Nouns, opinions and descriptions with a PSHE/RSE twist

I first got to know the work of Elise Gravel when I came across Monstres en vrac in Montréal ten years ago.  When I was in California last week, I popped into a branch of Barnes & Noble to have a look at their Spanish section.  Considering how bilingual California is, it was a smaller section than I expected.  I purchased one book: El rosa, el azul y tú by Elise Gravel.  It's also available in French as Le rose, le bleu et toi !

The book offers us opportunities to discuss self, relationships and gender stereotypes with children, while also covering areas of language such as nouns and their gender, opinions, and adjectives and adjectival agreement.

For examples, here are some nouns which we could show to children without the images.  They could investigate the phonics and use their dictionaries to find the meanings.  They could also work out the grammatical gender of each noun.  Then, as is suggested at the top of the page, we could ask the children to sort them into "Things for girls", "Things for boys" and "Things for everyone".  The resulting discussions will have strong links to the PSHE/RSE curricula.

Another example is opinions, which can be approached as a true/false activity as suggested on the page.

Elise Gravel also offers some free posters on her website.  Among them there are two useful Spanish ones:

They show examples in practice of adjectival agreement and could be a starting point for discussions about gender stereotypes.

This book and these resources give an interesting twist to commonly taught grammar, and would give Key Stage 3 teachers a way of doing the usual in an unusual way for their new Year 7 students who have different experiences of language learning.

I would recommend speaking to your headteacher and/or PSHE coordinator before using these ideas in your lessons.

Language World 2020: Sketchnotes

Here are my sketchnotes from Language World 2020.  My own presentation "Harnessing the Hive Mind" is here.

World Book Day

It can't have escaped your notice, especially if you work in a primary school, that next Thursday (5th March) is World Book Day.  Around this time of year, those who work in schools or who have little children of their own are asking on Twitter and in the Facebook groups if anyone has any ideas for costumes for the day.  I had my time, when my daughters were at primary school, of making Hetty Feather costumes and Paddington costumes, and would have appreciated ideas for simpler, easier and cheaper alternatives.

A couple of years ago I made myself the tee shirt that you can see above.  I printed the covers of some of the books I read with the children onto the special paper that can be ironed onto fabric, and arranged them on both sides of the tee shirt and its arms.  I wore it on last year's World Book Day, and the children enjoyed recognising some of the books that we have read together.  Unfortunately the pictures didn't cope very well in the wash, so if you try something like this, a gentle handwash is the way to go.

I always enjoy seeing what the children are wearing.  One of my favourite ones was one of the Year 6 girls a couple of years ago.  She was wearing an old tee shirt and pair of leggings, onto which she and her mum had written lots of different words in black Sharpie.  She had come as a dictionary.

A couple of days ago I received from the primary school where I am a governor their weekly newsletter detailing their plans for World Book Day.  They are going to have a vocabulary parade inspired by Miss Alaineus, A Vocabulary Disaster.  I'm sure that this is something that could be adapted for other languages, not only for World Book Day but for language days or weeks, European Day of Languages and so on.

UPDATE 9.3.20:  This year's dictionary tee shirt!  A quick Sharpie job :)

And more Spanish books!

¡Hola desde Sevilla!  A great way to spend half term.  I was allowed a little while in a book shop today, and happened upon these two:

I have to admit I like this one because I have a Nina in my house.  The book is all about Nina starting primary school and everything she encounters there.  It's a great insight into Spanish primary schools.

I was drawn to this one partly by its very topical message, and partly by the fact that it has lots of infinitives, which I am have just started with Year 6!  

Each double page spread has an acetate overlay.  You read what you should do to help the environment, then turn the acetate and it shows you!

My final purchase was a book of Mafalda bookmarks, so here is a topical one for you:

UPDATE:

I've just got another one!

It's a pop-up book about jungle animals.  The first one, for example, is a crocodile:

 You can see it says "cocodrilo" down the side, and there's the sound he makes on the left.   But the best is yet to come - you can flip over just half of the page ro mix him with another animal, like a hippo:

And you get a Cocopótamo!  Then why not mix the hippo with something

like a toucan, to make a Hipocán.  There is a great combination of sounds on the left too.

There is also a "La Granja" book in the same series.

More Spanish books

It seems kind of appropriate that I am writing this during a tropical thunderstorm.  The sky is very dark, thunder is rumbling and torrential rain has just started to fall.

This afternoon I was allowed half an hour in our nearest Barnes and Noble, the US equivalent of Waterstones.  I always head straight for the Libros para Niños, and even on such a short visit I was not disappointed.

I do weather with my Y5s, and so far it's been difficult to find suitable reading material.  This reader is a good level for UKS2, and of an appropriate maturity level too.

One of my Y5 classes read Wonder with their class teacher last year and produced some fantastic English writing about it.  This, by the same author, is beautifully illustrated and told in simple Spanish.  It has the messages of "todos somos únicos" - we are all unique - and "elige ser amable" - choose to be kind.  This book will be great for KS2 children, as they'll be familiar with the novel, and the theme fits in beautifully with the values that we want to instill in the children.

This book, called We're All Wonders in English, is not available in the UK but can be purchased from Amazon Spain.

Measuring with fruit

This term, my Year 1s have been learning about fruits.  We've learned plátanos, manzanas, naranjas, fresas, ciruelas and peras.  These are some of the activities we have done:

• Some simple writing of the fruit words
• "Fruit crush" from Take 10 en español
• Game using number cards, where a fruit is underneath each number 1-6.  One child nominates a number, a second child says which fruit they think is under there, and a third child lifts up the number to see if they are right.
• Read Limón and wrote and recorded our own versions (these are some of last year's)
• Sang La canción de las frutas
• Read Yummy Yucky (there is now a bilingual version of this) and then a Spanish version that I wrote

The week before half term, the class teacher had, by chance, left open by the computer a copy of the children's Inspire Maths workbook.  The next thing that children were going to do in maths was measurement.  This was something I could do in Spanish!

Before half term I took a metre rule into the Y1 classroom to measure things like the chairs and tables, to get an idea of the size of unit the children would need to use for the measuring, given that we couldn't use any numbers bigger than 10.  Consequently I made 3 large A4-size versions of each of the fruits (see picture above!) which my daughter laminated for me.

Here's what we did in the lesson:

• We practised the fruit words again (it had been half term!)
• We practised the numbers 1-6 and then sang this song a few times to introduce the numbers 1-10.
• I showed the children the huge fruits, and demonstrated how to measure things in the classroom using the fruit.  We found out that the whiteboard is 6 oranges high, one of their little chairs is 2 pears high, and one of the girls is 4 strawberries high.
• Using our numbers and fruit words we worked out how to say these measurements - seis naranjas, dos peras, cuatro fresas.
• I gave each pair of children a fruit.  They got a mini-whiteboard between them to record their results.  I said they could write the name of the thing they measured or draw a picture of it to help them to remember, and then write how many of their fruit it was long or high. 
• At the end we fed back and worked out how to say the measurements in Spanish.

The children were very focused and enjoyed the measuring.  I also got measured a few times!  If I was doing this again it would be great to take them outside.  Even though Wednesday was a sunny 16 degrees day, it was also the last session of the day, and I'm not sure I would have got all the children back in again!

This lesson could be adapted for older children, simply by giving them a smaller unit so that they have to use bigger numbers.  It's a great way to reinforce the plural form as well.

My Library

A couple of weeks ago Nathalie Paris told me about the My Library app.  She, in turn, had been told about it by Sylvie Doyle.  Now, I have a lot of books that I use both in my teaching and to inform my teaching.  I have blogged about a lot of them on here before, but I've never made an attempt to record anywhere the books that I have.  This app seemed to be a way of doing that, and a way of sharing my library afterwards.

The My Library app enables you to build up a list of your books quickly and easily.  You scan the barcode on the book, which records the ISBN number and locates the book.  Then you can add a Series (I've used this to enter the language the book is in or its theme, e.g. Pedagogy) and any number of categories.  For example, when scanning one of my copies of the Hungry Caterpillar, I entered it into the French series and gave it the categories Numbers, Food, Fruit and Days of the Week:

Now that I have all 422 of my books in my library on the app, I can use the search to find certain themes.  For example, let's say I want to find other books that I can use for Days of the Week, all I need to do is to select it in the search.  I tap on "All categories" first:

And then select the category that I'm looking for:

And here are all my books that have something to do with Days of the Week:

Doing this has highlighted that I have a lot of books about animals, food and colours, but very few or none about other topic areas that I teach.

I scanned all my books in with my phone, and it took several sessions over two weeks.  I've been able to export the library and its pictures so that I now have a copy on my tablet as well.  It's not possible to share the list with someone else without it overwriting all their books.  However, you can export your library as an Excel spreadsheet, which is easy to share and to sort.  The only slight downside of this is that all the categories end up in the same column and you can't use them to sort the books.  You can, though, highlight categories using the "Find" function.

I've uploaded my Excel library to Google Drive, and you can browse it here.

In a geekie way I've enjoyed reacquainting myself with all my books and recording what exactly I have!