Spanish leaders

Before I left for maternity leave a few years ago, a lovely colleague of mine had come up with an idea to continue Spanish in the school. She organised a small group of Y5 and Y6 pupils, planned games and activities and got them to visit all the classes of KS2 once a week! They worked on "old" topics, each week a different one. I made help sheets of all the topics we had covered (vocabulary and sentences), wrote down our favourite songs and created a list of the most popular games.

some of the help sheets 

 our favourite song book with CDs

When I went back to teach later that year, we decided to continue with the Spanish leaders and gave them a different job description: instead of doing "old" topics, they did a follow up activity the same week. I had to plan different games for each class and meet the leaders for 5 minutes every week to talk about the activitites. I left the CD on top of the Spanish cupboard in the hall and copied our  youtube songs on the teachers' laptops for easy access. I got the leaders Spain badges from ebay they could put on while they were working:-).

 these are from ebay

Last term we didn't have Spanish leaders but they are back from next week and I would like to try this idea in my other school too, so got  more badges from the Little Linguist stand at Language World 2014.

 these are from the Little Linguist

The advantages are obvious, the children get to use the language more than once a week and the class teachers who are not confident won't need to feel the pressure to speak, the leaders are great helping the pupils! As a visiting teacher I often feel frustrated that with 1 lesson a week and 30 children in the classroom we are not getting far, but using the more able ones to do an extra activity a few days later actually helps a lot.

I have blogged about the 10-minute teachers, the Spanish leaders, next time I will write about my Spanish helpers!