National Creativity Day

 

This morning I found out via the Facebook page of Prinfab (the company that prints my fabric designs) that today, May 30th, is National Creativity Day.  You can find out more about the day here.

The main focus of the day is artistic creativity, although for me creativity is also pedagogical creativity, linguistic creativity and "crafty" creativity.  (Read more about creativity here.)

I engage my linguistic and pedagogical creativity by creating teaching resources for the languages community, which I put on Light Bulb Languages and my Sellfy shop.

I also spend a lot of tine (probably too much!) sewing language-based goodies and more for my Etsy shop, LumenMakes.

Today, as it's half term, I have been having a play with my Cricut machine.  I have been experimenting with printable vinyl to make acetate keyrings.  Now I am trying to find a way to protect the vinyl.  I have tried gloss Mod Podge, which is indeed glossy, but you can see the brush marks.  Any suggestions?!

Another creative thing I have on my list for this half term is sewing my younger daughter's prom dress.  I have until mid-July so it's not too urgent!

So happy National Creativity Day!  What do you do to be creative?

No-screen activities

 

Today is another normal lockdown day in our house.  "Normal" consists of my daughters, my husband and I working at home, all on screens for most of the day.  I try to stay away from screens at the weekend (not always very successfully) for a break.  

Understandably, there have been a lot of requests recently for no-screen activities for students.  Here's what I can offer for languages:

• Lumen's Language Challenges: art and craft challenges with a languages focus. These are the ones that I have done, to give you some ideas.
  
  
• Make a minibook!  There are lots of different kinds, and you can read all about them on this blog as well as downloading a free publication containing all the information.
  
  
• Create a calligram: You can read all my blogposts about them here, or download this free publication which tells you all about them.
  
  
• Students could also complete a number of different no-screen activities and put them towards Lumen's French Award, Lumen's Spanish Award or Lumen's German Award.

Lumen's Language Challenges

If you' re after something arty or crafty to do during this period of lockdown, look no further than Lumen's Language Challenges - art and craft activities with a language focus.  Great for exploring languages, and creating a sense of wellbeing.

I've been doing them myself, and I'm going to put the results here:

#LumenChallenge1: Make a bookmark which features your favourite word or phrase in another language.

#LumenChallenge2: Find out how to say the numbers 1 to 5 in another language, then add them to the printable which you can then decorate.

#LumenChallenge3: Create a mirrored image of an animal word in another language, and decorate it to look like that animal.

#LumenChallenge4: Have a look at the Light Bulb Languages #LanguageLinks.  Choose one you like and illustrate it in your own way.

#LumenChallenge5: Print out your favourite letter from the printable, and decorate it.
In the white space around the letter, write some words in another language that start with this letter or have the letter in them.

#LumenChallenge6: Make an origami box.  Stick extra pieces onto your box to turn it into something else, for example an animal or something you might use in your home. You could also colour or paint it.  Find some words in another language to describe your modified box. 

#LumenChallenge7: Make a game of pairs (sometimes called memory or pelmanism) in another language and play it with a family member.  (This is me playing it with - and losing to - my 13 year old daughter.  You can download my game here.)

#LumenChallenge8: Make a piece of art inspired by Paul Klee's Once Emerged from the Gray of Night.  Divide your paper into small squares - 2cm squares are a good size - with faint pencil lines.

Find a phrase or saying that you like in another language, and write it in some of the boxes.
Then colour in the boxes and the spaces left by the letters to complete your artwork.

#LumenChallenge9: Make a minibook from a single piece of A4 paper and choose some words, phrases or sentences to put in it. Then illustrate your book!

#LumenChallenge10: Choose a short text, poem or rhyme in another language and create an illuminated text of it

#LumenChallenge11: Use an animation app and some objects in your house to make a short stop-motion animated film. Then provide a voiceover or subtitles in another language.

French and Spanish Art

It's the time of year when schools are having French days or Spanish days and need things to fill them, or when teachers want an artistic activity to fill in a spare lesson here and there.  Here are the ideas previously mentioned on this blog, that may come in handy for such an occasion:

Klee letters - combining art and writing

Vision On!  - creating art out of words

Magical Miró - ideas for exploiting the images of Joan Miró

Decorative Letters - making illuminated texts

The Shape Game - creating an image out of a shape

Imprinting Verbs - creating characters to inspire writing

Moorish Mosaics - making mosaics and exploring symmetry

Gaudí's Mosaics - making mosaic suns inspired by Gaudí

Guatemala - traditional patterns and textiles

Bend it, shape it, any way you want it - using plasticine and play doh

Food flags, informative flags - creating flags out of food, words, images...

Calligrams - converting text into images

Calligrams part 2 - creating calligrams using outlines and stencils

World Cup calligrams

Letter by Letter - make personal calligrams from your initials

Minibooks!

Arts and Crafts

You may remember that at this year's #ililc5 and Language World I delivered a workshop called Be a Crafty Languages Teacher, which was all about craft activities that we can use in the primary language classroom.  Recently I purchased the book Arts and Crafts with Children by Andrew Wright, which gives a rationale for and lots of examples of art and craft activities that you can do with classes to practise the foreign language.  Today has been the first proper day of my summer holiday, and I have spent it reading the book and sketchnoting my favourite bits.  There are, of course, many other activities that I haven't mentioned.  The ones I have mentioned are the ones that I can see myself using in the classroom.

Click on the image to see it bigger.

Klee Letters

Once again, while I was looking for something else recently, I came across Once Emerged from the Gray of Night, which was painted by Swiss-German artist Paul Klee in 1918.  I like abstract art and I like letters, so I decided to have a go at doing something inspired by it.

I chose a Spanish refrán as my text.  I divided my paper into 2cm squares and coloured the sections with ten different colours of coloured pencils.

I really like this blogpost, which shows how the children used a simple opinion sentence as the text for their Klee-inspired work.  This could easily be adapted to opinions or other short sentences in the target language, which are effectively hidden in the artwork.  It could also be used for making greetings cards in the target language (or English).

Something else to have a play with.

Vision On!

Early on Friday morning I read an email from Pinterest.  I registered with Pinterest quite some time ago, but have to admit that I haven't really done anything with it. Anyway, there was an interesting link in this email.  The skeletons reminded me of the 70s children's programme Vision On, and the character that Tony Hart made by writing and mirroring the programme name.  In 1981 I was in the 4th year of middle school, and we did a piece of art work inspired by this, where we wrote our names, mirrored them, and then painted each little section in a different shade of the same colour.  I seem to remember mine was various shades of red and pink.

Then this morning my six year old downloaded yet another app for her Android tablet.  It's called Doodle Toy, and she showed me how you can make mirrored writing with it.  So, instead of doing the work which I really need to do, I have been having a play with Doodle Toy, and thinking about how it could encourage Year 3 in particular with their writing of single words, as specified in the Key Stage 2 Framework for Languages.

Using this app it's easy to create an image of, for example, an animal name, and then embellish it to make it look even more like that animal.  I have done the French animals lapin and lion.  I have also created one of my own name, about which I could write something like "Me llamo Clare.  Soy un insecto." because of the shape my name makes.  It was straightforward (after a few false starts!) to save the images to my tablet's Album for later use.

I hope it gives you some ideas for having fun with text.  I'm going to put this on my old Android tablet, which I let the children use, and see what they come up with.

Take One Picture

The school where I teach Spanish has begun work this term on the National Gallery's Take One Picture project.  The current picture is Bartolomé Bermejo's Saint Michael Triumphant over the Devil (1468).  The fact that Bermejo is a Spanish artist is great news, and means that there will be a lot of cross-curricular Spanish stuff going on this term in at least PE, literacy, history and geography.

I have started to incorporate the picture into my Spanish lessons, and it is proving considerably easier for some year groups than for others.  Year 5, for example, are currently learning how to tell the time in Spanish.  Ideas on how to get Bermejo into that are very welcome!

Here's what I've done so far.

Year 4 have been working on days, numbers to 31 and months, and putting these together to make dates in Spanish.  As the picture is of St Michael, I took the opportunity to do some intercultural dates, namely saints' days.  I made 24 different saints' days into cards and we used them for a game of Showdown.  If you haven't tried Showdown yet, I recommend that you read Helena Butterfield's blogpost about it.  It's so easy to adapt and the children find it very useful and enjoyable.  Here are the cards if you would like to have a go yourself.



Year 3 have just started colours.  They are already familiar with them from Year 1 and Year 2, so I welcomed something different to do with them.  Bartolomé Bermejo was actually called Bartolomé de Cárdenas.  Bermejo means red, and he was always known by that name, maybe because he had red hair or a red face.  This gave me the idea to combine colours with names (more intercultural input).  The children are drawing Mr Men style characters in one colour, and then using the sheet below to find the name of the colour and a Spanish first name to go with it.  My examples on the board were Verónica Violeta and Rodrigo Rojo.



If you have any brainwaves about other ways that this picture could fit in, please let me know! The devil is going to inspire the "describe a monster" part of Y4's next topic, but apart from that.... I'd also be very interested to hear from anyone else who has been involved in this project, not necessarily for this picture.

And on an entirely unrelated matter I have also learned that you can embed documents from Box.

It's beginning to look a lot like a Christmas mini-book

I have to admit that I am often easily distracted from my work. I think I may have mentioned that before.  This afternoon, I was having a look at Twitter while I was supposed to be finishing a resource, and noticed that @missmclachlan was tweeting pictures of some interesting-looking origami Christmas trees that her classes were making.  I asked if she had a link, and she posted the link to the above YouTube video.

It's easy to make regardless of whether you understand the Spanish, and what I particularly like is that you can write things underneath each layer.

While I was walking to pick up my children from school this afternoon, it occurred to me that you could stick half a Spanish lady on the top and the tree bit becomes a Flamenco skirt.  Or turn the tree bit upside down, add a semi-circle of pale yellow, pink or brown card and it becomes an ice-cream cone.  Or add a face to the bottom of the tree bit and it becomes a magician's hat.

Like I said, I'm easily distracted.

Roscón de Reyes

It's here!  The 2013 Spanish Christmas card.  It represents the Roscón de Reyes, the cake that is traditionally eaten in Spain on 6th January, el Día de Reyes.  The Roscón is made with a rich dough flavoured with orange and lemon, and has brightly-coloured candied fruits on the top.  Inside is hidden a little figure or toy (in 1986 I found a minute china vase in a Roscón!) and also a bean.  Whoever finds the figure is crowned king or queen for the day, and whoever finds the bean has to pay for the Roscón the following year.

Here's how to make the card:

You will need: a piece of A4 card, scraps of red, gold, green and silver shiny paper (Christmas wrapping paper is ideal and much cheaper than packs of foiled card!), scissors, glue, a pen and colours.  Most importantly you'll need a copy of the Roscón on roscón-coloured paper, a copy of the crown on card to use as a template and a copy of the title banner, which will be fine on white paper.  Download the Roscón, crown and banner from here.

1.  Fold the A4 card in half.  Cut out the Roscón and stick it on the middle of the card.  Don't throw away the scraps of Roscón paper - you'll need them later.

2.  Draw round the crown template three times on the reverse of the gold paper, and cut the crowns out. Stick them across the top of your card.  You could decorate the crowns if you want.  I have written on the names of the Reyes Magos: Melchor, Baltasar and Gaspar.

3.  Colour in the lettering on the banner and stick it on the bottom of the card.

4.  Use the scraps of red, gold and green paper to make round shapes and lozenge shapes to represent the candied fruits that are put on top of the Roscón.  Stick them on, leaving one space.

5.  On the reverse of the silver paper, draw the shape of a trinket that will be hidden "in" the Roscón.  I have done a simple round silver coin.  Cut it out and stick it on the space that you left.  Then, using the scraps of roscón-coloured paper from step 1, make a little flap to cover the trinket and stick it on.  You could put another candied fruit on top of the flap.

Before the children make these, we are going to look at the ingredients, probably as a pair exercise with dictionaries or even a Tarsia, and watch this video of a baker making roscones.  There are also lots of photos of Roscón ingredients, like this one.

Magical Miró

I have a confession to make.  This isn't my idea.  Well, it started off as my idea, and had another idea added to it by a very clever student.

I always liked working with NQTs back in my secondary days, as they always brought with them lots of fresh ideas and new ways of doing things.  I'm now a language tutor on the Primary PGCE course at Manchester University, and I am learning from the students there.  My input on their first language day in September was ideas for promoting reading and writing in the languages classroom, and one of the things I showed them was how to make calligrams like these.  Their second session was language-specific, and the Spanish group talked about using the works of Joan Miró to inspire lessons.  Yesterday we went to a junior school in Stockport, where the students had the task of teaching a 30 minute language activity to a small group of Year 5 or Year 6 children.

For me, one of the students stood out from the rest.  She presented the colours in Spanish to the children and then gave them a black-and-white Miró-style picture (that she had drawn herself) which they coloured in and labelled calligram-style.

Now I don't know much about Miró, as my artistic endeavours thus far have been limited to Gaudí and mosaics.  So I did a bit of digging to see what it was all about, and have had a go at the calligramming myself.  I created my Miró-esque picture using this resource as a guide.  Then I coloured it with coloured pencils, and used coloured fineliners to write the colours in:

I'm determined now to find out more about Miró's art and to incorporate this activity into the colours section of my Key Stage 2 Spanish scheme of work.  Ya-boo-sucks to the new curriculum and its lack of desire for culture.

Here are some of the Miró links that I've found so far:
Draw like Miró, collage style
Another way of making Miró-style artwork
TES Miró resources
Rachel Hawkes's Miró resources

Of course you could use other artists for the same idea:
Arcimboldo (and perhaps write the food names in instead of the colours)
Mondrian
Kandinsky (perhaps)
Klee
Van Gogh (in simplified form)
Gaudí
Matisse (also see this blogpost)

So thank you to the very clever student for taking two ideas and making something so much better by putting them together.


UPDATE 18.11.13:

My Year 2 class have been working on 2D shapes and numbers to 15.  We have been counting shapes in pictures and writing numbers, and have also used colours to help us.   (The resources are here if you'd like to use them.)  I've used the Miró idea and a box of 2D shapes to create pictures like these:

There is a space at the bottom of the A3 sheet, under the frame, for them to complete the sentence "En mi cuadro hay ____ círculos, ____ cuadrados y ____ triángulos."  

Another great Miró link for you as well, again via the wonders of Twitter.  This is another Miró dice roll activity, but for making Miró-style people.

Decorative Letters

A couple of weeks ago I received from Europe Direct NE an email about the European Day of Languages competition that they are organising jointly with ALL(NE).  The competition is inspired by the current exhibition of the Lindisfarne Gospels in Durham, and the idea is that children select a short text in another language and present it as an illuminated text.

Now I know what an illuminated text is and what one looks like, but it isn't something I've ever taught before.  I'd really like for my KS1 children to have a go at this as well as KS2, but think that a properly illuminated text would be a little beyond the younger ones.

Then I thought of this book that I bought in the Espace Culturel at Leclerc in St Jean d'Angély last month.  I like it because it combines handwriting, drawing, vocabulary-building and knowledge of the French writing system.  It will be useful especially for KS1, for some cross-curricular literacy.

The book has one letter of the alphabet to each page.  The letter is written in the French style and then turned into a picture of something that begins with that letter.  Here are b and c, for example:

The b becomes the head of a bélier and the c is the back of a crevette.  I also like the l page where curly ls become the filaments of lightbulbs (lumières).  I'm sure children would enjoy taking a letter, writing it in their best writing and turning it into something in French/Spanish that starts with that letter, as well as writing the French/Spanish word in their best writing.  Taking it one step further, there are many French comptines that would inspire an illuminated text using this as a basis.

I should add that unfortunately the competition is only open to north-east schools.  And if you are in a north-east school, no nicking my idea, right?!

UPDATE 24.9.13:

The children will be embarking on their competition entries today.  Here are the two examples that I have made:

Starburst

I've had to explain to a few people recently why I haven't gone down the management route and why I never intend to.  I did do a management course once, 12 years ago, and decided there and then that it wasn't for me.  I'm far too easily distracted by new things to try, and would definitely be the creative/ideas person in a team, and not so much the person who gets things done.  

Here is my latest distraction, a Starburst book, and it's specially for @lancslassrach.

The advantage of this one is that is folds up pretty small yet has plenty of space for writing and illustrations.  Each "page" is almost A4 in size.  It can have as many or as few sections as you like.  Mine has 6.  I used coloured card as I don't have any coloured paper.  Here's how to do it:

For each section: 1.  Take a piece of A4 paper and cut a square from it by folding it as shown and cutting off the extra rectangle.

2.  Unfold your square and fold it in half from top to bottom.

3.  Fold it in half again.

4.  Open up your square again and you'll see that it has 3 different folds.

5.  Fold inwards the squares that have the diagonal folds through them....

6.  .....and this is what you will have.

7.  Make your other sections in the same way, then stick them together on the blank square sides, taking care to match up the folds and open edges.

8.  Now all the sections are stuck together.

9.  Cut 2 squares of card, 11.5cm  x 11.5 cm, for the covers, and stick them to the outsides of your starburst.  And that's it!

Each section can be opened up individually and has a large space for writing and drawing.  You could also make these using A5 paper.  They would then be mini-starbursts but would still have nearly A5-sized "pages".

These mini-books would be useful for any writing that comprises different sections or chapters.

The Shape Game

I needed a one-off lesson today as I had two halves of classes put together, each of whom were doing different things.  Recently I purchased Anthony Browne's The Shape Game as I thought that it would make for a good lesson idea.  I have used Anthony Browne books before - Silly Billy and Bear's Magic Pencil.  I quite often use a book in English to put some language work in context, to set the scene.

The Shape Game tells the story of Browne's visit as a child to a gallery where he discovered the world of art, and after which his mother introduced him to the Shape Game.  The idea of the Shape Game is that you draw a random shape on a piece of paper, and then give it to a friend who turns that shape into something recognisable.

The Children's Laureate website has some super resources to go with the Shape Game.  I started off by showing the children the gallery of creations using Anthony Browne's first shape - I love Quentin Blake's.  Then I gave them the first shape on this resource and they set about turning it into something recognisable.  The rabbit at the top is what I did with it!

Here are some of the things that the children created:

Creating the pictures is fun enough, but take a look at the suggestions for what you can do with them afterwards.  Browne suggests giving the character a name, adding a speech bubble and something the character would say, or describing the character and any special qualities that it has.  What would happen if two of the characters met?  There are lots of possibilities for language work.  I also like the creative activities suggested for the different key stages (EYFS/KS1, KS2, KS3 and above), particularly the Drawing to Music in the KS2 activities.