I'm a Modern Languages teacher who changed to Primary after 14 years of Secondary teaching. Read about my creative ideas for language teaching, suitable for more than just primary.
Monday, 21 November 2011
Sing a song of Spanish phonics
In recent months I've done a lot of phonics work with my KS2 Spanish students. However, a fortnight ago, at the end of our Family and Pets unit, I noticed that they were still having a problem with the [x] sound (the ge/gi/j sound that we can't write in English!) So I decided to have a lesson about just that sound. They like singing so I set out to make a song with as many words with that sound in as possible. I later decided to add words with the [g] sound so that we could work on the rule for when you say each sound.
I collected all the words that we have covered that had those sounds (there were more than I thought) and thought up a tune. The song has ended up having four verses and is a nonsense song due to the diverse nature of the words involved!
You can have a listen to it here. It had its debut with the children last week and they seemed to like it. I've also done a "th" sound song, which I'm going to use with Y4 as they do more phonics work. You can listen to that one here. I have also uploaded the resources that go with both songs (scroll to the bottom of the page).
With Y3 I have worked on the vowel sounds by doing a chant, which you can hear here. The lyrics are:
a - a - a, Gran Canaria
e - e - e, Té en el café
i - i - i, Lidi y Pili
o - o - o, ¿Loro o lobo?
u - u - u, Purucú, Perú
I recorded the songs using Songsmith, which I think gives a really professional finish for something I have recorded on my laptop in my front room. The difficult thing was recording the vocal in one take, as I am still suffering from a post-cold "viral chest"!
I wrote the scores with a very reasonably priced and easy to use program called Finale NotePad. I made the backing track for the chant using Aviary Roc and then recorded the vocal using Audacity.
Are there any other Spanish sounds that you think would benefit from having a song made in their honour?
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Brilliant Clare. You are so dedicated.
ReplyDeleteThank you :)
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