Mundo Primaria

While looking for something else yesterday, I found Mundo Primaria.  It's a website intended for Spanish children, but has plenty to offer us as teachers of Spanish, both in primary and secondary.

Here are my favourite pages:

• Chistes cortos para niños  At Language World, Glennis Pye recommended jokes as good short texts for translation.  This page has a slide show of 25 jokes.
  
  
• Lecturas cortas  These texts too would be good for translation, particularly the non-fiction ones.  El Sol is among the texts that would also be useful for reading in Key Stage 2.
  
• Cuentos infantiles cortos  Lots of short stories of different genres.
  
• Infografías educativas  The first ones are for English, but look further down the list and there are some good word mats for maths and the solar system.  I particularly like this food pyramid one.
  
• Ejercicios de ciencias sociales  Downloadable worksheets for social sciences.  The geography ones are to do with the map of Spain (which is what I was looking for originally!) and even if you don't use the exact resource it will give you some ideas for teaching the geography of Spain.  The Vida en sociedad and Historia worksheets are also useful for cross-curricular learning in Key Stage 2 and even Key Stage 3.
  
• Ejercicios de lengua  Worksheets that provide useful ideas for teaching grammar, especially in Key Stage 2.
  
• Números naturales hasta el millar  These maths worksheets would be useful for any student learning big numbers in Spanish.
  
• El Euro  Some useful adding-up-money sheets  (The rest of the maths sheets can be accessed from here.)

Videos

Here are some videos I thought you might like. Do you have any you'd recommend?

French:

Photo de classe is a thought-provoking set of videos where children talk about their families' countries of origin.

On fait les crêpes from the BBC

Masculine and feminine body parts from BBC Virtually There

Being French - a day in a French Primary School from the BBC

Primary French - Deux Jeux de Mains

Primary French - Playground Games and pocket money

Spanish:

The gender of nouns in Spanish from BBC Virtually There

El Pasado y el Presente - Then and Now

Un recorrido de mi ciudad - In my town

Aquí está mi escuela - a primary school in Mexico

Las cuatro estaciones - seasons and weather

Maps, glorious maps

I've always liked a good map.  And I have always liked showing maps to my students, to put the languages they are learning into some kind of context.

Here are some useful links about maps:

• Mapfight is a way of visually comparing the sizes of two different countries.  It's clear to see from Mapfight that Spain is bigger than the UK, rather than smaller, as it looks on the map above.
  
• Some ideas for using maps in the classroom, from Lisa Stevens
  
• All about time zones, from the BBC
  
• If it were my home compares your own country with another, to see how your life might be different, given the different living conditions in that other country.
  
• This map shows you the locations of lots of different live webcams.  The more you zoom in to a certain country, the more webcams there are to choose from.
  
• National Geographic map jigsaw puzzles
  
• Map puzzles from Your Child Learns
  
• When you choose a place on the History Pin map, it will show you photos of that place in the past.  Ideal for a "Then and Now" topic.
  
• With Show Mapping Worlds, all the countries change size from land mass to a new size, depending on their data on a particular subject, such as number of children in primary school, natural disasters or football.
  
• World Mapper works on a similar basis to Show Mapping Worlds.  Click on the green arrows to see your selected map animated.
  
• List of maps with the words in Spanish
  
• Information, lesson ideas and maps all about the Americas, all from National Geographic.
  
• With Place Spotting you can set up quizzes where students have to find a pictured place or landmark on a map.
  
• Have a go at Lizard Point's geography and map-based quizzes.

Flowcharts

Apart from two rainy interludes, yesterday was warm and windy - excellent drying weather.  While I was pegging out another load of washing, I had the idea that some grammatical points can be explained and facilitated using flowcharts.  I sketched some out last night, and today had a go at making them.

I wanted to use an app, but couldn't find one that I liked and that worked well on my tablet.  If you know of a good Android flowchart app, please let me know in the comments!

I consulted with my engineer husband, who I knew had recently put together a complex flowchart as instructions for an electronic archery gadget he made.  He told me about the meanings of the differently-shaped boxes and arrows, and said that Publisher was a good tool.  That was OK, as I make most of my resources using Publisher.  It was the first time, though, that I have used the flowchart Autoshapes for their proper purpose!

These two were relatively simple to put together.  There are things like Ser and Estar, and Por and Para that I could do as well, but they would be much more complex!

I also discovered this afternoon that flowcharts are part of the programming component of the KS2 Computing curriculum.  Flowcharts, therefore, are another opportunity for some cross-curricular learning.  Children could demonstrate their understanding of concepts or groups of vocabulary by devising a flowchart for their classmates to test out and debug.

What do you think?  Do you think flowcharts would be a useful tool in the languages classroom?

Practising spelling and structure

I've written before about ways of supporting children as they start to write words, phrases and sentences.  We can give them letter cards to try out spelling and also arrange the parts of the sentences into writing frames or dice grids.

Sometimes, to assist children in collecting together a series of correct sentences to act as a model, I give them an activity like this one:

For the first four sentences, the letters are in the right order, but there are no capital letters, finger spaces or punctuation.  The children have to rewrite the sentences, adding those aspects.  The second group of sentences have the finger spaces, but no capital letters or punctuation.  Oh, and the letters in each word are not in the right order.  The children have to unmix the letters so that each sentence makes sense.  All 8 sentences have the same structure, though, and at the end of the activity (which they usually self- or peer-assess) they will have 8 model sentences to help them when they come to do their own writing.

I've recently rediscovered a website that will allow you to create a variation on this kind of activity - the Reverse Text Generator from Text Mechanic.

If I take the basic sentence il fait chaud aujourd'hui, I can:

• reverse it: iuh'druojua duahc tiaf li
  
• reverse the wording: hui'aujourd chaud fait il
  
• reverse each word's lettering: li tiaf duahc druojua'iuh
  
• write the sentence upside down!: ınɥ,pɹnoɾnɐ pnɐɥɔ ʇıɐɟ ןı

Making sentences using some of these methods would again require children to transliterate the sentences to make them correct, and again provide them with an accurate model which they can then adapt.

Le Tour de France

Yesterday I blogged my list of resources for 14 juillet.  Today, here are some useful links and resources for another important French event which will be taking place at the end of this term: the Tour de France.  Please feel free to add in the comments any links that you think other people would like!  you can find a list of French festivals and celebrations here.

• The Tour de France website
  
• Podcast about the Tour de France, and its transcript
  
• List of useful words, with explanations, from the BBC
  
• Some online activities, including a quiz, from the BBC
  
• BBC Newsround article about the Tour
  
• A labelled diagram of a bike
  
• Bike-related games and puzzles from Momes.net
  
• Lots of resources from Tête à Modeler
  
• "C'est quoi, ce maillot jaune?" Article from 1 jour 1 actu
  
• Interactive game and quiz in French from FranceTV
  
• Lesson ideas from Teach Primary

14 juillet

After this week there is only half a term left of this academic year.  We are starting to think about our lessons for that last half term, and starting to look for resources that will help us to include 14 juillet (la Fête Nationale / Bastille Day) and the Tour de France in our French lessons.

I've been looking around for some resources for 14 juillet, and thought I'd share my findings here.  Please feel free to add in a comment any resources that you've found that you think people would like!

• Qu'est-ce qu'une fête nationale? explanation of the event from 1 jour 1 actu
  
• Information about Bastille Day on Wikipedia
  
• Fête nationale - dossier from Momes.net, including information, games and craft activities
  
• Useful links and information from Fête-enfants
  
• Dossier from Tête à Modeler.  Lots of craft activities.
  
• pdf dossier of information from Citoyen de demain.
  
• The children's book La tour Eiffel a des ailes ends on 14 juillet.  Here's a video of it.  Bout de gomme has resources for the book, like this one.
  
• Symboles de la République from Bout de gomme
  
• Make your own Paris
  
• Podcast about 14 juillet.  Transcript here. 

Radio Labo

It's tricky to find suitable and good-quality listening materials for Key Stage 2 French.  Radio Labo from BBC School Radio is a series of 10 fifteen-minute programmes. They are intended for upper Key Stage 2, but the earlier programmes would be just as useful for Years 3 and 4.

The programmes cover vocabulary, grammar and phonics, and each programme also has a song.  The language is presented but also practised via games.

There are some very comprehensive teacher's notes to go with each programme, and I think it would be wise to study these before listening to the programme with the children in order to gain the maximum benefit from the programme.

Have a listen and see what you think!

Word puzzles: valuable or a waste of precious time?

all puzzles from this resource

If, like me, you used to spend a lot of time on the TES Modern Languages forum in the good old days, you'll remember the pretty frequent mention of "TWALT", where the T, W and A stood for Time Wasting Activities.  These activities were things like Making a Poster, and Colouring In.  Anything easy for the teacher to plan and that students would get on with without fuss while still looking busy to the casual observer.

Do wordsearches, crosswords and other word puzzles fit into this category?  Are they time-wasting activities or do they serve a valuable educational purpose within the lesson?

Here are my thoughts, and along with some ideas for how to use them.  Admittedly I am coming at this from a primary point of view.  If your learners are older you may have a different opinion.

• Puzzles can be used to reinforce vocabulary and structures.
  
• Puzzles are a useful addition to the repertoire of Repetition activities.
  
• It is easy to customise puzzles to the class or to individual children.
  
• You can't use them too often or the novelty will wear off.
  
• You need to have a meaningful reason within your sequence of planned activities for using the puzzles.
  
• Puzzles help to develop visual acuity for recognising words in the new language.
  
• Wordsearches encourage children to think about and notice aspects of the written words that will help them, such as written accents and unusual letters.
  
• Learners feel a sense of achievement when they complete a puzzle.
  
• The ability to complete a crossword is a useful lifelong skill.
  
• Completing a puzzle is good exercise for the brain.
  
• Puzzles like this are associated with recreation and so are perceived by children as a less threatening activity.
  
• Crosswords need exact spelling and so children are obliged to write accurately.
  
• Puzzles are useful as a five-minute activity.
  
• With crosswords, clues can be given in sentence form with a word or words missing.  The missing word or words are the answer.
  
• With wordsearches, the word list can be given in English and the children have to find the words in the second language, or vice versa.
  
• When matching up new vocabulary, children can use a crossword puzzle to test their hypotheses, like in this activity.
  
• Crosswords can be completed in teams in the style of the quiz game Crosswits.
  
• Crossword grids can also be used as "grid fills", where a word list is given and the children needs to fit the words in the right place on the grid.  They need to look at the letters they already have and count the number of letters in each word.  Like this one.
  
• Word spirals and waves using Festisite can be used as an alternative to a traditional wordsearch.

I make my puzzles with a program called Crossword Compiler, which I have had for years.  You have to pay for it, but it produces professional-looking results quickly and easily.  There are online, free puzzle makers available, such as Armored Penguin.

What's in a name?

It won't have escaped your attention that I make a lot of resources.  You might even have used some of them!  When creating a resource, I want it to be as authentic as possible, and so choose carefully the names that I am going to use.

My favourite website for choosing appropriate names is Meilleurs Prénoms.  I particularly like it because you can select a year to see the most popular boys' and girls' names for that year.  For example, let's say I'm making a new resource for Year 4.  They are 8 or 9 years old, and so are likely to have been born in 2008.  So I click on "Tendances" on the homepage of the website, then "Prénoms par année".  Underneath the lists of names there is a box where you can enter your "Autre année". I have entered 2008:

The lack of a name in the no.1 position on each list is a fault that I've noticed the last few times I've used the site.  Hopefully it'll be put right soon.  So if I'm making a resource for Year 4, I'll use some of the names from this list.  If they were to go to France, the children their age would more than likely have these names.  Similarly, if I'm making a resource about family members, I'll choose appropriate names for the parents and grandparents.

Here's the list for 1970.  I recognise quite a few penpals and exchange partners!

Some other name-related websites that I like:

French

The 1000 most common surnames in France

An alphabetical list of names for pets

Spanish

This Spanish website allows you to see the most popular names in recent years (scroll down to below the lists to see the years to select)

Calendar of Saints' names, month by month

An alphabetical list of names for pets

Most popular Spanish names by decades

German

This German website also shows you the list of the most popular names for a given year.

And finally, an interesting graphic which shows how the names of countries, continents and oceans translate in their native languages.

Italian

Most popular names by year

The Generation Game

Here are some websites that you might like to try for making resources:

SEN Teacher Maths Printables: Add coin worksheets:  Tell the generator which currency you want to use, how many of the coins you want to be included, which level of difficulty you require, and it'll give you a sheet showing piles of coins that need adding up.  Euros are one of the currencies available, so it's great for doing numbers in a different way and for some cultural input.

Classtools SMS Generator:   Use this generator to create authentic-looking SMS dialogues.  Something to make dialogues a bit more interesting!

Festisite is still one of my favourites, for making word spirals, hearts and waves.  I use the wave setting for word snakes.  Since I last wrote about the site, it's undergone some changes:

Type in the words that you want to be in the spiral, heart or wave, then select "Printable Document". This means that it will generate a PDF of your finished word shape.  I select 26pt font, and A3 size paper. This means that you'll get a large word shape which will be nice and clear when you paste it into your document.  Then click on "Download" and you'll get the PDF with your word shape in the middle.  You can then screen-capture it and paste it into your resource as required.

The Tools for Educators Board Game generator is mentioned frequently on social media.  There are various different kinds of games, and you can use images and text or just images.  Here's one with fruits and vegetables:

I also like the AtoZ teacher stuff Word Shape worksheets generator.  I like to use these word shapes as a step towards memorising spelling.  The only slight downfall is that it doesn't recognise accented characters:

Do you know of any other good resource generators?

FlipQuiz

A member of the LiPS (Languages in Primary Schools) Facebook group, Ana Woodward, shared her find of this website yesterday.

FlipQuiz can be used to make interactive, "Jeopardy" style quizzes for children to play in class in teams.  You need to sign up for an account, which is free, and then you can start to make your quizzes.  You enter pairs of questions and answers, or it could be English and target language / target language and English.  You can also add an image to each pair as well.  FlipQuiz then generates the game board for you, which you can also customise with different colours and images.

If you sign up for the free account, you have to keep the scores yourself.  The Pro account will keep score for you.

My first flip quiz is about opinions of fruits and vegetables, which I am doing with Year 3 Spanish at the moment:

I think this would be a good alternative to Blue Numbers for reviewing a topic.  It can be used for single items of vocabulary, for short phrases and for longer sentences.  It would also be useful practising translation in Key Stages 3 and 4.

Vocabulary Maps

If you've read my posts over the last few months, you'll know about my passion for Sketchnoting.  I was very interested to see pop into my Inbox last weekend an email about Vocabulary Maps.

Vocabulary Maps are the brainchild of Tom and Susi in the Czech Republic.  They are mind maps which show the links between nouns, adjectives, verbs, phrases and idioms within a certain topic.  The pictures are a very important part of each map, and they help to embed the vocabulary via the visual memory.

If we look at the Vocabulary Map for bird, for example, it links to nouns such as eye, tail and feather, and also phrases and idioms such as bird's eye view, the early bird catches the worm and to take somebody under your wing.  Egg links to nouns, verbs such as whisk, fry and scramble as well as sayings and idioms.

I have been in touch with Tom this week to find out more about the Vocabulary Maps.  He says:
"...vocabulary maps are suitable for VISUAL LEARNERS - learners of a second language, a teacher's aid, homeschooling parents, young native speakers, special education students or even just brushing up on vocabulary in a foreign language.. pretty much everyone, it just depends on how you choose to use the maps and that you like visual learning."

At the moment the maps are available in English, German, Czech and Spanish, with French in development.

Tom and Susi are crowd-funding via Kickstarter at the moment.  Why not back them and have a go at using the vocabulary maps.  I have!

Enriching English vocabulary

Our curriculum for Languages in Key Stage 2 says that through learning a new language, children should:

• broaden their vocabulary
• know how (key features and patterns) differ from English

I don't know about you, but I find it very difficult to teach new words in French or Spanish without (a) linking them to English cognates and (b) thinking of English words that are linked to the new words that aren't necessarily cognate.

For example, last week I was working on the -er sound with Year 5.  Our picture was a chevalier and so when we heard the -er sound, we held up our lance.  I asked the children if they knew an English word that sounded a bit like chevalier and described a knight perfectly.  I was alluding to 'chivalrous', and it wasn't a word they had come across.  We discussed the meaning, and I suggested they used it in their next piece of English writing when instead of 'courteous' or 'polite'.

I do this a lot.  We use the new words that we are learning to enrich our English vocabulary.  We are building bridges between the new language and English (all the time talking about why they are often similar) and using knowledge of one to help the other.  This is another weapon in our arsenal for those headteachers who do not value language learning in their primary schools.

I have started to make a list of the links like this that we can make with French and Spanish.
*These links are no longer available as they've been taken over by the Light Bulb Languages #LanguageLinks.

French - https://docs.google.com/document/d/12uJ4mM6Zw7C1lyCkxhUDZsGjU4Lw-9ORNmolX8c9eUM/edit?usp=sharing  LINK NO LONGER AVAILABLE

Spanish - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hOUILNdEbbPTu-11S8dKh_YuzCooZJu_nKIm1ArC_Ak/edit?usp=sharing  LINK NO LONGER AVAILABLE

These are open Google documents.  Please feel free to add any words that you mention to your classes!

French festivals and celebrations

Festivals and Celebrations are a part of the new GCSE syllabus, and we are always looking for cultural aspects to include in our French lessons in Key Stage 2.  Yesterday's post had a list of Spanish special days, so today here is the list for French.  Again, if I have missed any, please let me know in the comments.

You can download my French Festivals and Celebrations Tarsia and dominoes here.

le Jour de l'An	1st January	New Year's Day
la Fête des Rois	6th January	Epiphany
la Chandeleur	2nd February	Candlemas
Saint-Valentin	14th February	Valentine's Day
Carnaval	February, leading up to Lent	Carnival
Mardi Gras	Tuesday in February	Shrove Tuesday
la Fête du Citron	February/March	The Lemon Festival
Pâques	March/April	Easter
Lundi de Pâques	March/April	Easter Monday
Journée Internationale de la Francophonie	20th March	International Francophonie Day
Poisson d’avril	1st April	April Fool’s Day
la Fête du Travail	1st May	Labour Day
8 mai 1945	8th May	VE Day
Lundi de Pentecôte	May	Pentecost
Jeudi de l'Ascension	May	Ascension
la Fête des Mères	last Sunday in May	Mother’s Day
la Fête des Pères	3rd Sunday in June	Father’s Day
la Fête de la Musique	21st June	Music Day
le Tour de France	July	the Tour de France
la Fête Nationale	14th July	Bastille Day
l'Assomption	15th August	Assumption of Mary
la Rentrée	beginning of September	the return to school
la Toussaint	1st November	All Saints' Day
l’Armistice / le 11 novembre	11th November	the Armistice, Remembrance Day
la Veille de Noël	24th December	Christmas Eve
Noël	25th December	Christmas
la Saint-Sylvestre	31st December	New Year's Eve