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.

Months rhyme

I am about to start "Telling the time" with Year 5 and Year 6 Spanish, and have been looking at how it links to the KS2 Maths curriculum:

Pupils should be able to:

• read the time from analogue and digital 12 and 24 hour clocks
• use units of time - seconds, minutes, hours, days and weeks - and know the relationship between them.

The units of time are my "way in" from the last topic of "Big numbers" as they are themselves big numbers.  And it's a good opportunity to think about what we already know about Time after three years of Spanish learning.

On the subject of numbers and months, and starting to think about Mr Gove's reciting-poetry-in-the-foreign-language thing, I was wondering if there was a rhyme in Spanish like the one we have in English which we use to help us to remember how many days are in each month:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November.
All the rest have thirty-one,
Except for February alone,
Which has twenty-eight days clear
And twenty-nine in each leap year.

As always, Twitter came up trumps.  Thanks to @josephiney83, @Marie_Sanako, @teachermrw and @annelimac.  There doesn't appear to be one definitive version!  I thought I'd put them here to save anyone else searching for them.

Treinta días tiene septiembre
Con abril, junio y noviembre.
Veintiocho ó veintinueve tiene febrero
Si es bisiesto,
Y los demás treinta y uno.

Treinta días trae noviembre
Con abril, junio y septiembre,
Los demás treinta y uno,
Menos febrero mocho
Que sólo tiene veintiocho.

Treinta días tiene noviembre
Con abril, junio y septiembre.
Veintiocho sólo uno 
Y los demás treinta y uno.

Treinta días tiene noviembre,
Con abril, junio y septiembre.
De veintiocho sólo febrero, 
Y los demás de treinta y uno.



It also exists in Swedish:

Tretti' dagar har september,
april, juni och november.
Februari tju'åtta alén,
alla de övriga trettioen.


and Italian:
 
Trenta dì conta novembre
con april, giugno e settembre.
Di ventotto ce n'è uno,
tutti gli altri ne han trentuno.



Another way of remembering how many days are in each month is to use your knuckles.  Wikipedia says it's typically used in France.  I've never used this method but my husband swears by it!