of Studies so we are spending a fair bit practising our verbs this term with the Year 6 pupils. To make the concept of conjugation less abstract, today I took my puppet in and placed him in the other end of the classroom with a pupil. We contrasted "juego" and "juegas"- a volunteer stood up and said a sentence about herself/himself: Juego al fútbol, and the whole class had to point at my puppet and change the sentence to "juega" while the pupil puppet was doing the action.

We also did the Mission Impossible conjugation song (blog here) so we are getting closer to our target to write about our favourite sport stars in third person singular. 

Watch this space to find out more:-)

The 12 joys of teaching: Day 7

On Day 7 of #12jot15 I am sharing the joy of singing a Hungarian song together with my Year 5 pupils. They will perform it at the Christmas Carol night, the theme is "Christmas around the world", where every class will represent a different country, and I am so pleased that Year 5 have chosen Hungary! 

It was such an emotional experience to be in the classroom practising the song... I really understand this quote now:

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart" (Nelson Mandela)

Update on 26 December: You can listen to them sing here: http://youtu.be/DFlXuoiqUF4

The 12 joys of teaching: Day 6

On day 6 of #12jot15 I am sharing the joy of belonging to the etwinning community! I love working with teachers from other countries and collaborating on projects like learning languages together, making cookbooks or teaching each other playground games. The playground project will be published in the Languages Today magazine ( by the Association of Language Learning) which is amazing! 

Thank you Natalia, Carmen and Sarah for being excellent partners and inspiring me and the children:-)

Some links: 

My visit to Valladolid last year: 

http://zapatitoingles.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/my-etwinning-visit-to-valladolid.html

Carmen's blog:

http://spanishrv.blogspot.com/

The etwinning website: 

https://www.etwinning.net/en/pub/index.htm#

Today I am sending you greetings from the etwinning training event from Nottingham! (With Vikki Bruff and Lisa Stevens)

The 12 joys of teaching - Day 5

On Day 5 of #12jot15 I remind myself of one of the most inspirational people I know: Joe Dale. He is the founder of #mfltwitterati and knows everything about technology! He is very supportive and approachable, make sure you follow him on Twitter (@joedale).
I learnt many things from him, the latest is green screening on the iPad with the Do Ink App.
Thank you, Joe:-)

The 12 joys of teaching - Day 4

On Day 4 of #12jot15 I am copying the Facebook post I wrote this afternoon:-)

Erzsi Culshaw feeling proud.

6 hrs · 

Well, I don't make £65k and not even the lowest amount mentioned in the government teaching advert, but I feel very rich because an ex-pupil just told me that his high school teacher said that his primary Spanish teacher must have been very good:-)

What a lovely thing to say, it feels good to be complimented!