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.

Physical description: Spanish crowdsource

 

Following the success of previous crowd-sourced text resources, I'd like to try another, with your help.

I would be very grateful if you could write some sentences using the language that you can see in the tables at the top of this post.  If you don't want to add your real name, a pseudonym or nickname would be fine.

You can add your sentences here in a comment, or email them to me.

¡Muchas gracias!  These will be so useful for my Year 5s who are grappling with adjectival agreement and position.   I will, of course, share any resulting resources.

This will be my contribution:

Redondo y Cuadrado

 

When I taught Key Stage 2 French, my favourite way of introducing and practising grammatical gender was using the book un triangle by Néjib.  You can read about the book and what I did with it here.

With my Year 5s I've just started Unit 13 of my scheme of work for Key Stage 2 Spanish, which is all about description.

We started off by reading the poem Redondo (Round) by Gloria Fuertes, and talking about why the adjective is spelled in three different ways.

Then I showed the class the Spanish words for ten more round things.  We gave out the Spanish dictionaries, and the children worked in pairs to look up the new words, find out if they were masculine or feminine, and decide whether we would need redondo or redonda to describe them.

We put the answers in the form of a new poem inspired by the one by Gloria Fuertes.

While we were working on this activity, I had an idea inspired by un triangle and its family of books.  The next week, I introduced the class to the adjective cuadrado, which they had first met in Year 2.

I gave them the challenge of finding in the dictionary the Spanish words for things that are square and putting them into a line of poetry following the example above, and working out whether they would need the masculine or feminine form of the adjective.  The children worked in pairs on their poems and used this guide to help them.  I also showed them the book un carré by Néjib, to show them how the thing didn't have to be something square exactly, but something that had a square as a part of it.

There is also a column for a small picture, so that they could justify why they had chosen a certain word, and show me how it was square.  

The following week the children copied up and illustrated their excellent poems, and I now have the difficult task of working out which ones to put forward for the next issue of Write Away! next month.  Here's one of them as an example of the poems the children created.

 

The resources will be on Light Bulb Languages soon.

Superheroes!

In January I delivered a staff meeting to all the grown ups at school about Spanish, and said that I'd like to link more of the class topics to the Spanish work, especially in Key Stage 1.  So I asked the teachers to tell me if they were doing any topics which they thought would lend themselves well to being covered in Spanish.  So far the only teacher to do so is the Year 2 teacher, whose class is working on the topic "Heroes and Villains" this half term.  A great idea for Spanish for Year 2!

I had an ask around for ideas, and someone suggested colours of superheroes' outfits.  I found these books, which gave me some more ideas:
Superhéroe:  Manual de instrucciones

Cuenta los superhéroes

Count the superheroes

The first gave me ideas about the outfits and how to name a superhero (your favourite animal and favourite colour, if you're interested - I'd be Cobaya Azul).  The Spanish counting book is just that, with the numbers up to 15, while the English one includes things like counting blue superheroes, counting flying superheroes and so on.

I then set about making my own resources, including lots of original images, which I have now made available along with lesson ideas on my Sellfy store.  Children can use the superheroes to practise counting to 12, to practise the colours and to do some simple description of superheroes' outfits.

I'm now working on the French version, which will be available soon.

UPDATE 18.3.20:  French available now! 

By the way, if you want to host your own online shop, I recommend Sellfy to you.  It's easy to use and I've never had any problems.  Follow this link to sign up.

Gender and number: Trash or Treasure?

This year I inherited a Year 6 class who have done three years of French but no Spanish.  As they have done lots of French I am able to move them on pretty quickly, showing them how the grammatical notions that they know from English and French - number and gender - work in Spanish.

At the moment we are working on adjectival agreement with plural nouns.  So we know how to identify a masculine noun and a feminine noun and how we need to change some of our adjectives when describing something feminine.  We have read Los limones no son rojos which has lots of examples of plural adjectival agreement in action.  The children can explain to me why there is an extra s on some of the adjectives and why some of them also have an a instead of an o on the end.

I have designed the above Trash or Treasure? activity for the first lesson back after half term to make them think about what exactly shows that a word is masculine or feminine, singular or plural.  The words are a collection of nouns, adjectives and articles/determiners.  It’s not vital for students to understand the meanings of all the words - you are training them here to look for the clues that tell you about a word’s gender and number.

Each pair of students will need a set of the words and a Trash or Treasure board.  The following sorts are suggested:

• Words that are definitely masculine
• Words that are definitely feminine
• Words that could potentially be either masculine or feminine
• Words that are singular
• Words that are plural
• Masculine singular words
• Feminine singular words
• Masculine plural words
• Feminine plural words

Which words would you put in these different groups?  Can you think of any other sorts that could be done using these words?

You can find out more about Trash or Treasure here and the board can be found here. 

After this activity we will do the Spanish version of this French adjectival agreement activity, which I have also prepared and which is available here.

UPDATE 23.2.18:  I used both these resources in my Year 6 lesson yesterday.  We re-read Los limones no son rojos first, talking about why the colours are spelt differently to the ones we originally learned.  The Trash or Treasure? activity consolidated their knowledge about gender and number, and I enjoyed hearing them saying things to each other like "We need to find anything with an s on" or "Find all the words with an a on the end".  They then found the sentence-building activity quite straightforward, and were able to put right independently any errors.  Some pairs chose to use the "son" cards to extend their sentences in the same way as the book had, for example "Las fresas no son negras, son rojas."

Looking for feminine singular nouns

Looking for masculine singular nouns

What's in the box? pt.2

A few years ago I wrote What's in the box?, a post with some ideas for using empty or not-empty boxes to stimulate language work.  Today I actually tried it out!!

I've been working on gender of nouns (animals in particular) with my new Y6 Spaniards, moving on to description of these singular nouns using adjectives of colour.  I wanted them to have a go at some descriptions on whiteboards before writing anything formally in their books.  I set up these PowerPoint slides, which show an empty cardboard box.  I asked the children to decide which animal was in the box and which colour it was.  They had to write their description on their whiteboard and hold it up for me to see.  Then I clicked the slide to reveal what was in fact in the box. 

Doing five of these meant that I could spot common errors such as putting the adjective in the wrong place, putting the wrong article, not agreeing the adjectives and so on.  All the children became more confident and faster with their writing the more we did.  It also turned out to be immensely motivating, especially for the boys.  They all seemed to enjoy putting daft colours with the animal words.

Challenge accepted!

In recent months I have been sending various Pinterest pins to my primary languages colleague Janet Lloyd, by way of challenges.  And she has accepted and achieved each one.  Then on 8th May I received a challenge from Janet:

People pillar poems @valleseco thoughI would set you the challenge this time.What do you think these are like in 3D? http://t.co/iIVAR2Rdes

— Janet Lloyd (@JanetLloydnet) May 8, 2015

I tucked this one away to think about during half term, and was reminded of it this morning.  And here it is - Janet's People Pillar Portrait poems in 3D.  It's a great way of practising descriptions, especially adjectival position and agreement, and would also work for other writing about people.

Here is the template if you would like to use it:

What's in the box?

Isabelle Jones revealed to me the delights of Pinterest at #ililc4 last year.  Digging around on it is a good way to spend a cold and rainy Saturday afternoon.  I've been using it enough now for Pinterest to start suggesting things for me.  I always seek out the pins that say "Picked for you", as I know that they will reveal some unexpected treats.  As I have a minibook board on Pinterest, many of the pins that are picked for me are to do with foldables, and today there was a link to an origami box.

My husband and my 11 year old daughter are both keen on origami, but I have never had the patience for it, despite the many minibooks!  I often get to a certain point with the folding, and then can't do the next step and abandon it.  However, my daughter has made a lot of these little boxes, and so I thought I would give it a go.  You can see my box at the top of this post.

While I was making it I had some ideas for how little boxes could be used in language lessons:

1. Tell the children the name of the object that is in the box.  They have to use adjectives to guess what colour, size or shape the object is.
2. Children list what they think is inside the box.  They can use the dictionary to find the words they need.
3. Children decide what they think is inside the box and describe it as thoroughly as they can.
4.  Inspired by the book Not a Box, children say what other things the box could be used for.  They could stick extra pieces onto their own box to make it look like something else.
5. Tell the children that the box is a treasure box.  They say what treasures they think are inside.  Alternatively they could make some treasures for their own boxes or bring some treasures from home so that they can describe them to classmates.
6. Children use simple opinions to express what they think is or isn't in the box.  "A mon avis, il y a un chien bleu, mais il n'y a pas de chat noir."

The box inspires activities which range from word level, therefore suitable for Year 3, to complex sentence level for Year 6.  The activities also tick quite a lot of the boxes (no pun intended!) of the Key Stage 2 Languages Curriculum, for example:

• communicate and understand ideas, facts and feelings in speaking and writing
• express opinions
• describe things orally and in writing
• key features and patterns of the language (use of adjectives in particular)
• use a dictionary