Dialogues

 

In September I began teaching unit 1 of Cycle A of my mixed age Spanish scheme of work (we started with Cycle B last year - don't ask).  Lesson 1 was all about saying hola and adiós, saying our name using soy... and introducing the question ¿Quién eres? 

The learning was brought together towards the end of the lesson using a simple dialogue, as seen above.

Here's how we used it:

• Using escuchad y repetid (listen and repeat) we practised each line several times, going through the whole thing twice.  When I use more complex dialogues I split some lines into chunks to start with.  The children were very good at copying my intonation.
• We discussed the meaning of each part.
• We read all the dialogue all together three times.
• We split the class in half - by tables and then girls/boys - and performed the dialogue in teams, half the class being person A and the other half person B, then swapping roles.
• I asked the children to practise the dialogue with their partner.  We talked about what they might change in the dialogue when speaking as themselves.
• While they were practising (I only gave them a few minutes) I circulated to help as necessary and to listen in.
• Quite a few pairs of children in each class volunteered to perform their dialogue in front of the class.

Practising a dialogue enables children to ask and answer questions, engage in conversations, speak in sentences and speak with increasing confidence, as required by the Key Stage 2 national curriculum for Languages.  It also enables children to speak an extended passage of the language, in this case at the end of the first lesson of the term.  

We revisited the dialogue in the following two lessons.  A highlight was a Year 3 beginner reciting the entire dialogue perfectly to his class teacher and me in the corridor, with excellent pronunciation and intonation.

Dialogues like this will work with most topic areas and most levels of language.  I recommend giving them a try!

The usual in an unusual way

This year in both my schools I have Year 3, Year 4 and Year 3/4 classes. For that reason I have had to devise a mixed age, two-year scheme of work. All three classes are working on the same curriculum (Cycle A of the scheme of work) this year. Because I have Year 4 children with one year of formal Spanish learning in the same class as Year 3 children who are beginners, I have had to seek a different context in which to introduce basic greetings, saying your name and first phonics, so that everyone can learn something new.

I chose the context of animals and the continents that they come from. This means that I can use soy instead of me llamo for saying their name (something new for the Year 4s) and then reuse soy in sentences such as Soy de Europa.

I chose the animal vocabulary and the first names so that they cover all the main phonemes/graphemes that we cover in Key Stage 2 Spanish, and also ensured that there was a good spread of names ending in -o, names ending in -a and names ending in neither for our first look at grammatical gender.

This video is designed to play at the beginning of a lesson while the children are getting ready, to introduce them to the animals and to begin to show them which continents the animals come from.

Do you adapt your scheme of work to cater for a range of student experience of language learning? Do you do the usual in an unusual way?