Pictotraductor

A few years ago I discovered Pictotraductor, a Spanish website which allows you to create pictorial representations of Spanish sentences.  The resulting sentences make excellent decoding activities.  I like to give them to the children in mixed-ability pairs, where the children take it in turns to write, and each writes in a different colour so that you can see who did what. (This is a collaborative, Kagan-style activity.)

For example, can you work out what these sentences are saying?

I like to leave out the definite and indefinite articles for added difficulty!  These just appear as words in the squares:

I have been using it to prepare some sentences about opinions of sports for my Year 5 class, but found that there was no symbol for me encanta.  If you click on "Login" at the bottom of the screen, you can create an account and upload your own images.  So I now I have an image for me encanta:

If you click on "Funcionamiento" at the bottom of the page, there are some useful tips on making Pictotraductor work for you.  For example, if you put "no-" before a word, the picture will appear with a red cross through it.

Pictotraductor is only available in Spanish, but if you know a little bit of Spanish you can make it work for other languages too.

I contacted the people at Pictoaplicaciones (they are based near Santiago de Compostela) and they are happy for me to use and share their images in resources.

If you click on "Una idea" at the bottom of the screen, you'll find the other applications offered by Pictoaplicaciones.  I like Pictosonidos, which lets you hear the word and see it included in a sentence.  You can also play a guessing game with the words (click on "Jugar" under one of the pictures).  There is a minibeast one which I'd like to use with Year 1.  Also of interest is Pictocuentos, which tells and illustrates well-known stories.

Have a play with it and see what you think!