Dialogues

 

In September I began teaching unit 1 of Cycle A of my mixed age Spanish scheme of work (we started with Cycle B last year - don't ask).  Lesson 1 was all about saying hola and adiós, saying our name using soy... and introducing the question ¿Quién eres? 

The learning was brought together towards the end of the lesson using a simple dialogue, as seen above.

Here's how we used it:

• Using escuchad y repetid (listen and repeat) we practised each line several times, going through the whole thing twice.  When I use more complex dialogues I split some lines into chunks to start with.  The children were very good at copying my intonation.
• We discussed the meaning of each part.
• We read all the dialogue all together three times.
• We split the class in half - by tables and then girls/boys - and performed the dialogue in teams, half the class being person A and the other half person B, then swapping roles.
• I asked the children to practise the dialogue with their partner.  We talked about what they might change in the dialogue when speaking as themselves.
• While they were practising (I only gave them a few minutes) I circulated to help as necessary and to listen in.
• Quite a few pairs of children in each class volunteered to perform their dialogue in front of the class.

Practising a dialogue enables children to ask and answer questions, engage in conversations, speak in sentences and speak with increasing confidence, as required by the Key Stage 2 national curriculum for Languages.  It also enables children to speak an extended passage of the language, in this case at the end of the first lesson of the term.  

We revisited the dialogue in the following two lessons.  A highlight was a Year 3 beginner reciting the entire dialogue perfectly to his class teacher and me in the corridor, with excellent pronunciation and intonation.

Dialogues like this will work with most topic areas and most levels of language.  I recommend giving them a try!

Making a paper puppet - a #LW2025 takeaway

 

At Language World on Saturday I enjoyed the two talks about puppets that I went to.  In particular I'd like to thank Lavinia Dos Remedios, who showed us how to make a puppet out of a piece of A4 paper.  If you are a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that I am very keen on making things with one piece of A4 paper, namely minibooks, so this was right up my street!

Above, you can see a short video of the puppet that I made during the session and quickly decorated to look like a Moomin, in honour of Lisa Stevens and the box of biscuits I just ate, ahem.

Here is the YouTube video that Lavinia referenced with the instructions on how to make the puppets:

Adaptable Activities for your Language Lessons

 

I'm delighted to announce the publication of Adaptable Activities for your Language Lessons.

This pdf download contains 120 different activities that can be adapted to any language and to most ages of learner.  There are activities for listening, speaking, reading, writing, grammar and phonics.

So if you've ever found yourself in a planning rut, wanting to try out something new but not sure what, then this is the publication for you!

Available now in my Sellfy shop: https://ideaseducationltd.sellfy.store/

Take a look at the index here: https://www.ideaseducation.co.uk/resources/Index.pdf

Presenting new language - an update years later!

In February 2010, I wrote a blogpost here about presenting and practising new vocabulary.  At the time I had been in the primary classroom for a term and a half.  Now, 13 years later, I can see that my practice has morphed into something different, and something that I think is more effective.

In January I read an interesting article about the benefits or not of learners learning new words in the foreign language by repeating them out loud.  Here is the summary of the article:

This paragraph explains it a little more:

Reading and reflecting on this article has caused me to modify the way that I introduce new vocabulary and then get the children to move towards saying it out loud.

Here is what I now do, and I am definitely seeing the benefits, with better pronunciation and recall from both my more experienced Spanish learners and my beginner French learners.

1. I present the new vocabulary via Physical French/Spanish Phonics.  My PowerPoint slides show the words, the sounds that make them up, and image to show what it means.  We sound the words out, repeating each one at least 3 times.  We don't blend them at this stage, although I do hear some learners quietly saying the words.
   
   
2. On a new PowerPoint slide I put all the words in a numbered grid, along with the images to again show meaning.  I say the words firstly in order and then randomly, and ask the children to point to them on the screen.  Engagement is always good and it is a quiet activity.  Here's an example of a grid:
   
   
   
   
   The pointing game could be used as an alternative for this, and would be a useful resource for further practice later.
   
   
3. Next we use the numbers for listening practice.  I say the word and the children have to tell me which number it is.  It's also a good way to practise numbers!  We cycle through all the words probably two or three times.
   
   
4. Next it's time for the children to start saying the words.  We use "don't repeat until I click".  I say the words in order, but the children aren't allowed to repeat them back until I click my fingers.  I give them a good few seconds to mentally rehearse the words first.
   
   
5. Finally we do some choral repetition in the usual way.

We repeat some of these steps the following lesson, and gradually reduce the amount of practice that we have to do.

Do you have any other go-to activities that you do at this initial "getting to know the words before saying them" stage?

Skills icons

 

Recently I was shown the excellent work of the history lead of a local primary school.  They had chosen to design an icon for each of the seven history skills (Constructing the past, Sequencing the past, Continuity and change, etc..)  Their plan is to display the relevant icon at the beginning of each lesson, and then to discuss with the children how they will be learning, and to recall when they have used that skill before.

It got me thinking that we could use a similar system in Key Stage 2 Languages, to alert children to the skills that we are using and discuss how we are learning.  I introduced the topic in the Languages in Primary Schools Facebook group, where it turned out that some colleagues have used such icons in other subjects and have also dabbled with them in Languages.  We also discussed the skills that we would want to include.

I have used Canva to create sets of icons for French, German and Spanish.  The skills included are:

• Listening
• Speaking
• Reading
• Writing
• Phonics
• Grammar
• Culture
• Knowledge About Language
• Language Learning Skills

(For Knowledge About Language [KAL] and Language Learning Skills [LLS] see the objectives of the Key Stage 2 Framework for Languages.)

My plan for the icons at the moment is to put them onto the first screen of my lesson PowerPoints, the "Today we are going to..." screen, to explain how we are going to achieve our lesson objectives, and perhaps also on my worksheets.

I displayed them in my lessons today, and it enabled me to say not only what we were going to be doing, but also to tell them which skills we were going to be using.  I suspect that quite a lot of the time, the children aren't aware of the different skills that we use and why.

If you would like a copy of the icons (available as shown in the image above and in a reversed format for displaying on a dark background) then click on these links:

• French https://www.lightbulblanguages.co.uk/resources-fr-dis.htm#misc
• German https://www.lightbulblanguages.co.uk/resources-ge-dis.htm 
• Spanish https://www.lightbulblanguages.co.uk/resources-sp-dis.htm#misc

If you would like to use them (and I'm not saying you have to) I'd love to hear about how you have used them.

UPDATE 08.07.22:

• "Language Learning Skills" changed to "Language Learning Strategies" as per the KS2 Framework.
• Italian icons added (thank you Alberta!) https://www.lightbulblanguages.co.uk/resources-pr-it.htm#dis

Physical Spanish Phonics

 

When I trained as a secondary MFL teacher in 1994-95, phonics were not mentioned.  We were not trained how to teach the sound-spelling link, and, indeed, it wasn't expected.  Those were the days when students were supposed to just absorb the different phonic and pronunciation rules.  It was clear, especially when preparing Year 10 and Year 11 students for the oral components of their modular GCSEs, that this didn't work.

Then in 2000 I was invited to be part of a working group in Sunderland LA, looking at the findings of the Invisible Child report by David Buckland, Jeff Lee and Glenis Shaw.  David Buckland came to spend a day with us to discuss it.  (NB the date of the CILT publication of the report says 2001, but we were definitely already discussing it in January 2000.)  

In the group we formulated listening strategies, to break down and demystify the often impenetrable audio recordings that we find ourselves obliged to use, and reading strategies, in particular the analysis of texts.  We also decided that phonics, the sound-spelling link, was very important for building confidence for the "invisible children" and in fact for all.  I still have the posters that we compiled for French, Spanish and German, to display in classrooms, for example this one for that Spanish sound that we can't write in English!

Since then, I've always endeavoured to include some phonics in my lessons.

Phonics are an integral part of the Key Stage 2 programme of study for Languages.  What exactly does it expect us to do?

• (in the aims of the programme of study) "... continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation"
• (in the subject content introduction) "using their knowledge of phonology, grammatical structures and vocabulary"
• "explore the patterns and sounds of language through songs and rhymes and link the spelling, sound and meaning of words"
• "develop accurate pronunciation and intonation so that others understand when they are reading aloud or using familiar words and phrases"

I had always tried my best to achieve these objectives, even going so far as to create my own resource for Spanish.  But I was never completely happy with how it was going in class.

In the Languages in Primary Schools Facebook group, there had been a lot of chat about a publication called Physical French Phonics, which was proving popular for teaching French phonics, something that is of course a lot more complex than Spanish.  

Then last year, Jenny Bell, Sue Cave and Jean Haig published Physical Spanish Phonics, which I have to say has revolutionised the way I teach phonics, and has vastly increased the children's knowledge of sounds and their confidence with pronunciation.

The idea is that you have a image which represents a sound, and which also gives you an idea of what that grapheme sounds like, for example someone biting into an apple for the "a" sound.  Then that picture and phoneme/grapheme are accompanied by an action.  I then take one of our words (the months, most recently, for Year 4) and represent each sound using the images.  We then look at the images, say the sounds and do the actions for each individual sound before then blending them to make the word.

This approach has been particularly successful for the very low ability children, who often get left behind and who might find the sound-spelling link most difficult.  Using this process they can easily sound out and then blend the words.  It is also clearly contributing to a significant increase in confidence for all the children.

With Year 4 I have been using Physical Spanish Phonics to sound out and blend the months, prior to putting the months into our sentence builder which puts together birthday sentences:

By the time the children see this, they already know the numbers (from the previous Year 4 unit), the word mi (from Year 3) and the word es (from Year 3).  So knowing the sounds of the months, which we have just practised in isolation with the sounds and then by reciting them in order, is confidence-building, and allows us then to move quickly into the meaning and structure of the sentences.

I gave my Year 4s a challenge this morning, after we had practised the months and their sounds some more.  I showed them the words viña, ceño, jabalí and cerezas, accompanied by the Physical Spanish Phonics images, and asked them to work with their partner to work out how to say these words, none of which they had ever seen before.  Their pronunciation was beautiful.

I asked Year 4 to tell me what they thought of working on phonics in this way:

• "It helps a lot."
• "It helps me to work out words easily."
• "If I get stuck I can look at the pictures."
• "It makes me concentrate."
• "If you're joining in with everyone and you're a bit lost you can look at the pictures and listen to the others."
• "I take it in a bit more."
• "When I do the actions I can say the words better."

If you're looking for a way to teach phonics in Key Stage 2 or even early Key Stage 3, I definitely recommend Physical Spanish Phonics.  I really like how the actions allow you to see exactly who is putting in the effort, and how the actions also give you a shorthand to use to correct mispronunciations in a quiet and non-threatening way.  To refer back to the programme of study, it helps me to explore, develop and continually improve the children's pronunciation. Why not give it a try!

Things to do with sentence builders in the primary languages classroom: part 2!

 

In my last post, I talked about some of the activities that I do in the primary languages classroom with sentence builders, and asked readers if they have any primary-friendly activities that they recommend.

I'll be starting my planning for the week shortly (at the top of this post is one of the sentence builders I'm going to be using this week, with Year 5) and so will be looking to incorporate some of the activities that people have recommended:

And some others, from the Facebook group and blog comments:

• Trapdoor 
• Slalom listening - You give them a copy of the sentence builder and they highlight/ underline words they hear, then they have to read the whole sentence.
• Flippity 'fruit machine' style activity, particularly the fact that sometimes there are 'nonsense sentences appearing (with food likes and with clothes you wear in specific weather conditions.
• Pyramid translation
• Delayed repetition or writing

Many thanks to everyone who took the time to respond.

Things to do with sentence builders in the primary languages classroom

 

Writing frames, sentence builders, whatever you call them, are enjoying considerable popularity in the languages community at the moment, due mainly to the work of Gianfranco Conti.  If you are a tweeter or if you are in one of the languages Facebook group, you'll have seen lots of posts about them and ideas for using them.

You can see at the top of this post one of the sentence builders that I have been using most recently.  I nearly always use the flowchart format (thanks Joe!) in primary, as I find with the tabular format it's too easy for them to miss columns out.  I also make them in black and white, as colour photocopying is only for special occasions at my schools!  If it's not clear enough without colour, it's not clear enough, I think.

I've been experimenting with using them and knowledge organisers this academic year to facilitate our work in class at a time when I have to stay at the front and not go to help individual children.

We have been trying out different activities with them, for example (in no particular order):

• I say the Spanish sentence, children tell me the English
• I say an English sentence, children tell me what it would be in Spanish
• Children test each other in one of the above two ways 
• I say a Spanish sentence, but leave it incomplete, either just saying the first sound of the last word or stopping at a suitable place, and children need to complete the sentence with the correct word or with suitable words.
• After a little practice, I show a sentence from the sentence builder with a random extra word in it.  The children have to tell me which word is unnecessary.
• I say a sentence in English and the children write it in Spanish on their mini whiteboards and hold it up for me to see.
• I write a sentence from the sentence builder on my mini whiteboard, and the class between them have 10 attempts to guess the sentence, which I then reveal after the 10 attempts or when it is guessed correctly.
• I prepare a sentence from the sentence builder and conceal it.  The children all prepare a sentence and write it on their mini whiteboards.  The children stand up.  I reveal my sentence word by word.  As soon as the children have a word in their sentence that is different to mine, they have to sit down, until we reach the end of the sentence and hopefully there is someone left who has the same sentence as me.  Thanks to Sue Cave for this idea - Year 3 loved it this morning, although one of the boys saw through my strategy of not wanting to repeat words!

Do you have any favourite activities when using sentence builders?  There are some that I have seen that are a bit reading-heavy for primary children; I'd love to increase my repertoire!  Please leave any ideas in the comments.

Managing choral speaking

 

In my previous post, I wrote about language lessons in the "new normal", particularly with regard to choral speaking.

To help manage choral speaking, I have made some PowerPoint slides which tell the students which group should be speaking at any one time.  It also tells them what they should be doing while others are speaking.  There are slides for two groups and three groups, and the PowerPoint is available for Spanish, French, German and Italian.  You can download it from here.

Grouping in 3 groups (which I will have to for my classes of over 30) was a slight problem for Spanish, as the flag only has 2 colours.  So the three groups will be Los Rojos, Los Amarillos and Los Escudos, which I will probably type onto the slide.  Great for phonics too!

The "New Normal" Classroom

Here we are at last: the new school year, the new term, and the “new normal”.  I’ll finally be heading back into the classroom next week, to earn a teaching salary after 173 days of not earning a teaching salary.  In preparation for the big return this week and next week, teachers have been discussing behind the scenes what we will and won’t be able to do in the classroom this term.

WARNING AND DISCLAIMER: The plans and strategies that I am going to discuss here are appropriate to my schools, the risk assessments that my schools have in place and agreements I have with my headteachers.  They may not be suitable for your setting.  Always check your own risk assessment and confirm with your headteacher.

I’ll be seeing all my classes pretty much as normal, as peripatetic teachers are allowed to work in multiple bubbles.  For additional protection for me, for the children and for the other adults in the schools, the way I teach is going to be different to usual. 

I will be restricted to a small area at the front of the classroom.  This means that scaffolding and supporting activities, building up the learning in small steps, is going to be even more crucial than usual.  If a child is stuck, I won’t be able to go over to help them.  The class teacher’s seating plan is not always conducive to children successfully helping each other, so knowledge organisers are going to be a huge help and provide that extra layer of security and confidence for the children.

One of the main discussion points over the summer has been choral speaking.  In the government guidance, specific mention is made of singing, chanting and shouting.  I don’t consider choral speaking to be the same as chanting, and emailed the DfE at the end of last term for ask for clarification.  No clarification has been forthcoming.  Therefore it has been the responsibility of each headteacher to decide how to address choral speaking in their schools.

I will still be able to do choral speaking activities with the children (thank goodness – I don’t know what I would have been able to do otherwise – it’s my bread and butter!) but only with a maximum of 15 children at a time.  For most classes this will be half the class at a time, but I have some classes of over 30 and so will have to divide them differently, into more than 2 groups.

I’ve been thinking, therefore, about the ramifications of choral speaking with only a small group at a time, and how to manage the activity.  What about the ones who aren't speaking?  What will they do?  I want them to physically do something so that they don’t have time or the opportunity to look out the window / fiddle / talk etc., and so that I can see that they are engaged.

Thank you to everyone on Twitter and in the Languages in Primary Schools Facebook group who responded with their ideas, particularly Amanda, Noelia, Suzanne, Vicky, Barbara, Steve, Erica, Jane, and Maria.

Actions  The children do an action which represents the word.  This is an example of a multimodal approach.  My 13 year old daughter has been teaching herself BSL (British Sign Language) over the summer; you could try one of the signs as your action.

Mute button  Children mouth the word silently, they “put their Mute button on”.  (This might take some practice with certain children!)  If the children are speaking, you can also use an imaginary volume control button with them to ensure they are speaking quietly and therefore not expelling too many droplets.  By the way, whispering should be avoided – it has been shown to expel more droplets than ordinary speaking.

Writing  The children write the relevant words on their mini whiteboard, using their knowledge organiser or other support to help them.  I like this idea as I would like to do a longer period of speaking with one small group, rather than rapid swapping between groups.  I’ll get the writers to hold up their whiteboard to show me what they’ve done!  To make the writing more engaging you could try:
- writing the words in order of length, shortest first
- writing the words in alphabetical order 
- writing the words in order of preference (could be useful for later work on opinions)
- writing the words with a finger on their sleeve
There’s also the dice activity where the number thrown tells you how to write the word.  Here are some suggestions:
1 – write the word in bubble writing
2 – write the word with your other hand
3 – write the word backwards
4 – write the word with your eyes closed
5 – write the word normally
6 – choose how you want to write the word

·     Group A Group B  You could say your word or phrase, then ask the first group to repeat it, followed straightaway by the second group.  The second group will listen to the first group and so are reliant on the first group’s accuracy.  This could be adapted to have a row speaking at a time in a Mexican Wave style.

·     Pointing  The children have a sheet with showing the words, English translations or images.  The children who aren’t speaking have to point to the correct word or image as the other half of the class say it.  Find out more about this activity here.

I still haven’t solved the problem of pair speaking activities, such as dialogues, where the children all practise together in pairs, but am hoping that most other things won’t be too different.

If you're looking for other ideas, check out Janet Lloyd's video No singing? No problem!  and these Covid-friendly activities from TheIdealTeacher.

I hope this has given you some ideas for your classroom.  There are some more ideas for choral repetition here.  If you have any other ideas, it'd be great if you could pop them in the comments.

Wishing everyone well for the new term.

Making a flag

The last unit of my Year 3 scheme of work is one of my favourites - Mi bandera.  The children learn how to describe the colours and shapes on flags, opening the door to other countries that speak Spanish and their cultures.  It usually coincides with a major sporting event and so the children are always interested in it.

After we have finished practising all the speaking with actions (multimodal - it really works!) the children make their own flag and describe it to the rest of the class.

I always use the method of making a wave-able flag that I first saw on Barbara Cheded's blog.  Unfortunately the link for the instructions no longer works, and I can't find them anywhere else, so I've done my own instructions for making the flag here:

1.  Fold a piece of A4 paper into quarters.

2.  Cut off one of the quarters (it doesn't matter which one).

3.  It's important to get the piece of paper the right way round at this stage - children sometimes put the paper in the portrait orientation and end up with the wrong-shaped flag.  At this stage children draw and colour their flag design on the "flag" section.

4.  When the flag design is finished, roll up the flag pole section of the paper and stick it with some sticky tape (we've never had any luck with glue!)  The flag is now ready to be waved.

To KO or not to KO? Knowledge organisers in primary languages

During these months of lockdown and working at home there has been a lot of discussion and reflection on Twitter and in the Facebook groups - primary and secondary - about Knowledge Organisers.  They are becoming more prevalent in both primary and secondary education across the curriculum.

In the primary languages context, there have been two main questions.  Firstly, what are knowledge organisers, and secondly, should we be using them?  I'll try to answer those questions:

What is a Knowledge Organiser (KO)?

• A single A4 sheet containing a summary of the essential knowledge from a unit of work
• It needs to be specific to your children in your class, and should follow your scheme of work.  An "off the peg" KO might not suit your children and your school.
• It should contain what you are going to teach and nothing extra.
• It shows the Intent of your curriculum, and may also determine the Implementation to a certain extent.
• A series of KOs should show progression.
• KOs show the big picture of a unit of learning. 
• A KO is low-tech and therefore easy to share with parents and carers if necessary.  Being paper-based means that there are no barriers to learning if a certain child can't access technology.
• KOs are characteristic of the current Ofsted and DfE focus on a knowledge-rich curriculum, and acquiring and retaining subject knowledge.
• There is no set format for a KO.  A KO for languages should probably include key vocabulary plus any essential facts or structures presented in manageable chunks.  They often contain model texts and can have images as appropriate.  It's important that the KO also contains English meanings to reduce the cognitive load and to help children to use them effectively.  "Dodgy English" is often used to emphasise structure in the target language, for example "Tengo hambre = I have hunger".  Above all, the KO should be engaging and clear, so that the children can use them easily and regularly.
• KOs are not a magic solution to teaching languages - they should be seen as another tool in your kit.  They are one of the solutions to problems of retention and memory.

Why should I think about using them?

• Having a KO to hand means that children won't have to hold so much information in their working memory.  They reduce cognitive overload.
• Having a KO to hand enables children to constantly review their learning.  They should have the opportunity to look at and become familiar with the KOs and practise retrieving the information.
• They save time for the teacher in the classroom - if the children all have a KO you won't have to answer as many questions!
• Children who have more prior knowledge of a unit are likely to learn more from the teaching of it.  The new knowledge hooks onto the "pre-knowledge" and becomes sticky.  Knowing the big picture of the learning we are more likely to make links and help the knowledge to stick.
• If a child is absent or goes out for intervention, having the KO means that they will have what they need to catch up.

My opinion:

I can see the benefits, from having read about them and attended an online event, of using KOs in the primary languages classroom to facilitate the learning and to help children to become more independent learners.  I can appreciate how it would help children to have the information to hand from the beginning of a unit, particularly in the new and changed circumstances in which we will all find ourselves come September.

As far as format is concerned, the format that is favoured in secondary classrooms is the parallel text.  I tried an example of the parallel text approach a year ago:

This is from my Yo soy músico unit, which is the one I keep in my back pocket to teach if I run out of scheme of work with any year group.  It introduces opinions of genres of music, musical instruments and regular -AR verbs.  This parallel text illustrates the infinitive and the 6 forms of the -AR verb tocar.  

I tried it out first with two very good Year 6 classes, who bought into it wholesale and got a lot from it.  I tried it the following week with a Year 4 class.  Many of them found it OK, but the weaker readers found the approach very hard to deal with, and opted out.  

I think it's most suited to upper Key Stage 2, and I would have to think carefully before using this approach in lower Key Stage 2.  We need to think carefully about the English literacy level of the children in the classroom.  Children in Years 3 and 4 often enjoy languages because of the focus on speaking and listening and the fact that there is considerably less reading and writing than elsewhere in the curriculum, so it would be a shame to opt for a reading-heavy approach which would lead to less enjoyment for them.  I'm also not convinced that younger children would be able to delve through a text of this nature to find the part they need when it comes to adapting and substituting text.

Yesterday I worked through the first week of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) Teaching Languages in Primary Schools: Putting Research into Practice on FutureLearn.  It focused on three pedagogical principles for middle childhood, which more or less corresponds to Key Stage 2.  This was one of my main takeaways: "Fun activities from an engaging teacher are particularly important at this stage" (i.e. Year 3 and maybe Year 4), as children of this age are more emotionally engaged in this kind of learning at this stage.  This ties in with what I said above, that children need a more teacher-led and less reading-heavy approach in lower Key Stage 2.  However later on, as the children get older, they appreciate more opportunities to reflect on the language and to see that they are progressing.  This would favour the parallel text approach more.

At the top of this page you can see the format of KO that I have chosen to accompany my new scheme of work for Key Stage 2 Spanish.  It comprises the vocabulary that the children will need for that unit, as well as examples of the phrases and sentences that we will be working on.  I have also displayed the key verbs that that particular unit includes and the key sounds, which are also underlined throughout the KO.  That's not to say that these KOs won't undergo a few tweaks here and there when I eventually get to use them!

It's worth pointing out here that a sentence builder (such as the one below, tabular as well as flowchart) can also be a KO - it contains all the key vocabulary and the structure.

I'm still very much on my journey of discovery as far as KOs are concerned, and of course I haven't had the opportunity to use them in the classroom yet.  I would be very interested, as always, to hear any of your constructive comments!

Useful reading:

• Knowledge Organisers: What they are and how to use them in KS1 and KS2
• What are Knowledge Organisers and how can we use them in the primary classroom?
• A Knowledge Organiser about Knowledge Organisers
• Knowledge Organisers - from Steve Smith's blog
• Everything in the MFL Knowledge Organisers group on Facebook

Flowchart Sentence Builders (pt. 2)

Since Joe's brilliant post about Flowchart Sentence Builders I have been starting to put some together to accompany my new scheme of work.  I've been sharing back and forth with Joe and with Carmen, who I first met at a Consejería event and who, it turned out, had been trying out a similar thing.

It takes a while to put the flowcharts together, especially the first few, and they go through a few incarnations before you are happy with the layout.  Once you've done a few, they are quicker to put together as you can start copying and pasting and moving existing boxes around.  I use Microsoft Publisher to create mine (I use Publisher for nearly all my resources).

Here are the ones that I've done already.  All comments welcome!

FLOWCHART by Clare Seccombe

Flowchart Sentence Builders

At the weekend I saw a post on the Languages in Primary Schools Facebook group by Joe Barnes Moran.  He showed a picture of a sentence builder presented as a flowchart.  Immediately I could see the benefit of this for my young learners.  Over to Joe to tell you more about them:

I am honoured to have been asked by Clare to write a guest post on flowchart sentence builders. Between Spanish lessons, I am also a Year 6 class teacher and SLE at Parkfield Primary School, Middleton.

Convenient timing brought me to the world of sentence builders. There was a big push around knowledge organisers at my school and I was tasked with sourcing or creating them for Spanish. Knowledge organisers – or sentence builders as they are known in language circles – are by no means an entirely new concept. Everyone has their own idea of what a knowledge organiser should look like, and how it should be used. This is just me putting my hat into the ring. Take it or leave it.

I studied the work of Dr.Gianfranco Conti and, with the wonderful support of Dylan Viñales, head of Spanish at Garden International School, I put what I had learnt into practice and produced my first set of sentence builders! Proudly, I presented a sentence builder to each of my classes. Here’s a Year 6 example that I created a year ago. Yikes!

The impact was…mixed.

Students really liked them but what I found disappointing were the occasional errors that students continued to make even when the pathways to a coherent sentence seemed so logical to me. In hindsight, it was just too complex: there were too many possibilities with their own, grammatical intricacies that presented a minefield for my students – cognitive overload would strike!

Back to the drawing board I went. 

With lockdown offering me the perfect opportunity to devote some significant brainpower to the problem I was faced with, I diligently set about to simplify and streamline my sentence builders. For a sentence builder to facilitate real learning it had to be easy to follow, and without all the grammatical possibilities crammed into one table. In the words of Señor Viñales, creating the ideal sentence builder meant it had to, “avoid the possibility of impossible combinations.”

At this point, I have to take time to mention my wonderful and supportive husband, Mark. One evening, seeing how frustrated I had become with a particular sentence builder focusing on prepositions, he offered to help. Owing to the mathematical and scientific kind of person he is, he actually understood the explanation ramble on the grammatical possibilities and faux pas that the humble preposition would inevitably create.

“Give me half an hour and I’ll see what I can do!’ he said to me as he disappeared, determined to help his floundering husband.

What he presented was to be the lightbulb languages moment (see what I did there?) I had been trying to create. This was a simplified, easy-to-follow-and-impossible-to-make-impossible-combinations sentence builder. We named them ‘flowchart sentence builders’ owing to the similarities they present with the traditional flow chart (apologies to any purists out there). Any grammatical exceptions are studied in a separate sentence builder. This way it’s possible to maintain the simplified view. By providing the English equivalents, the possibility of cognitive overload is reduced further. I raise awareness of any recurring grammatical patterns (plural, masculine or feminine) by highlighting appropriate endings. Children will be able to follow the arrows and come up with a possible combination, safe in the knowledge that it will will be correct. I feel the space is freed up to focus on what’s important – modelling a high quality, grammatically correct sentence.

Since this initial creation, Clare and I have chatted about the possibilities and I have since spent this portion of the lockdown busily devising flowchart sentence builders for each of my classes. I can’t wait to use these with students when schools return to normal!

Drawing

At the beginning of July my elder daughter went to her school prom.  This meant that the time between her GCSEs finishing and the prom was spent purchasing and pampering.  After the event I accompanied her to the nail salon as she wanted to have the nails removed - they were annoying her.  I sat in the "reception area" with another mother and a sister.  The sister was waiting for her sister to have some rather fearsome turquoise nails done, and was amusing herself by drawing on her i-Pad using an Apple pencil.  I had a few crafty looks at what she was doing and was impressed by the effects that she was achieving.

When I first tried sketchnoting I tried using a traditional stylus - one of those ones with the rubbery stopper on the end.  It was impossible to draw or write anything good with it, so hadn't tried writing or drawing on my tablet since.  That was 2015 and of course technology has moved on since then.  I searched the possibilities for a pencil for Android and purchased this one.  

I've been using it most days since then, along with the Autodesk Sketchbook app for Android, which I had tried before but which has had an update.  One of its interesting new functions is the ability to record a time lapse version of a picture that you are drawing.  This could perhaps be used in the classroom for students to draw a picture and then get their partner to narrate what they can see and what is happening.  Here is one of my offerings, for example:

I'm off to doing some more illustrations for my new resource.  The picture at the top is a little taster for you!

Wheel Decide

Many thanks to Danièle Bourdais for telling me about Wheel Decide at Language World on Saturday.  

There are plenty of apps around that do the same or a similar thing, but they aren't of much use to me in the classroom.  This online wheel is easy to customise, then you just copy and paste the resulting URL to be able to use it when and where you want.  

The wheels can also be embedded.  Here's the one I've made for one of my Year 5 classes who are working on sports, and I'm trying to find lots of different ways to help them with their "I play" and "I do" sentences.  We're going to spin the wheel and then they have to say the correct sentence for the sport that it lands on.  Give it a try!

Pointing and Flicking

The Pointing activity is something that students can do individually or in pairs. 

• They have in front of them a copy of the Pointing sheet (for example the colours one above), and the teacher has a copy on the board.  
• As the teacher says each word, the students touch the correct image on the sheet.  
• First of all the teacher says the words in order, then randomly. 
• Finally, the teacher points to the words without speaking and the students say the words.  
• Students will be able to think of other ways that they can use the sheet to help each other to practise, for example giving each other sequences to find.

The physical act of finding and pointing to the right image makes students listen, think and focus.  A variation on the Pointing activity is the Flicking activity:

• Students work in pairs. 
• Each pair will need a coin or counter, a whiteboard marker and a laminated copy of the Flicking card. 
• Students take it in turns to put their coin or counter on the black circle and push or flick it onto one of the images. 
• If they can say the correct word for that image, they can write their initial on the square with the marker. 
• The winner is the first student to mark his initial on all the images.  (Each image can potentially have both students' initials on.) 

A more challenging version has an extra spider and star:

If students land on the spider, they have to erase their initials on one of the squares they have already 'won'.  If they land on the star, they get another turn. 

All these resources are available here http://www.lightbulblanguages.co.uk/resources-gen-pz.htm