Plastic cup fashion show

Today in year 5 we had our last lesson of the half term where we made an adjective fashion show using plastic cups.
Thank you Helen Williams for sharing the original video by Sashko Danylenko Art!
https://www.facebook.com/sashkodanylenkoart/videos/581409165350936/

The one we made today is here.:-)

Dice conjugation with the "plenary pals"

The idea of "plenary pals" comes from one of my favourite teaching books:  Pimp your lesson  (I. Wallace, L. Kirkman).

Here I'll tell you about how I used this last week with Year 6 in our Spanish lesson where we are learning about verbs and the conjugation of "tener".

Some of the pupils finished the writing activity before the others and I gave them a job - to create a plenary activity taking into consideration the learning objective of the lesson. They could use the iPad, (they already know some apps from previous lessons).  They chose Make Dice Lite and created this:

The dice template was handy as Spanish verbs have 6 forms, so they could fit the verbs on the 6 sides. (The pink number dice is always there, we just ignored it this time but I appreciate it could be useful if we put 6 different infinitives on each side and the challenge would be to conjugate it in the person where the number dice stops. Also, you can use more dice at the same time to make a sentence building activity.)

During the plenary, we mirrored the iPad screen on the IWB. A volunteer came out and stood by the screen (without seeing it). Another pupil shook the dice (=the ipad), and the "mind reader" had to guess the verb form, he had 3 chances. If the mind reader was lucky, the reward was a sticker. But if he didn't guess it, he could still get the sticker for a challenge the class set (saying the verb in a mysterious voice, singing it,etc).

We could have said a sentence with the verb form the dice gave us, that could be our starter next Thursday!

Feel free to comment with your ideas:-)!

Easter 2016

Happy Easter to you all! 

Here are some photos from last week...We discussed Easter traditions with our eTwinning partners in Sunderland and Valladolid.We were sent lovely nazareños from Carmen's class, they are on display in the Year 5 classroom now. Our cards are on the way....

I like making nazareños, these are from a different class - they took them home and promised to tell their families about Spanish Easter traditions. 

Just like last year, we ate some Haribo bunnies and chicks to remember that the adjective comes after the noun in Spanish.

We played "egg hunt": the children had to find the egg blindfolded while following instructions in Spanish (izquierda, derecha, recto).
We also played "chicken fight", an all time favourite, which is not only fun but makes you practise Spanish pronunciation. The rules are here on my previous blog post.

Previous Easter posts on my blog:
Easter
Easter ideas 2

Spanish Grass Heads

One of my Year 1 groups has "Growing Plants" as their class topic this half term. I had been struggling to link it with Spanish but yesterday I found something really exciting on the Facebook page of  http://ovoneni.blog.hu/, a Hungarian craft site for nursery teachers. One of the teachers (Ujszaszine Soós Márti) posted her classes' grass heads, about 20 of them next to each other in yoghurt pots. They looked so cute, I fell in love with them immediately. I watched the instructions video on Youtube, (just search for grass head) I went to Poundland to get the ingredients and took a bowl of grass heads in this morning:-)

We always talk about how we are feeling at the beginning of the lessons and it seemed a good idea to draw these emotions on the faces of the grass heads. We sang three songs, as well:

1, the weather one, to remember that we need rain and sun to grow plants

2, the days of the week song, to remember that we have to water them a bit every day, and 

3, Cabeza, hombros piernas y pies to remind ourselves of the body parts of the grass heads.

You can find these songs on Carole Nicoll's Español Español CD or on itunes.

Watch this space for an update! Hope their hair will start growing soon!

Update 1 week later:-)

If you bump into a Spanish teacher without socks...that's me!

Lego conjugations

I sometimes every day take my children's toys in to school. They are aware of most of my borrowings but can never find out this one... I take the Lego in as well!!!

Strictly to help my pupils understand the conjugation of verbs, of course....

We started to illustrate the verb "tener" last Thursday, here are our photos:

To be continued with the plural forms (if I manage to smuggle Lego Elsa and Anna into the car before the school run:-).

Green cushions and toys - Holiday topic

At the beginning of every lesson we do questions and answers (whole class) and then dialogue presentations ( 2 children take turns in front of the class, it is like a presentation). 

As our topic is "holidays" this half term, we did our dialogues in Egypt with the help of my green cushions and the DO INK app.  

I will have to use the Lego Movie Maker for a longer video but it was a good experience to play with Yakit as well:-)

A few more pictures with a different class:

Spanish in the rainforest

In one of my schools I was asked to link my lessons to the class topics and their curriculum. This surprised me and I found it a bit frustrating after spending a whole summer on my scheme of work...(not an illustration, this is it:-).

But everything happens with a reason I thought, and soon I found it very exciting to adjust my planning to the curriculum, it was fun to look for completely new resources (and toys in the charity shop:-).

To learn the place of the adjective in a Spanish sentence, we described parrots we made. I found the crafty idea here: http://blog.growingwithscience.com/2011/11/weekend-science-fun-birds-of-the-rain-forest/

We learnt a new song: Soy una serpiente... and played it in the classroom with 2 snakes, one for the girls and 1 for the boys.

We also did some green screen conversations, it was exciting to ask and answer questions and practise taking turns in the middle of the rain forest!

Now we have moved on, and in the second half of the term we are learning about rainforest fruits and how to buy them in the market. Will tell you about it later!

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!

The 12 joys of teaching: Day 3

On Day 3 of #12jot15 I am sharing the joy of teaching with TOYS! I love taking toys in to my lessons to illustrate and aid learning.  Yesterday I took these Happy Town people in for my Year 5 and 6 pupils to "play with". They had to choose a person and describe their clothing using the right agreement for the adjectives. It was an exciting and engaging activity!

The 12 joys of teaching - Day 2

Today I am sharing the joy of having friends who are like me! Sue, my French teacher friend made me these shoes last Christmas... aren't they pretty? I could even use the idea for the Reyes for January! 

Here is the link to the template: http://www.eugeniakatia.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/sapatinhos-menina.html

Thank you, Sue!

The 12 joys of teaching - Day 1

The 12 joys of teaching is trending on Twitter (#12jot15) and I have decided to jump on the bandwagon and share my joys with you! 
Day 1 was yesterday, when I remembered how much joy I find in learning from others and seeing other people's ideas develop and change in my primary Spanish lessons. 
With Year 6 we played Jenga to practise opinions and connectives, I took this photo, and here is the link to my previous blog post explaining the game. Thank you for the inspiration Rebecca, Eleanor and Morgan!

#eTconf15 - 10 steps to effective communication in eTwinning projects

Last week I attended the eTwinning Conference in Brussels (#eTconf15). It was a fantastic event, I met amazing people, saw inspiring keynotes and participated in fantastic workshops.I learnt a lot and now I am ready to use my new skills and spread the passion!

We were spoilt with the amount of available workshops, click on the programme to see how difficult it was to choose! There was one I definitely wanted to see : 10 steps to effective communication in eTwinning projects run by Irene Pateraki and Paraskevi Belogia. 

I tweeted the whole workshop presentation, here on my blog I will briefly list the 10 steps the Irene and Paraskevi suggest:

1, The pupils need to be confident with the technology they use throughout the project. This includes getting to know Twinspace.

2, Create Twinspace accounts for your pupils, and encourage them to participate on this platform and interact with other pupils. (I am struggling with this as I am a visiting teacher and I haven't got enough time and computers to give everybody the chance but there must be a way around it and I won't give up!)

3, Respect each other online, because the online world is like the real world!

4, Plan ice breaking activities so that the children can get to know each other and build better relationships.

5, Use the Twinspace communication tools: Twinmail, Discussion Forums and the Teacher Bulletin.

6, Add regular live elements (games, quizzes, chats).

7, Integrate collaborative activities into your project (team work, group work).

8, Engage the pupils in active learning: plan fun and creative activities.

9, Provide feedback, because good feedback is where learning happens.

10, Use the right ICT tools! Some examples:

• schedule an online meeting in Meetinfyre or Doodle
• use Twiddla for brainstorming or creating a logo for your project
• use Voxopop for discussing and debating ideas
• find each other on Zeemap
• watch a video together on Watch2gether
• play and learn in Kahoot
• evaluate in TodaysMeet
• more: http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/etwinningcommunication

If you want to see the slides, check my tweets (@Erzsiculshaw) or search for #eTconf15 on Twitter.

Next blog post coming soon: tablets in eTwinning projects!

Now off to do some exercise after all those Belgian waffles:-)

New Year - new toys (6): a teaching trolley

The last "new toy" blog post is the best one - my teaching trolley! 

Happy New Year to all of you working in schools! I am just as nervous as I was 30 years ago!!!

New Year- new toys (5): clapperboards

These are not new either but I had to buy some because the old one broke after excessive usage by enthusiastic pupils:-) I saw them on Carmen's blog first, follow her for more amazing ideas!

We do lots of role plays in the lessons, I set the scene and give different jobs out: the pupils love to volunteer to be the directors with the clapperboard, hold the spotlights and record the "movie" on the iPad, many times with a green screen in the back. Use big microphones for more drama!

The clapperboards are under £2 on ebay or Amazon.