Making a paper puppet - a #LW2025 takeaway

 

At Language World on Saturday I enjoyed the two talks about puppets that I went to.  In particular I'd like to thank Lavinia Dos Remedios, who showed us how to make a puppet out of a piece of A4 paper.  If you are a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that I am very keen on making things with one piece of A4 paper, namely minibooks, so this was right up my street!

Above, you can see a short video of the puppet that I made during the session and quickly decorated to look like a Moomin, in honour of Lisa Stevens and the box of biscuits I just ate, ahem.

Here is the YouTube video that Lavinia referenced with the instructions on how to make the puppets:

Language World 2025 #LW2025

I returned yesterday from the 2025 Language World Conference with a head full of information and ideas, and a notebook full of notes.  Well, full-ish of notes, as there were some sessions (for example the ones I was chairing) that I decided to just listen to.

The title of my talk was A rich tapestry of adaptable lesson ideas!  (The theme of the conference prompted a lot of weaving and stitching analogies as well as AI-generated pictures of the same!)

I had time to talk about 20 different activities:

1. Which one do I not say?
2. Sentence builder bingo
3. Listening Chests
4. Pointing game
5. Trapdoor/Cluedo
6. Sit down when yours is different
7. Working off the grid
8. Guess my sentence
9. Listen read write
10. Rapping
11. Dialogues
12. Messing around with text
13. Describing a poster
14. Odd one out
15. Analysing text
16. Post-It grids
17. Pair writing
18. Pictogram sentences
19. Dice roll activities
20. Kim's game
    

You can read more about these activities and 100 others here.

Here are my notes from some of the other sessions I attended:

Which one did I not say?

 

Recently I've been doing a lot more listening with my classes before we start speaking (here's why)  This activity can be done before you start the speaking, or afterwards as a recap.

I've called it "Which one did I not say?" for want of a better name!  I say all of the words that we are practising (not in any particular order) except for one.  The children look at the grid on the board while listening, and then have to tell me which one I didn't say.  It requires a lot of focussed and careful listening, and I am always impressed that they get the right answer - I'm not convinced I would be able to!

So far I've used it for single words, as in the example above, which is for Year 4 (age 8-9).  However I think it could be used with any age or experience of learner, and could be used with short phrases or even sentences rather than just words.

It is a low-prep idea, but I'd recommend preparing it in advance, so that you know what you've said!  I jot them down on a sticky note or make lists like this:

Nouns, opinions and descriptions with a PSHE/RSE twist

I first got to know the work of Elise Gravel when I came across Monstres en vrac in Montréal ten years ago.  When I was in California last week, I popped into a branch of Barnes & Noble to have a look at their Spanish section.  Considering how bilingual California is, it was a smaller section than I expected.  I purchased one book: El rosa, el azul y tú by Elise Gravel.  It's also available in French as Le rose, le bleu et toi !

The book offers us opportunities to discuss self, relationships and gender stereotypes with children, while also covering areas of language such as nouns and their gender, opinions, and adjectives and adjectival agreement.

For examples, here are some nouns which we could show to children without the images.  They could investigate the phonics and use their dictionaries to find the meanings.  They could also work out the grammatical gender of each noun.  Then, as is suggested at the top of the page, we could ask the children to sort them into "Things for girls", "Things for boys" and "Things for everyone".  The resulting discussions will have strong links to the PSHE/RSE curricula.

Another example is opinions, which can be approached as a true/false activity as suggested on the page.

Elise Gravel also offers some free posters on her website.  Among them there are two useful Spanish ones:

They show examples in practice of adjectival agreement and could be a starting point for discussions about gender stereotypes.

This book and these resources give an interesting twist to commonly taught grammar, and would give Key Stage 3 teachers a way of doing the usual in an unusual way for their new Year 7 students who have different experiences of language learning.

I would recommend speaking to your headteacher and/or PSHE coordinator before using these ideas in your lessons.

Adaptable Activities for your Language Lessons

 

I'm delighted to announce the publication of Adaptable Activities for your Language Lessons.

This pdf download contains 120 different activities that can be adapted to any language and to most ages of learner.  There are activities for listening, speaking, reading, writing, grammar and phonics.

So if you've ever found yourself in a planning rut, wanting to try out something new but not sure what, then this is the publication for you!

Available now in my Sellfy shop: https://ideaseducationltd.sellfy.store/

Take a look at the index here: https://www.ideaseducation.co.uk/resources/Index.pdf