Winter Olympics

I have just realised that the Winter Olympics start in 4 days! We only have two Spanish lessons left this half term with my groups and when we are back after the break the Olympics will have ended. I wouldn't like to miss the opportunity so I am thinking about changing my lesson plans a "bit" and incorporating the Olympics into them.

Vocabulary games:

 

 

We will learn the names of 6 winter sports and play games with the words.

Hot/cold: Because most of the words are long and challenging, we need to repeat them many times. I will take props in: ski goggles, a hockey ball (closest thing  I've got to a puck), a ballerina dress (figure skaters!) etc. A pupil will hide one in the classroom while somebody else goes out. The class has to repeat the word: whispering to start and getting louder the closer the pupil is to the hidden object. An all time favourite!

Charades: A volunteer acts out a sport and the children have to guess what it is. The person who gets it right can come out next. This can be played as pair work, too.

Statues: Two volunteers come out. One is the statue, the other one is the sculptor. The sculptor has to make a statue out of his partner by moving his arms and legs into the correct position. Of course the sculpture must be performing one of the winter sports from the list. The class has to guess the sport.

Dramatic sentences: Who is quicker? Myself or a pupil say a sentence with the new sports vocab and two volunteers in front of the class have to act out the sentences repeating them with the correct emotions on their faces!

"Me encanta el patinaje de velocidad." (We expect very excited pupils speed skating.)

 "Me gusta el esquí alpino". (We expect happy pupils skiing.)

 "No me gusta el hockey sobre hielo. (We expect grumpy pupils playing hockey.)

 Play dough sentences: I will print out the previous PPT slide and hand them out to pairs along with play dough. They each have to make a play dough figure with a sport, the partner has to guess which one it is and say the word in a sentence. A previous play dough sport picture is here:-) "Hago gimnasia."

 Spanish speaking countries in the Games:

(The map online is here.)

 

A great chance to remind the kids of the Spanish speaking countries! I have "Spanish speaking countries" laminated sheets and get them out when we discuss these countries in other topics. When I looked at the all time winter olympics medal table , I realised that Spain is the only Spanish speaking country mentioned, no countries from South America or Central America have ever won a medal! We will have to encourage all these countries so we will design them a trophy or a medal! The kids will work in pairs and design these, I have lots of crepe paper strips they can use to decorate the trophies or medals with the colours of their chosen countries from the list. They will have to write their countries on them, the six new vocab words, and also wish them luck with

"¡Suerte!" To illustrate this I have found an old football trophy in my files.

 

(Update 6/2/14: we did the medals! The template is here, on the familicrafts website.)
 

 

Design a uniform for the teams:

This will be an alternative to the previously mentioned activity: in pairs the pupils will have to design a uniform for a Spanish speaking country. They will have a clothes vocab list or dictionaries and they will have to label the clothes. My daughter could pass for a Mexican speed skater if she didn't have the dummy in! (The photo was taken in 2012 at the Summer Olympics in London, we supported Hungary:-)

 

 

(Update 6/2/14: we did the uniforms, as well:-)

 Anything you would add? Feel free to leave a comment! Thanks! Erzsi

Clothes games

The washing line competition

 

I have a big blue laundry bag full of my children's outgrown clothes, T-shirts, trousers, coats, shirts, shoes, skirts, dresses and jumpers. We play lots of games with them, one of the most popular is the washing line game. It's a competition and it's about speed, so the kids love it. You will need a stopwatch, a washing line, pegs, clothes and various lists of the clothes you have with you. Girls can play it against boys (just add the times together after a few games) or just two kids against each other. Two children have to hold the washing line up high. One pupil is given a list of clothes, the teacher starts the alarm and the partner has to put the piece of clothes on the washing line with pegs. It has to be in the same order as on the list and if something falls down, it has to be put up again. The winner is the team or pupil who is the quickest. You can find a stopwatch online and then everybody will see the time.  It's a great game for practising the colour agreement in Spanish. The slowest team or pupil gets homework: to do the laundry at home for a week:-)

 

Dressing up teddies

 

As a mum of two little kids, I have a hundred teddies in my house.... the following game was inspired by two of them: Dora and the Fat Controller. Toddler clothes fit on them very well, so they can be dressed up quite easily. Two kids come out to the front, they each get Dora and the Fat Controller, and I say "lleva una camiseta" or "se pone una camiseta" etc. They each have to find one in the big pile of clothes and put them on the two teddies, while the rest of the class repeats "lleva una camiseta" many times. The quickest stays in the game, the other kid has to pick a new dresser, and the game starts again. It is a good way to get everybody talking by repeating the sentences and also a good noun-adjective agreement practice. It takes a while to put a T-shirt on Dora's big head or to put trousers on the Fat Controller's chunky legs!

 

 

 

Design a school uniform

 

The children love being creative and designing uniforms, football kits, Olympic wear, etc. They draw the clothes, colour them in and label them in Spanish. It is a good practice of noun - adjective agreement. At the end of the activity, you can make a contest by voting: the best uniform will win a prize. It is great display material!

 

 

 

 

Fashion show
 

The children love it because they can bring their favourite clothes in, they do a quick change before the lesson. When they come back, they walk on the catwalk while others introduce them with sentences like "Es Connor. Lleva una camiseta roja y pantalones azules."  I have some toy microphones they love holding.I take a picture of everybody and make a fashion show display with the clothes labelled in Spanish. It's easy to label the photos in Powerpoint, I use different colours for masculine and feminine nouns and then give the photos to the children. I call these pictures "postcards" or "certificates", they can take them home and explain to their families why some words are written in blue or red and where the colour goes in Spanish:-)



 



 

Music

We sing "A pasear" from Let's sing and learn in Spanish , this song is good for practising "Me pongo...".
Mi tía: A good action song from Elizabeth, the words are here.

 

 

We look at typical clothes in Spanish speaking countries, I have PowerPoints and videos like this from Ecuador:

 

 

Fruit recipe project: Our flag and some snails

Year 3 and our partner class in Valladolid are working on a fruit recipe book. After last week's Spanish flag bites, it was time to make our own flag! We used blueberries, strawberries and marshmallows. The kids loved both designing and eating it.

The mandarin snail idea was tweeted to me by our partner school's head teacher. I copied the instructions from  the Little Cook website. Simple but so funny!

Next we will make fruit faces.

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day

 

This post is a bit early, but we have penpals in Spain and we had to write our cards today so that they would arrive on time...and on my lunch break I found these novelty sunglasses in the charity shop:-).We will take pictures with these on and send a video message on the 14th of February. How exciting!

 

 

 

My Spanish teacher friend, Natalia (mi alma gemela:-) sent me some ideas last week, and I immediately fell in love with some butterflies with lollipop heads. I bought a bag of Chupa Chups in Home bargains (25 for a £1, bargain!) and took them into class today. Long long ago in my teacher training days I found out that the logo was designed by Salvador Dalí and that the company was founded in Spain. What a great chance to find out about a famous Spanish artist! 

 

 

It took about 15 minutes to make the butterflies. The pupils wrote simple messages on them in English, and we will receive some cards written in Spanish. I downloaded the template from here: http://www.dagmarbleasdale.com/2012/01/10-cute-and-easy-valentines-day-cards-and-crafts-for-kids/kids-valentines-day-craft-butterfly-with-lollipop/#comment-48725 

The original idea is from http://www.skiptomylou.org.

 

 

 

On Valentine's Day we will listen to "Hay un amigo en mí" from Toy Story 3. I don't remember where I read this idea but I am very grateful to whoever recommended it because we all love this song, it is very simple and catchy.

 

Hay un amigo en mí
Cuando salgan a volar
Hay un amigo en mí
Sí, un amigo en mí
Hay un amigo en mí!

 

 

 

 

 

Fruit recipe project: Spanish flag bites

Last summer I "met" Natalia on the eTwinning website. She is a full time teacher in a primary school in Valladolid. Her groups and my groups "work together" on a weekly basis, we send letters, cards, videos and lots of emails to each other. Natalia has become a real inspiration to me, her enthusiasm, her new ideas and her sense of humour  have taught me so much. A few weeks ago she came up with an idea: a bilingual cookbook with fruit recipes! First I just thought that I would politely tell her that I don't have the time for this in my short Spanish lessons (45 minutes and 30 minutes), but then I started to do some research online and in my kids' cookbooks and found quite a few things we could make without cooking at the end of the lesson. I am hoping that the children will bring in recipes from next week to make it a real cooperation. We will make videos and a cooking competition, too! We are very excited.

I had lots of ideas in my mind before my first introduction lesson last Tuesday and went to Asda to buy all these:





After hours of experimenting with what would be the simplest fruit creation, I just decided to make "Spanish flag bites"  and only took the pineapples and strawberries in. I cut them in the school that morning to keep them fresh and put them in two plastic boxes.

 

The kids used toothpicks to make the flags, it only took them a few minutes and they really enjoyed this short introduction activity.

 

Wish me luck with the Union Jack next week:-)!

Directions

My pupils love being blindfolded. When I get my scarf or my blindfolds out, I always see 30 children full of excitement with their hands up waiting to be called out. In this post I will show you 3 games we have to play "in the dark":-).

The lighthouse and the boat

 

We need two volunteers for this game, one pupil will be the lighthouse, the other one will be the boat. Because kids love toys, I give a small lighthouse out to the lighthouse pupil, and blindfold the other one, with a newspaper boat on his/her head. I place them far away from each other. It is dark at night on the sea and the boat needs directions from the lighthouse. The boat person is blindfolded, can't see at all and only relies on the instructions. It is very funny to see the boat bumping into chairs, pupils and finally in the lighthouse.

 

Rope pulling

 

This is a new game I only came up with a year ago. 2 kids hold the same rope with 4 hands. They can't see anything and have to move the rope in the direction the teacher or another child tells them. If I say "arriba", an then both lift the rope up, they both keep playing. But if I say "abajo", and only one moves it down while the other one is moving it right/left/or lifting it up, there will be a "conflict", one child will be slightly pulled aside and the kids find this very funny. The person who makes the mistake sits down and picks somebody else for him/her. We used to play this with our eyes open but it was too easy to follow each other. Instead of the rope, I am thinking about handcuffing them next time:-)

 

 

 

Pin the tail on the donkey

 

A popular game for birthday parties: the blindfolded child standing at the whiteboard has to follow the instructions of his/her classmate and find the right place for the donkey's tail. It is a very good activity to practise directions in Spanish, and all the children find it very amusing. I bought my donkey in Asda last year, but before that I had just drawn one on the whiteboard (or better: asked a child to do it:-) and just used blu tack to stick on a paper tail.

 

 

Robots

 

Pair work: One pupil is the robot, the other one is the instructor who has to tell the robot how to move. Children love being robots and they can imitate them so well.

 



 

Arriba y abajo: by Los pimpollos

 

These puppets from Peru are the joy of my life. I absolutely love listening to their songs on youtube. We sing several of their songs, they have good ones on food, music, washing hands, etc. This is called "Arriba y abajo" and we sing it with actions. The song is subtitled which is great because it is really fast. We reach up and bend down, draw the sun in the sky with our hands, we pretend to be birds and ants, etc. It cheers everybody up:-)!

 

 

 

 

Izquierda, derecha by Los Pimpollos

 

Another one by Los Pimpollos, this time we practise "left" and "right".

 





Colour games

Colour block tower

I don't know how many block towers I've built in the past 4-5 years... probably hundreds! No wonder an idea occurred to me one day while putting one up.

I take the whole bucket of blocks in to school and let the kids build a tower as long as they can name the colour they want to put on. A volunteer comes out, says the colour of the block he or she is holding and places it on top of the tower. The aim of the game is to build the tallest tower possible before it collapses.Even though I only have four colours, they have important pronunciation rules and there is plenty of chance to practice ("j" in "rojo", "ll" in "amarillo", "v" in "verde"  and "z" in "azul").

We build the towers on top of  the desk, so that everybody can see them.

 

Carnival of beads

 

All my Spanish puppets are going to the Carnival of Tenerife at the end of  February. They want to look their best so they have ordered some necklaces, bracelets and anklets. They are a bit fussy and they want them to be particular colours. They have written down their orders on separate post it notes.We have 10-15 minutes to make as many as we can. We need to dress up 4 puppets and my talking hamster. We work in pairs and everybody will have a small plastic box of beads. It is a good way to practice reading the colours and remembering important spelling rules.

 

  

 

 

Chicken fight

I tweeted this game before, it is one of our favourites. The smaller the children, the better, unless you have lots of space in the classroom. Two children stand opposite each other, heads together, hands on hips. They close their eyes for ten seconds, myself or a volunteer puts a coloured post it note on their backs. After opening their eyes, the game starts. They twist, turn, walk around and try to see each other's backs. No touches are allowed. When one of them has seen the colour, he or she has to shout it out in Spanish.The idea comes from "Let's play games in  Spanish", fantastic book.
 

 

 

Pom poms song

 

We love singing  "¿De qué color?" (number 9 on the ¡Español! ¡Español! CD by Caroll Nicole). The song has 8 colours and I made lots of pom poms of these colours, everyone can have one or two. The classroom is really colourful when the children sing the song and wave their pom poms!