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.

What's connected?

The other day, while looking for something else, I reminded myself of the sadly-no-more interactive activity maker Sugarcane.

My favourite of their activities was What's Connected.  Here's an example:

Once you had entered your data set, it would choose 12 random words from it and then ask you to find links amongst them with the word at the top.  There were usually 3 different links to be found.  For example, the links here with ventana are una, la and window.  The more columns you had in your data set, the more links were possible.

I've been pondering making some versions of this activity to use as starters, as it makes students think about the detail of the words and phrases that they have been learning and the relationships between them.  The first unit of work that I thought of to use was my Year 4 unit involving opinions of food and drink in Spanish.  

First of all I created my data set in the form of a table in MS Word:

Then I needed to make a random selection.  I started off my putting the data set into a Flippity Randomiser but found that the selection it generated wasn't really random enough!  So instead I pasted the data in a list into an online random picker, which worked better.  I also used this to select the "lead word".

I created a template in PowerPoint and entered the information.

I'm thinking of asking the children to write on their mini whiteboards any links they can find, before showing them the answers.  All the children should be able to find at least one link.

This format would also suit adjectival agreement as well as verb paradigms and tenses.  Can you think of an area of language that you would like an activity like this for?  Let me know in the comments.

Let's play darts: an update

 

Last weekend I wrote about the dartbard writing activity that I had learned about via Twitter.  This week I tried it for the first time with my excellent Year 4 class.  We have done a lot of work this year on opinions of foods and drinks, and are now working on the weather.  The children are revisiting and recycling their knowledge of opinions to talk about opinions of weather.

The children said that they enjoyed the activity, and particularly enjoyed the challenge of remembering and looking for the correct words and phrases.  I asked them to do as much as possible from memory, and if they had to check the answers to note at the bottom of the instructions what they had used (they have a sentence builder and a knowledge organiser).

I divided the questions into 4 quarters of complexity, as I had suggested in my previous post.  The coloured-in dartboard on this child's work shows me very clearly that she needs a bit more practice of the more complex sentences, in particular with working out whether a singular or a plural opinion is needed.  I was really pleased to see that she had corrected her work as she checked it.

One thing I would say is that the accuracy of the marking by many of the children left a lot to be desired!  Particularly with things like me gusta vs me gustan, they hadn't checked the spellings carefully enough, and hadn't checked their definite articles.  Next lesson we will be practising checking our own work very carefully and talking about the difference that spelling errors and missed out words make to grammar and therefore meaning.

When I displayed the answers for the children, I displayed this grid and left them to it:

I think next time I will animate the answers to appear one by one, and talk the children through the things that they should be looking out for when checking their work.

I hope this helps you if you are thinking of having a go at this activity!

Post-It grids with a twist

Last week I saw this tweet from the Twitter account @Geog_HA:

It occurred to me that this great activity is a twist on Post-It grids, that I've blogged about before and which I use often in the classroom.  In fact today I did the weather one with a Year 5 class.

I had a go at doing this activity with a languages twist with one of my Year 6 classes this morning.

We've been working on infinitives in Spanish - what they are, how to identify them and how to use them.  We read them in school rules, using the book Ya voy a la escuela, sang them in a song ('Ahora vamos a cantar' from Diez Deditos) and last week used them in opinion sentences.

This morning I gave each pair of students a copy of the crowd-sourced texts using opinions and infinitives:

On the board there were 12 questions in a grid:

I gave each pair 12 post-it tabs.  I asked them to read the texts, work out the answers to the questions (using prior knowledge, their books and knowledge of cognates), write their answer (person 1-5) on their post-it tab and stick it on the question.  The board in that classroom is one of the ones like a giant TV, and one of the boys reminded me that it's very sensitive, so instead I drew a big grid on the ordinary whiteboard and we stuck the post-it tabs on there.  This turned out well as the questions weren't obscured.

I stopped the activity when all the groups had done most of them and we went through the answers.  I looked at the range of answers in each square on the board while we were going through.

Afterwards I explained to the children that this was the first time doing this activity for me, and asked them if they had enjoyed it.  They said they had - many said, "It was fun!" and added, "It was different!"  One of the boys said that he enjoyed it because he got to be out of his seat.  They were certainly all very engaged with finding the answers, and I overheard some good learning conversations about the answers.

When I do this kind of activity again, I'll find some stickier post-its (these ones had a tendency to flutter off the board!) and will also try having questions that need to be answered with a phrase or sentence rather than a number.

Be my Valentine

For the last few days people have been asking for Valentine's resources.  Then yesterday, completely by chance, I came across this Valentine's origami box on Pinterest.  I have simplified the idea to make a Valentine's card-cum-minibook, which would also be ideal for writing about likes and dislikes at non-Valentine's times of year.

To make it, first of all download the template from here.

1.  Cut out the shape, around the solid lines.

2.  Fold along the long, "internal" dotted lines.

3.  Fold out the two halves of the heart, along the dotted lines.

4.  Decorate the outside.

5.  Write inside!

UPDATE 15.02.15:  Due to popular demand I have created some more shapes for this design of minibook.  You can now download:

Easter Egg minibook
Christmas tree minibook
Smiley face minibook
Star minibook

UPDATE 31.03.15  A bell-shaped minibook for Les Cloches Volantes for Pâques.

Bell minibook

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

Paper Buildings in Town

Over the last few days I've been working on my scheme of work for Y6 for September.  It will be their fourth year of Spanish and so I need to include plenty of new content and activities so as to keep things fresh and motivating.

We will be starting off with "Buildings in Town", followed by transport and directions and heading into "Then and Now".  I've been looking at all my books to help me to complete the "Activites" and "Resources" columns of my plans.

Last week I bought these two books from Amazon:

Each has lots and lots of ideas for mini-book type projects and pop-up books.  I was leafing through the Ages 4-7 one while watching Andy Murray annhiliate Roger Federer in the finals of the Olympic tennis this afternoon, and found one which I think will be very useful for demonstrating knowledge of opinions and regular verbs as well as buildings in town.

It's basically a zig-zag book, converted simply into a row of buildings.  The photograph at the top shows "doors shut" and the second "doors open" to reveal the writing inside.  Here's how to do it:

1. Fold a piece of A4 paper in half lengthways.

2. Fold it in half again, widthways.

3. Fold the top half over.

4. Turn it over and repeat to make a zigzag.

5. With the folded edge uppermost, snip the corners off to make the roof shapes.

6. Open it out and cut the doors in.

7. Fold the two halves back together.  I glued them together before decorating.  You are then ready to start decorating the buildings.

I'm sure there are lots of other ways that you could use this idea.  If you use A3 paper, you get a much bigger space for writing, thus making it more suitable for KS3.  I would recommend, as the book does, using stiff paper to make these with.  I have used normal A4 photocopying paper, but once I had coloured my doors in they started to go a bit curly. 

I am also thinking of having a go at making mini-maps, which are in the Age 7-12 book, and which I have had a go at folding.  You can also find the instructions for the maps here.

Right - off to make more flashcards!