Kagan structures for Spanish

There was some discussion recently on the Languages in Primary School Facebook group about the book Cooperative Learning and French, with quite a few group members purchasing it for some holiday reading.  I found the Spanish equivalent (pictured above).  I made notes as I read it and then amused myself on rainy days in Spain by sketchnoting those notes.  I sketchnoted in an A4 sketch book, and so have uploaded the pages to Youblisher for ease of reading.

There are a lot of activities that are transferable to the primary classroom and of course to other languages.  This book has photocopiable resources for carrying out the activities in basic Spanish.

Click on the picture below to take you to the complete sketchnote.

Language Show Live 2012: Short - Sharp - Repetition

The last seminar that I attended at Language Show Live 2012 was Short - Sharp - Repetition.  What makes an activity good? by Heather Rendall.  I was particularly interested in it following my recent blogpost about choral repetition - I was hoping I was going to find out some new ideas.

I found the seminar fascinating, and not just because there were plenty of  new ideas.  Heather is an expert on MFL, ICT, the brain and memory, and this seminar put a different slant on second language acquisition.

Learning is the "biological organisation of new input", and the organisation of information for successful retrieval later on means that learning has taken place.   We need to make sure that the learning that takes place in the classroom is brain-centred and not child-centred.

This graphic shows how many connections the
brain makes in our early years.

Each neuron in our brain makes a myriad of connections with other neurons.  Many new connections are made from birth onwards, particularly up to the age of two.  During the teenage years "the Great Rewiring" takes place - many links are broken and new links made.

New information goes into the brain and tries to find a connection.  Assuming that it succeeds, if that link is not reactivated within three days then it will dissolve away and the memory will be lost.  "Cells that fire together wire together".  In other words, repetition makes then constantly reinforces these connections.

The brain has a natural tendency to learn what to do and what not to do. Avoidance of error is a driving force.  Babies learn by avoiding what hasn't been successful in the past.

"The driving force behind any learning is satisfaction".  Also our competitive nature and remembering past losses and failure spurs us on to win and achieve.

What makes the average student feel a failure?

• Not being able to understand or follow during a lesson
• Making no visible progress
• Continuing to make errors
• Comparing results and efforts with those of others

Inherited values that make learning successful
Ability to do and understand and make progress
Recipe for success with new input:

• minimise random or inapt connections
• repetition of the input
• receptive recall
• more repetition leading to productive recall

The brain likes repetition, although chanting switches the brain off. 

The brain is good at recognising things that it has seen before, so exploit this at the beginning of a lesson - make connections with prior learning. 

Long-term, permanent change in neurons occurs only after neurons are stimulated four times over the course of an hour (or however long a lesson is).  Therefore we need to deliver the new input in small enough, well-connected chunks that they can be repeated four times over the lesson.  The same vocabulary needs to be presented in a different guise, with a different exercise or activity.  Ideally it should be repeated with all four skills, and other vocabulary should be limited so that the core vocabulary can be absorbed.

To minimise misconceptions or false connections, Heather advises introducing new vocabulary with the spelling, the sound and the meaning, as well as transliterating the new content.  For example, showing je m'appelle early on so as to avoid je mapple or je'mappelle, and explaining that it means "I myself call".  She also recommends emphasising sound-spelling differences by regularly looking at close cognates such as station and table.  Håkan Ringbom wrote about the role of the mother tongue in second language learning. Children will seek the nearest English word to help them to "spell" the target language word unless you tell them otherwise.

For receptive recall students need to have as much sight and sound of the words as possible.  Some ideas are:

• Yes/no cards  Either separate cards or one "flippable" one.  Students have to show the correct one.  Everyone has to take part, and each student as well as the teacher gets instant feedback.
• linear wordsearch or wordsnake  Students need to know the vocabulary to be able to find all the different words. An example is  chevalmoutonlapinchien.  You can add extra letters between each word to increase the challenge. 
• Odd one out 
• Use PowerPoint animation to display the words being studied interspersed with words they don't know. Students call out the words they know but keep quiet for the words they don't know. 
• Again using PowerPoint animation, words appear letter by letter. Students call out the word when they know what it is
• Display each word with gaps or with the vowels missing, and students have to call the word out. 
• Using PowerPoint animation, the words appear and disappear very quickly and students have to call them out. 
• Students pick out the correct spelling from a selection.
• Flashcards with the target language on one side and English on the other. Students hold up the correct one but can check if necessary that they have chosen the right one, thus giving themselves instant feedback. 
• Follow me cards.  Tarsia can be used to make this activity quickly and easily.  You can read more about Follow me activities here.
• Children are growing up surrounded by computer games and so respond well to trying to beat scores and best times. They can see themselves continuing to improve and again this gives them instant feedback. Even a simple card matching activity timed with a stopwatch ticks this box.  Use the Online Stopwatch.
• Match the word to a choice of graphics.
• A short quiz after the initial input is better than a repetition of the input.
• Infinite Scrabble would be a good way of repeating the vocabulary.

When we observe something then do it ourselves afterwards, we use the same neural pathways. It's how babies learn - "monkey see monkey do"!  Live performance therefore has more impact than a recording - another reason why FLAs are so important. Puppets are also useful for this. 

This week I have been putting some of these ideas into practice to gauge their effectiveness.  

With Year 5 I have been working on Big Numbers (thousands, hundreds, tens and units) in Spanish.  I had noticed that they were not as confident with the new numbers as I hoped, particularly the 100s.  Before we tackled the Kilometraje activity  I wanted to do some intensive work on the numbers.  

Here's what we did:

• Choral repetition of the 10s from 20 to 100, with me pointing to the digits and the words.
• Numbers appearing letter by letter on the screen, children called out the number as soon as they recognised it.
• Numbers appeared on the screen interspersed with words they didn't know.  They had to call out the numbers and stay quiet for the rest.
• Choral repetition of the 100s from 100 to 1000, again with me pointing to the digits and the words.
• Card game - the children cut along the lines to make the ten number cards, then wrote the digits on the back.  Then I said the numbers in English and they had to hold up the right number card, checking on the back if they needed to.
• Numbers appeared on the board with the vowels missing, and the children called out the numbers.  All the PowerPoint activities can be found here.  The animations are all there so it would be easy to adapt to other vocabulary.
• The class completed the numbers spiral, finding the tens and the hundreds.  I made the spiral using this generator.

I think that made 4 repetitions of each within the hour!  I asked the class what they had thought of these new activities.  Their favourite was the "only call out the words we know" and their second favourite was the words with the vowels missing.

I also did very similar activities today with Year 4 (I was being observed!) who are learning days, numbers and months leading to dates.  We finished each section with a spiral, one for days and one for months.  When I made these ones I put in lots of extra letters, and the children loved them.

The activities were certainly engaging, and appeared to increase pupil confidence.  I will be interested to use them for a new topic to see if they learn new vocabulary more quickly and retain it better.

You might find these links interesting with regard to brain-centred language learning:

Forget it: the secret of remembering words

Language and your brain - infographic

Brain rules and learning

and I'm thinking that CILT's Classic Pathfinder 6, Patterns and Procedures, by Heather Rendall, will definitely be worth a read.

Bend it, shape it, any way you want it

I have a very low boredom threshold.  I'm always looking for something different to try in the classroom, for different ways of doing things. 

With my second-year Spaniards (Years 4, 5 and 6) I am working towards an extended piece of writing where the children design their own strange animal and describe it in Spanish.

We've been working on parts of the body and animals.  I used Switcheroozoo to make some strange animals, and we made sentences to say which body parts of which animals they had.  For example, for this one we wrote:

Tiene la cabeza de un oso.

Tiene el cuerpo de una tortuga.

Tiene la cola de un perro.

My normal way forward would be to have them draw their animal and then write their description underneath.  But I've been there and done that, and, more importantly, so have the children.

Then recently I was tidying daughter no.1's bedroom, which involved finding a space for more of her Plasticine Menagerie.  Perhaps using Plasticine or Play-Doh would be an alternative to drawing?

I asked the MFL Twitterati if anyone had experience of using Play-Doh in the classroom:

So there were definitely some possibilities.  I managed to get 40 pots of Play-Doh for £15 from Argos and decided to get the children to model their strange creatures. 

 

By this point daughter no.1 had run out of animals to make with Plasticine, so I set her a Plasticine Challenge.  I gave her the list of animals that I'd taught the children at school and asked her to make some strange creatures with different body parts from the different animals.  I then showed these to the children and asked them to put together some opinion sentences to say which animals they thought the creatures were made from.  They were highly motivated to do this, and put together many successful sentences using this writing frame.  This allowed them to see the sort of thing we were aiming for, so I then handed out the Play-Doh and they set to work.  I photographed their handiwork before they scrunched it up and put it back in the pot.

 

There are a few different things that we could do now.  I could give each child a picture of a creature that they didn't make and they could put together some opinions about it.  Or they could simply write about their own.  Or it could be a speaking assignment.  I haven't decided yet.  I'll put it on the school blog when it's done.

 

While I was planning this lesson, I did a search for other ideas for using Play-Doh in lessons.  There is very little out there!  There are some things on the Play-Doh website and some pre-school ideas here.  I'd be really interested to hear your ideas for using Play-Doh, because now I've bought it, I need to get my money's worth!!

I've got a pen that talks !

Last weekend my husband and I went down to the NEC in Birmingham for the Gadget Show Live. Some people don't believe it, but Mr S is even more into gadgets than I am. In fact he's been into gadgets a lot longer than me, but I'm trying to catch up ! I already have most things that I need for my work, and so wasn't looking for anything in particular. I looked at a few things and talked to a few people (and asked the Flip Mino man a question he couldn't answer!) and then was most interested to come across the Mantra Lingua stand.

Mantra Lingua have a new product called the RecorderPEN. You can use it to play sounds in specially prepared books, but, more interestingly for a language teacher, you can record your own sounds onto special stickers and then stick the stickers anywhere. On seeing this, my brain started ticking over and thinking of lots of ideas for how I could use such a gadget. So, dear reader, I bought one.

A few days ago I started to have a play with it. It took a few attempts to get a decent recording (start talking as soon as it tells you to, and don't put it too near your mouth) and then I set about making a resource. I printed some colours on a piece of paper and recorded seven different labels - a title and the seven colour words.

Here is a little video of my 7 year old daughter demonstrating it:

My resource is on paper at the moment, and consequently is flimsy. If I were to use it in the classroom, it wouldn't be long before the paper got dog-eared and the stickers came off. I would print the next one on card and then laminate the whole thing to make it more durable. Mantra Lingua's support team say that the stickers will still work and can still be re-recorded when they've been through a laminator.

I teach my KS1s in small groups of about 10, and have thought of some simple interactive activities that I could make for them using the RecorderPEN. There are also plenty of ideas on the company's forum. I was lucky to get the pen and the stickers for the show price of £35 all in. It is a lot more expensive on the company's website, and unfortunately I think this may put people off. Something else that has been a little annoying has been the lack of written instructions - the instructions are embedded on labels on the packaging ! - so I listened to them and wrote them down myself. All in all I think it's nifty little gadget, which gives me something else for my teaching backpack. Watch this space !

Things I want to try which I haven't tried before, part 2

Here are some more ideas which I have found since my previous post:

1. Which card ?
Several children stand at the front of the classroom holding a flashcard, with the picture side facing them. The others have to find out who has which card by asking "¿Tienes ....?" or "¿Te gusta...?" The children with the cards can only answer yes or no.

2. Join up the words
Give children or pairs of children sets of words which have been cut in half. Ask them to reconstruct the words by putting the halves together correctly.

3. Alphabetical order
Give children a set of word cards and ask them to sort them into alphabetical order. Alternatively, with words that follow a specific order like the months, children can race to put them in the right order.

4. Phonics
Make a set of word cards with single words which have the same sounds in them. Highlight the graphemes in a different colour. Use the cards to practise reading out loud, then children can classify the cards according to the phonemes or graphemes.

5. Stand up sit down
Give each group of children a sound, word or phrase. Tell them that when they hear it they all have to stand up together. The faster the activity goes, the more they will enjoy it. As an alternative you could say the word or phrase in English so that the children have to recognise their own phrase and then stand up.

6. Stand up sit down 2
Take your seat, and say a word in the language, for example "español". Then repeat it, standing up and sitting down when you say the final, stressed syllable. Ask pupils if they can explain what you did. Give another example if necessary. When they have worked it out, say a word to them, which they have to repeat, standing up and sitting down at the right time, i.e. on the stressed syllable.

7. Find your group
Give each child a card with 3 pictures on it. These pictures could be hobbies, animals, colours... The idea is that they are things about which opinions can be expressed. The children circulate around the room asking each other questions about what they like, and they answer according to what's on their card. Once a child has found someone with the same like as them, they stay together and find someone else to add to their group. The game continues until everyone is in a group. Ask each group the relevant question and they reply in unison. A simpler version would be for each child to have one word or picture, and for several children to have the same word or picture.

8. Find the sweets
Put the images for the words you are practising on the IWB. Behind one of the images hide a virtual sweet. Ask a child to name one of the images, move it aside and see if it reveals the sweet. If it does, ask the winner to jumble up the images so that the sweet is hidden somewhere else.

9. Spell it out
Give pairs of pupils a set of pictures and a set of individual letters on cards. Call out a word and the pairs race to find the right picture and make the word correctly.

10. Mexican wave
Choose some of the words that you have been learning and want to practise. The children help you to decide on the order in which they will be said. They go round the circle saying one word each, in the right order. They could stand up or kneel up to achieve the wave effect. You could clap your hands to change the direction of the wave. This could be fun with adjectives, where the children have to say, for example, "triste" in a sad way. Alternatively, they could use a sequence such as days of the week for the main words, but you make it more interesting by periodically calling out an adjective so that they have to say the words in a certain way. A Mexican Wave would be a good way to embed short phrases or sentences, or anything where word order is important.