Imprinting verbs

I don't know about you, but I find that all my best ideas occur to me when I least expect it.

On Friday I looked at my work plan for Year 6 and saw that the next thing for me to do in my Places in Town unit is "verbs - what you can do in each place/what you can buy".  Now Year 6 know a lot of Spanish - phonics, gender, nouns, plurals, adjectives, opinions, big numbers, time, weather..... but we have never focussed specifically on what verbs look like in Spanish and how they work.  They have used many first person forms like juego and veo but are as yet unaware of the infinitives that they some from or how they could use the dictionary to find and work out verbs.

And I couldn't think of a good way to introduce it.

So I left my planning to do some housework, and found my elder daughter's school library book lying somewhere in the house that it shouldn't have been. Lightbulb moment!  One of the images on the cover gave me the idea I needed.

The fly-thing on the cover is made using a blot of ink with the legs, wings and face drawn on with a black pen.  Why not create characters who will do the verbs?


I borrowed the finger printing set belonging to my younger daughter and tried it out.  The rabbit at the top of this post is a print of the side of my right-hand little finger with the details drawn on.

So Year 6 are going to discover a number of infinitives via Quiz-Quiz-Trade.  If you would like to know more about Quiz-Quiz-Trade, have a look at this blogpost by Marie O'Sullivan - it was Marie who first told me about it.  It is also described in this post under "Ask-Ask-Switch".  Then after finding out what infinitives are all about they will have a go at making their own print pictures like this one, where they will be using the infinitives in the context of me gusta, which they already know.

If you would like to do something similar yourself, I've put all my resources for this lesson here.

UPDATE 28.10.12:  I have made a little movie to show Year 6's work so far, and you can watch it on our school blog.

Sort it out!

It is well-known in the Twittersphere that I have a sister who is also a language teacher.  It is less well-known, however, that we also have two brothers, and that one of them is a maths teacher.  Recently I came across this maths resource via a tweet from the TES.  It's a Venn diagram activity, but not just any old Venn diagram activity.  It's a Superhero Venn diagram activity by @mrprcollins.  And it made me think of my brother, who is a comic enthusiast as well as being a maths teacher.

This type of activity could be adapted easily for MFL, particularly in KS3 and KS4 to make topics like Personal Identification more interesting.  Here's an idea for how it could work:

What do you think?

All mapped out

As I've mentioned before, my Year 6 Spaniards (who are now in their fourth year of Spanish) are studying "En mi pueblo".  They have learned the names of lots of places in town, practised using hay and no hay and experimented with the connectives pero, también and sin embargo.  I was looking for something that would enable them to show off their writing skills while allowing them to practise their dictionary skills and, of course, do something artistic.

It's a bit difficult to explain how to do the folding, and I'm not sure my usual set of photographs would be enough, so I've dusted off my Flip camera and made a video.  Those who know me will laugh heartily as for some reason I sound like an extra from Alvin and the Chipmunks:


Year 6 enjoyed doing their maps.  They got to know the vocabulary better and enjoyed finding out new places in the dictionary.  Drawing a map was interesting from a spatial awareness point of view and looking at things from a bird's eye view.

If you would like to see Year 6's work, you can look at the video compilation on our school blog.

Some of the girls transformed the outside of their map into the outside of a house.  They said that the map was what they could see outside the house.  Using their idea, you could use this for House and Home as well, and draw a plan of a house inside instead of the plan of a town.

Right up your street

The other day I was revisiting this wonderful blog and looking at the templates for lots of different kinds of mini-books.  I had noticed the Triarama before, and this time had the idea of giving it to Year 5 French so that they could show me how well they can say what is in town and what isn't.

Above is the one that I made, and here's how I did it: 

1.  Take a piece of A4 paper and fold one of the corners down to the opposite edge.

2.  Cut off the spare strip.

3.  Unfold the resulting square of paper and fold it the other way to create a second diagonal crease.
Then cut from one corner to the centre.

4.  You can then draw your pictures and write your words to complete the Triarama.

5.  All you need to do then is to stick the blank triangle under the writing triangle to make the 3D Triarama shape.

As well as using this for places in town, you could try it for a family portrait and description, or perhaps a supermarket shelf containing containers, weights and measures of foods and drinks.  Any other ideas?  Year 5 are really enjoying making their streets.

Line up, please

Here's another lift-the-flap writing idea, similar to Paper Buildings in Town.

How to make it:

1.  Fold the paper down lengthways, down to about 3cm (for A4) away from the edge.

2. Concertina the paper.

3. Flatten the concertina, draw the outline of the figure on the top part and cut round it.

4. Unfold the concertina.  Fold the smaller sides together and make two cuts for the flaps.

5.  Glue the two sides together, but don't get any glue on the flaps!

There are many different topic areas that this could be used for.  My figures above are saying their names and what foods they like and don't like.  You could use them to give personal information, to introduce members of the family, to practise personal description or to say what sports someone likes, for example.

I would recommend using heavy paper, as normal photocopier paper isn't stiff enough for the figures to stand up.  Using A3 paper would give you bigger flaps and therefore more space for writing.  Coloured pencils might be better than felt tips for the colouring in, so that the colour doesn't bleed through to the underside of the flaps.  You could also glue on hair, hats or different clothes made of other pieces of paper.

If you're after a simpler version, for the first step just fold the paper completely in half and don't cut any legs. Then you can either write directly onto the figures or make flaps in the same way as before (see photo below).

Off to wash the felt-tip off my hands.

UPDATE 23.10.12:  I tried this with my Year 3s last week, and many of them found the folding and cutting difficult.  Therefore I have created a template which is free for you to download from my website.  Just fold the lines in the order indicated by the numbers and cut the shaded areas.