Poundshop ideas for the languages classroom (part 1) (#Poundlandpedagogy)

When I joined Twitter about a year ago I noticed that there are lots of tweets with the hashtag #poundlandpedagogy: teachers share ideas on how they use the treasures they buy in these shops. I am very lucky because in Southport there is a Poundshop in every corner so I have managed to buy lots of things for my language teaching. 

Here are my favourites:

Hula hoop sentences

This idea comes from Carmel O'Hagan, (MFL teacher and adviser), who tweeted a photo of a special hula hoop. I bought two of these, wrote the same long sentence on both and got two pupils to race to put the sentence together (Hoy hace frío y está lloviendo., El jueves voy a la playa en tren, etc.)

Another hula hoop activity was inspired by Julie Prince (MFL teacher and consultant). Two pupils had to hold them up and other two had to race to throw soft toys through them.Both hula hoops stood for groups (masculine/feminine, "j" sound or "v" sound, etc.) and after I have said a word, they had to throw the teddies through the right one. If the word included both sounds (jueves), the two pupils holding the hula hoops had to make sure they put them together quickly. When you pick these "holders", say you want volunteers who are not scared of pain and not afraid of being hit with the teddies:-)

Puppets

These can be plastic spoons, polystyrene balls or eggs. You can use crepe paper, buttons, pompoms, strings and felt tips for decorating. Once the sentences are written (on lovely colourful post it notes:-), you can put a lolly stick in the balls.

The spoon puppets were made for the European Day of Languages, the pupils had to write "hello" in 3 different languages and learn them. We used the Languages Take You Further booklets, which are great because they are free from the European Commission, check out my EDoL blog post for the link.

Plastic boxes for parts of the sentence

I used these plastic boxes to put my Lego words in. We played with building block sentences before, I took the idea from Dominic McGladerry's blog. This activity worked well in a carousel lesson, I had placed the boxes on the table and the pupils had to make up sentences.

Plastic drawers for parts of the sentence

Baking decorations

I  baked Día de Muertos cookies, Roscón de Reyes and Mona de Pascua for my classes. They had to decorate these using colours, plurals and shapes in Spanish. You can get writing icing very cheap, 4 for a £1. Other decorations could be feathers, pompoms,little chicks...etc.

 

Genders

It is very difficult for English children to understand the concept of masculine and feminine, so I bought a few things to introduce the concept of genders. For more activities check out my blog post.

These are cornflake boxes:

More boxes:

Wigs (there is a pink one as well): the pupils can put them on while playing the hot/cold hiding game.

 Pompoms for masculine/feminine words (there are blue ones, too).

Plastic folders to put words in:

Props for detective games

Moustaches for detective games, foam face stickers to express feelings, blank faces to practise physical descriptions, blank jigsaw puzzles to solve a mystery (this one is from Wilko's).

Stickers for penpal letters

No time to decorate letters during class? You can always get cheap stickers from one of the poundshops, children love them!

Have YOU got any poundshop ideas? Leave a comment or tweet me (@Erzsiculshaw) and I will include yours in Part 2. Thank you:-)!