Writing without a pen

This morning I was having a look back at a post from 2009, the beginning of this blog.  In this post, I listed things I'd like to try in the classroom that I hadn't already tried.  Number 9 on the list of ten:

I've experimented with cut out letters to spell out words before (for example in my Soy prehistórico series of lessons) but haven't tried this particular activity.  I've made an activity for my Year 3 Spaniards, with whom I've just started Food and Opinions:

It'll take a bit of printing and cutting to get it ready (I pay my own children to do that kind of thing!) and we might do some other activities like these ones to help to memorise the spelling.  Children could also work on the words independently and photograph their work for evidence.  A similar activity could work with word cards, where the teacher says a sentence in English and the children have to put together that sentence in the target language.

"Writing" in this way is non-threatening for children, as they are not faced with a big empty page, and mistakes are easy to erase.  Writing with word cards rather than letters would work for older students for dictation and translation purposes.

If you'd like a copy of the above activity to try for yourself, you can download it from here.  There is also general set of Spanish letters here and French here.