Las pulseras de Valladolid

A few weeks ago we received a parcel from our penpals in Colegio Compañía de María - La Enseñanza in Valladolid.  Among other exciting gifts there were some packets of elastic bands the kids use to make bracelets with, and Natalia, the class teacher wanted to share this activity with us.

 This is really popular with children in Spain at the moment and making bracelets seems a good chance for us to practise colour agreements, get to know Spanish speaking World Cup countries, follow intstructions in Spanish and learn to compliment each other's work.

I bought more elastic bands on ebay to have a bigger choice.

 

Today we started to make our jewelleries with the elastic bands... We made bracelets, rings and keyring charms while practising Spanish.

Beware! Complete chaos unless you work in small groups!:-)

 

I made a PowerPoint Presentation of the language content, printed the slides out and put them on the desks.

 

Colours that change their endings:

 Instructions:

We were lucky, because Natalia sent us a video of some of her pupils showing us what to do. I have written the most important steps down.

 

Compliments:

 

Spanish speaking countries:I encouraged the children to use the flag colours of the World Cup.

 





 

I am very proud of my pupils' work. Watch this space for more elastic band jewellery!

 



 Thank you Mrs Krajewski, without you I simply couldn't cope, and thank you Natalia, you always make sure we are entertained:-)

 

 

 

 

Light Bulb Languages

While desperately looking for resources at the beginning of my primary teaching career 5 years ago, I came across the MFL Sunderland site. I was amazed at the wide range of resources and links it was offering for free! PowerPoints, quizzes, word searches and schemes  of work in one place. I got updates on Twitter about new resources so I just lived my life knowing that in every single topic I teach, there would be loads of support and fun material on the MFL Sunderland website.

Then on a dark day, a tweet announced the end of the MFL Sunderland website!

My heart stopped for a minute, my face turned pale, I started to shake, and got into a state of panic because I wanted to save and copy all the files from it before it would disappear. I felt frustrated that such an amazing site would close down so I was very happy and relieved when a bit later another tweet confirmed that it would come back under a different name....

 

And soon Light Bulb Languages opened its doors:-)

 

 

 

 

I love the site, because it is very clearly structured, and it is so easy to find what I need!



My favourite parts are:

• the Primary Spanish links where you can find schemes of work, flashcards, assessment sheets, PowerPoints, games, puzzles and so many more things in a wide range of topics: numbers, days, animals, transport, weather, places in town, telling the time, etc...
• the Intercultural Understanding links in the section quoted above
• the transition links from KS2 to KS3,
• the site's own blog  where I can find out about the latest updates and more teaching ideas (great World Cup activities!)
• and of course the World Cup ideas!!!

Apart from Spanish, there are loads of materials in French, German and Italian for KS2, KS3, KS4 and A level, too.

 

You can follow @LightBulbLangs on Twitter for regular updates.

Please visit the the site if you haven't been there yet, you will love it! I am wishing you lots of light bulb moments of inspiration!:-)

 

 

 

Football World Cup activities

I am a big football fan! 2 years ago during the European Cup I was like a tiger in its cage because I was off on maternity leave and couldn't express all my football love in my lessons, which was very frustrating, so my poor newborn daughter had to celebrate Spain's victory with me, like this:

 

 

This year I have thought of some activities to celebrate the World Cup, it is payback time for the girls who really enjoyed making bracelets for Mother's Day :-)

 

I made a slide with the flags of  the Spanish speaking countries of the World Cup, we will practise the colours playing the "Who is quicker?" game with our dusters/ fly swatters.  We will play "red herring", a game between two teams of the class: while one team goes to sleep on their tables, a volunteer from the other team will point to a country in silence, and when the sleeping ones wake up, they have to guess which country is the "red herring". But there is a twist: they actually have to avoid this country, and they get points every time they say a different one. As soon as they say the red herring, the game is over and we count the points. We play it between boys and girls, twice each time. It is a very exciting game, and it gives us plenty of opportunities to practise the pronunciation of México, Argentina, España, Honduras. In most of my lessons we mention Colombus Day/ Día de la Hispanidad in October, now there is a good chance to ask whether they remember why they speak Spanish in all of these countries.

 

 

 

 

Players: another good chance to practise phonetics:-), although I have to be careful here because some players are Catalan and say their names differently. Casillas, Hernández, Sergio, David Villa, David Silva, isn't it fantastic to see all these written down and be able to say them correctly? The BBC football commentators definitely didn't do Spanish in school, I feel pain in my heart every time they say Sergio incorrectly, about a hundred times during each match. Apart from "Who is quicker?",  and "the red herring" we can play "Who am I?" describing them physically and saying how old they are.





 

Designing a mascot for the game or for a Spanish speaking country is a good chance to revisit the body parts.

 

 

Similarly, designing a national outfit for a Spanish speaking team using the flag colours gives a good opportunity to learn/revisit the names of the clothes.

 

 

And one more of those: design the winning trophy to practise writing. I have included England, too:-). I have trophy templates from 4 years ago, they can write the name of a country on it and decorate it with the flag colours (I keep pieces of crepe paper that fall off my colour pompoms).

 

 They can include praising words on them:

 

 And they can wish good luck to their favourite Spanish speaking team!

 

 

Before the Winter Olympics started, I  had said that I would give a chocolate medal for every medal a Spanish speaking country gets.... I had a big mouth because apart from Spain no Spanish speaking countries had ever received a medal...But when they were coming to me before the start of my lessons for two weeks to say that they had checked the results and there were no medals yet, I felt really sorry for them, so this time I will do another challenge: for every Spanish speaking goal they will get a mini sticker, as long as they can name the country correctly in Spanish. And if a Spanish speaking team wins the World Cup, there will be chocolate for everyone:-)) 

 

 At the beginning of the lessons, when we do our general Q&A, I will always ask whether they love football.

 

 

 And the big ones (Year 5 and Year 6) will get another question:

 

 They can answer using "porque" and "pero", how exciting!

 

 

I am still looking for a good catchy song to support Spain, so far this is the best, it has the names of the football players! It is a bit out of date, from 2010, so I will ask my Spanish penpal Natalia for a better one when she comes back from her Easter holidays and update the blog. Or we will just have to make up our own song, which will be just as good!

 

 

 

There are plenty of more resources on the web, my favourites are the activities on the Light Bulb Languages website (check out the other topics, too, fantastic page) and there are lots of links on the Janet Lloyd Network site here.

 

If you worry about my daughter's football identity, I can assure you that she supports England now!

 

 

Just like me! In case my husband or Glen Johnson read my blog:-) 

 

 

 

 

But when nobody sees me I shout "¡ ¡Villa Villa Maravilla!!"

 





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!

Sant Jordi: love, roses and books!

I am very lucky to have spent a few years in Barcelona, a city that will stay in my heart forever! I went there to learn Spanish a long time ago, but at that time I didn't realise how wrong I was because they were all speaking Catalan around me. I soon fell in love with the language though, went on courses on Thursday nights (they were free:-) and got to meet lovely people. After going back to university in Hungary, I always had Catalan lessons and enjoyed them a lot.

 

When we learn Spanish in the KS2 classroom, I like promoting the Catalan language .The boys love Barça, the football team, so as a treat we listen to their anthem in Catalan and shout "Barça, Barça, Barça". I tell them that I had the chance to listen to it in Camp Nou a few times and it was an amazing experience.

 

 

Around the 23rd of April we celebrate "el dia de Sant Jordi", the Catalan Valentine's day, when the men give the ladies a rose, and the ladies give the men a book! The rose comes from the legend of Saint George and the dragon, and we celebrate Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare by giving books as a gift, they both died on the same day on 23 April 1616 (or very close anyway...). I tell them about Cervantes, I show them one of my favourite books: Don Quijote, which is about 900 pages but makes me laugh out loud a lot , so it is well worth reading.

 

 

It is such a special day in Barcelona, the city is full of bookstalls and rose sellers:

 

In the past few years I took a bouquet of roses in and we did counting, plurals, and colour agreements with them, we played our big favourites: the hiding (hot/cold) game and the secret signal.

This year we will focus more on the books and because it is going to be the first week of the half term, we will have a minibook competition with the following 2 categories:

1, a book about why it is good to learn Spanish or a language,

2, a dictionary of a favourite topic.

Instructions on making minibooks are here. 

Lots of minibooks on Clare Seccombe's website.

The deadline will be sometime in the middle of May and I will get our penpals to choose the best one which will get a prize. All the entrances will be rewarded with my special certificates I got at Language World 2014:-). I will post a photo of the children's work in May.

 

¡Feliç Sant Jordi!

I wrote this post in memory of my Catalan teacher, Eloi Castelló.

 

 

 

My iPad journey

I did my PGCE in Budapest (Hungary) 8 years ago and the only technology I used was a CD player. When I started to work in England in 2008,  I didn't even know what a PowerPoint presentation was and I was astonished to see an Interactive Whiteboard. When I got my first small job in a primary school I always made sure I stood a few metres' away from the IWB, it felt like being next to an alien. Because I was never taught with technology nor was I shown how to use it in the classroom, I didn't really understand all the fuss about moving images on the IWB or writing on it with those special pens. When I learnt how to make a PowerPoint presentation in 2008 I thought I had the world at my feet!

I am a visiting teacher, I fly from one classroom to the other with 1 basket and 2 bags, I meet my pupils once a week and spend very limited time with them. I teach with lots of props, PowerPoints, Youtube videos, CDs, craft activities, I do make sure we learn and have fun and I don't think anything will be missing if little Connor drops my iPad 'Dominic McGladdery' style....we will just shrug our shoulders and move on. 

My iPad journey started after a Show and Tell event in Manchester last October where almost all the presenters  mentioned their twitter names. I had no idea what they were talking about, but I couldn't sleep that night and joined Twitter, which was probably my smartest move of 2013. I saw loads of iPad questions and advice on my timeline  for weeks but was completely immune to them, just scrolled them down until one day I saw a tweet from Joe Dale (@joedale)  who made a picture of himself in ComicBook and wrote some lines there, too. I found it so funny that I immediately downloaded the app on my iPad; which until then, I had only used to go on Facebook or read the news. I took my iPad to my lesson the following week and with shaky hands gave the ComicBook task to a couple of children as an extension activity when they finished their writing.

Since then I have challenged myself to try something new, that I see on Twitter, every week, and I am getting really excited. Yesterday I even bought myself a VGA adaptor so that I could use the big screen as well.

Here I am listing the apps we have used so far. I can't show children's images from the classroom so I just took a few selfies for illustration, sorry:-)

 

ComicBook

 

Great to practise the Spanish question/exclamation marks and the accents.

 

 

Whiteboard

 

Just like a whiteboard, good to draw favourite numbers, pets etc.  and let the others guess it.

 

 

Tellagami

 

After writing 7-8 sentences about themselves, the pupils can make their own 'gamis' then read out what they've written, making an audio recording of this. Very engaging, motivating and funny!

 

 

AutoRap

 

Even the shyest pupil will speak out loud to my hand holding the iPad and then will listen to the rap proudly. This one is called "Me pongo...".

 

http://www.smule.com/p/173506830_34553514

 

 

 Thank you @EWoodroffe and @ SylvieBRawlings for the idea!

 

Morfo

 

Based on your own photo, you can make funny faces with different themes and then record a message.

Thank you for the idea @lisibo! Here goes a smile for your blog!

 

 

 

 

Make Dice Lite

 

You can write your own sentences on the 6 sides, a volunteer rolls the dice, if somebody from the the rest of the class can guess where it stopped, he/she can roll the dice next. It really motivates the children to speak!

 

 

Decide Now!

 

A volunteer spins the wheel, if somebody from the the rest of the class can guess where it stopped, he/she can spin the wheel next. Just like the previous app, it gets the pupils to speak easily.

 

 

YAKit Kids

 

Put eyes, nose and mouth on your face and record your message, the mouth will actually talk!

 

 

 

Thank you @joedale and @Nieves_Sadullah!

ToonCamera

 

We made "daily routine" short movies with it, there is a wide range of pictures you can use, it is really funny to look back and show the children the movie again at the beginning of the next lesson to remind us of the vocabulary.

:

Using the iPad in the classroom makes my pupils very excited, they all have their hands up to talk, sing, or have a go. They love looking at themselves on the screen and listening to how they speak in Spanish. I can't put much interesting technology in my bag but the iPad and the adaptor are really small to carry around, get out and set up. 

Thank you #mfltwitterati  and @joedale:-)

 

 

This is where it all began, and who knows where it will end? :-) I am looking forward to the iPad workshop next Saturday at ALL Languages World in Lancaster!



 



Easter

In our last lessons of the term we will use eggs, chicks and bunnies to help us remember what we have learnt so far this year. Hiding and racing are all time favourites is my lessons!

Egg hunt in the classroom

I will hide these eggs in the classrooms before the school day starts, the children will have to find them and stick them on the board next to the right numbers.

The card eggs are from Asda, £1 for about 30 of them.

Egg race

A pupil will say a number and the two volunteers standing by the whiteboard will have to pick the number as quickly as they can. I always make them put their hands behind their backs first.

¡Preparados, listos, ya! Treinta y............ocho!

 Colour race

To practise the place of the adjective, a child or I will say sentences like "Tengo un huevo naranja". The 2 volunteers standing by the board will have to race to pick the right egg.

 

 

 What is the sound?

A game in pairs: the pupils will work in pairs, they will be given 2 different lists and they will have to challenge each other to recognise the sound and point to the right egg. The eggs will be hanging in the corners and on the walls of the classroom. If they point to the right egg, they can go to the next one, if they don't, they have to sing/rap the word, or sing/rap a sentence with the word! I will have a sentence written next to each word to help those who need more support.( My list will have words like amarillo, me llamo, rojo, perro, España, verde, junio, julio, jueves, viernes, hace calor, hace frío, está lloviendo, está nevando, hace viento, el hermano, la hermana, etc.)
 

 

Egg and spoon race:

I will put laminated flashcards around the classroom (different topics in every classroom: in the school, in the town, transport... etc). The two volunteers will have to race from one place to the other holding a spoon with an egg on it while saying sentences in Spanish (Voy al supermercado, Paso por delante del restaurante, Llego a la iglesia... etc.). If they can get to all the places without dropping their eggs they get a sticker.

 

 

 

Egg head families

 

I bought these eggs from one of the pound shops. In year 6 we are learning qualities and how to describe ourselves and others, this will be a good activity to finish the term. We will decorate them and describe them , and have a contest at the end for "la familia más mona" . There are four tables, they will each work on a family. I used the back of cereal boxes for the descriptions and I connected the egg and the card with a cocktail stick.

 

Chicken/Bunny Pacman

4 chickens stand in the 4 corners of the classroom and 4 bunnies stand between them by the wall. A volunteer will ask questions in the middle of the classroom and the quickest chicken or rabbit to answer right can move up a place, eating the one standing in his/her way. They move in a clockwise direction, if there is a gap they fill that. The last one standing is the winner. I learnt this game from my colleague Scott Davenport long time ago, he played it with "toros y gallinas".

Click for the bunny mask  and the chicken one.

La Mona de Pascua

This is for my Year 6 pupils and Spanish club only, I am not prepared to feed 200 pupils:-) They will have to work hard before they can eat them, because the plastic eggs have Spanish words and sentences inside that will need to be put in the right order. If we have time, we will decorate the cakes with ready made cake icing , I have got lots of half packets left from my son's home made birthday cake. We did some baking on this rainy Saturday afternoon:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Los pollitos dicen...

 

A song to learn an animal sound: pío pío and to say "I am hungry" and "I am cold".