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

Dictation across the key stages #LW2024

 

On Saturday I attended day 2 of this year's Language World conference.  I gave a presentation about dictation, giving lots of ideas to use from Key Stage 2 (age 7-11) all the way up to Key Stage 4 (age 14-16) and beyond.

It was much easier to make a video for you in order to share it than to paste all the slides into this blogpost!  Here is the video:

Other links:

Point à la ligne: dictation in primary languages - blogpost

Dictados: resources to introduce, support and practise dictation in Spanish

Language World 2024 #LW2024

 

"Language World" by Pixlr AI Image Generator 

Yesterday I returned from ALL's annual conference, Language World, which this year was held in Kenilworth in Warwickshire.  That's a good four-hour drive from here in the north-east, but it's always worth it for the content and for seeing old friends and meeting new ones.  I only attended one of the two days this year due to a family birthday, but of course it was worth it.

Here are the sketchnotes that I made from some of the sessions that I went to.  I'm afraid the scanning has gone a bit wonky with some of them!  I spoke about Dictation, and will post about that separately.

By the way, if you are wondering about the image at the top of this post, inspired by the theme of AI at Language World, I asked the Pixlr AI Image Generator to create a "Language World" image.  As you can see, it needs work!

Language Education in an AI enabled world: the challenges, the opportunity and the future
Prof. Kate Borthwick

University Challenge: how working cross-phase can provide support and capacity to raise aspiration and develop learning outside the classroom
Jane Driver and Sarah Schechter

Translation: the key to growing flexible, imaginative linguists
Jess Beeton

Cognitive Science in the language classroom and learning language through images and physical representation
Saleh Patel

Promoting International Links: a practical guide
Lisa Stevens

Possibilities and practicalities of ChatGPT in languages teaching and learning
Joe Dale

Sentence Builder Bingo

 

I'm always on the lookout for more ways to drill and practise vocabulary and structures.  During the summer holiday I had the idea of using sentence builders to play bingo with.

One unit of learning that I have used it with is Pets, in particular saying that you have more than one pet.  I used the bottom half of this sentence builder:

and drew up the above grid as my checklist so that I knew which sentences I had said.

Altogether with this sentence builder it's possible to make 36 sentences.  I asked Year 4 to choose 5 sentences and write them in their books.  Then I read out the sentences one by one in a random order.  I repeated each one twice, just in case, and then went straight on to the next one.  The children needed to listen carefully and constantly check their sentences, ticking off any sentences they had that I said.  When they had ticked off all 5 of their sentences they had to call out "Bingo" and then to check I asked them to read their sentences back to me.  I used my grid to check they were right.

We then continued until most children had heard their sentences.  Some children were frustrated at the end because they had missed one of their sentences and so didn't get bingo.  I did point out, though, that they had heard and identified 4 out of their 5 sentences, so not to get hung up on just one.

The classes that I tried this with said that they enjoyed it.  I liked it because they got to hear over 60 sentences all in one go.  

You may well have been playing this game for ages!  I don't remember having heard it from anyone else.