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.
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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?
Brilliant Clare. You are so dedicated.
ReplyDeleteThank you :)
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