Hexagon books

 It's time for another mini-book!  I was reading Erzsi Culshaw's blog recently and it reminded me of hexagon books.  As I've mentioned recently, my Year 5 Spaniards are learning how to tell the time in Spanish at the moment.  I usually finish this unit with a lift-the-flap book, but the cutting and folding always seems to go wrong (not mine, I hasten to add).  So I thought I'd give the hexagons a try to see if the children find the making any easier.

The idea is that you unfold one hexagon at a time.  On the top of each hexagon I have drawn a clock.  When you lift up the hexagon, the time in Spanish is written underneath.  The clock pictured below says 4 o'clock.  When I turn it over you can see "Son las cuatro" written underneath.

Because of the six "petals" this mini-book would be useful for verb forms.  Here is the template if you'd like to have a go yourself:

Lift the flap

Another quick and easy mini-book to make is the lift-the-flap book.  My Year 5 class have just made some to help each other to practise telling the time in Spanish.  The one in the picture above was made by Kate.  She has put digital times on the outside of the flaps and written the times in words inside (except for one where she did it the other way round by mistake!)  She has also presented it beautifully.  Others drew analogue clocks or wrote the times on the outside of the flaps.

Last year my Year 3 class had an experiment with lift-the-flap books.  We made them in a different way that time.  But either way, you start by folding the paper in half.

Can be used for many different things, I'm sure you'll agree, and would make nice displays.

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!

The mind of a man is like a clock

"The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up."  William Hazlitt


The half term holiday is drawing to a close, and, like many other teachers out there, I'm thinking about planning for the last half term of the year.  Fortunately, nearly all of my classes will be a repetitions of lessons that I have taught in the past.  Years 5 and 6 Spanish, however, are the ones that I have to plan and make completely new stuff for, as they are the only ones nearing the end of their third year of formal Spanish learning.  We're just finishing big numbers (we've worked out that we could now count up to 999,999 if we only had the time) and will be seguing from distances between cities in Spain to reading and understanding the timetables for buses between major cities in Spain (request from Y6 teacher who takes them all for maths).  Therefore, teaching them to tell the time in Spanish will be the next step.


So earlier this afternoon, while the girls were watching Annie (Disney version) for the nth time this week, I set to thinking of possible activities for "Telling the Time" and couldn't really think of anything.  Like William Hazlitt said, my mind had run down and needed winding up.  I decided to read back through my previous blogposts to get some ideas.  I use my own blog posts a lot, just like I use MFL Sunderland all the time, mainly because all my resources are on there.


In the hope that it will be useful to someone else, here is my list of ideas for teaching telling the time, in no particular order:

• use the RecorderPen and flashcards to practise listening and understanding and build up the times
• Tarsia puzzle, dominoes or follow-me cards with pictures of clocks or digital times on one side and times in words on the other
• Timetables for data handling
• Time ballet
• Worksheet where children read the times and then draw the hands on the clocks (or vice versa)
• Teacher says a time, children use little clocks with moveable hands to make the time and hold it up
• Fling the Teacher game
• Song - I like "Un dos tres ¿qué hora es?"
• Human lines - give 5 or 6 children a written time, they line up at the front of the room and the rest of the class have to put them in chronological order
• a game of Blue Numbers
• a game of Cluedo - columns with es la, son las/number/y cuarto, y media for example.  Teacher thinks of a combination, children have to use the grid to work out that combination.  Teacher can tell them when they have 1 part right or 2 parts right.  Lots of thinking and listening involved.
• Pin-number writing frame activity to support weaker learners.  Work out times then put them on a blank clock.
• Small cards of numbers of hours and numbers of minutes etc, teacher says time and children have to hold up the right cards.  Or give cards with the words on, show a clock face and children have to hold up the right words.
• Higher/lower variation - teacher puts a time on a clock and hides it.  Children have to work together to work out the time that is on it.  Teacher can only say "más temprano" or "más tarde"

I've also had a look around for an online teaching clock for displaying random times for speaking work.  This one from Cambridge University Press is delightful.  Click "open clock" then "show panel" to select the sort of times you want it to show, then click on the cat's paw to change the time.  I also like this one from Sandfields, as there is plenty of scope for changing the settings.

I already have some worksheets that I can use, but may well use some of the online worksheet generators to make some simpler ones quickly and easily:

• apples4theteacher
• themathworksheetsite
• SEN teacher

I'll be putting any resources that I make with my other KS2 Spanish resources.

Do you have any good ways of teaching the time?