Pushing the envelope

Yesterday I made the somewhat snowy and perilous journey to Nottingham for the first day of ALL Language World 2013.  One of the perks of such an event is catching up with old friends and Twitter friends.  I spent lunch shooting the breeze with @joedale, @atantot, @kec974 and @reesiepie.  Reesiepie and I were talking about the dangers of Amazon recommendations, and I mentioned that I have recently purchased from America three secondhand books about mini-books.  Just when you thought there couldn't possibly be any more kinds of mini-books to add to the ones I've already done....  Then I had the three hour drive home to think about and formulate this next mini-book, which is based on one I saw in one of my new books.

This envelope book combines pocket books with the skills used when completing Venn diagram exercises and Thinking Skills classification activities.

While I was #balletmum for the last time this term, I made some hair and eyes pictures, all of them different

and cut them into individual cards.  I then divided two A4 sheets of paper into four sections and wrote a sentence about hair and eyes on each one:

I cut these into separate cards too and stapled them together down the lefthand edge.  Then I cut two rectangles of card slightly bigger than the word cards.  Onto one I stuck the pile of word cards, and on the other I stuck a small envelope.  I stuck the two pieces of card together with a strip of coloured paper (sticky tape would also do) and put the picture cards in the envelope.

To use this, children take out the picture cards, and, for each page, find the picture cards which the sentence describes.  For example, the first page says J'ai les yeux bleus, so they need to find all the pictures which have blue eyes.

I have an idea for another one using colours and numbers, but this could in fact be used for anything for which you would use a Venn diagram or other sorting exercise.  For example, replace the picture cards with small word cards, and on each page name a grammatical term such as noun, feminine, plural, article, verb....  It would also work to highlight different tenses.