Reading about Spain and Hispanic Culture

Sometimes I have a young class who need calming at the beginning of a lesson and at other times I need to fill a little bit of time at the end of a lesson when the children have finished all their work.

I read them a book in English about Spain or a Spanish-speaking country which also has a cultural theme.  Here is my selection of books:

Abuela's Weave  tells the touching story of Esperanza and her grandmother going to sell their traditional weaving at a market in town.  The story is from Guatemala and I read this to the children as part of our Guatemala project.

This is the tale of how chocolate was given to the Mayan people by the Jaguar god.  It has a bookmark in as this is the story I am reading with Year 2 at the moment!   

The moon falls from the sky and breaks into pieces.  The story tells how she was put back together again.

Lola's papi teaches her to dance flamenco.  There is a CD included with the book as well with music.

Ferdinand the Bull was the subject of one of the early Disney cartoons.  We read the book first and then watched the cartoon to see how they were different.

This is a great book for explaining why there are so many Spanish-speakers who don't live in Spain.

I bought this book because it reminded me of Nathalie Paris and her Bibliobook!  This is the true story of a librarian who took books to children in very rural areas of Colombia with the aid of his donkeys.

This story tells the tale of Gaudí walking around Barcelona and talking about his works.

The fox (Zorro) wants to eat the guinea pig (Quwi) but is continually tricked by him.  Year 2 really liked this one.

Another story from Mayan mythology, which tells how the first Mayan people were made of corn

I like to read this story on European Day of Languages.  Carmelita and her dog Manny walk down their multi-cultural street, calling out "Hello" and "Woof" in lots of different languages as they go.

And finally, The Legend of the Poinsettia tells how the poinsettia plant ("Flor de Navidad") came to be closely associated with Christmas in Mexico.

Thank you to members of the Languages in Primary Schools Facebook Group, who recommended a lot of these.  Do you know any others?

Reading about France and French culture

Sometimes I have a young class which needs settling at the beginning of a lesson or a class who finish all their work and need a little something to fill in the end of a lesson.

I have a selection of reading books in English but about France and French things which I read to them on such occasions. I thought I would share with you the books that I have:

Mr Chicken goes to Paris to visit his friend Yvette, and they go on a sight-seeing trip.  Nobody seems to notice that there is a giant yellow chicken in the city!  I think this is Year 2's favourite.

A little girl and her grandfather go on a walk around Paris.  There is lots of useful information about the sights of the city.

Adèle picks up her little brother Simon from school and they walk home through the city of Paris.  On the way, Simon manages to lose most of his belongings.

Anatole is a mouse who gets himself a job tasting cheese in a cheese factory.

A Lion in Paris is the (fictional) story of how the statue of a lion came to be in the Place Denfert-Rochereau in Paris.

Do you have any recommendations that I could add to my list?

Starting to write in a new language

In September my Year 9 daughter started to learn German, and she has now opted to take it for GCSE.  My languages are Spanish and French, and in the past I have studied Latin and Catalan.  All Romance languages and no Germanic languages!  So I undertook to learn German myself, which I am, slowly, mainly via Duolingo.  I understand enough now to be able to make resources for Key Stage 2 and Year 7.  Daughter has progressed much further!

As I start each new section of Duolingo, I write down in a little book the new words that I am introduced to.  To begin with I found the new combinations of letters and the new characters hard to get right.  My pen was having to make shapes that it wasn't used to, and my other languages were interfering.

This is what faces our students, particularly the younger ones, as they start to write words and phrases in their new language.  The letters are in sequences that they haven't seen before and there are strange little lines and squiggles on top of the letters and sometimes underneath.  Sometimes the punctuation looks different.

It's worth taking a step back and spending a bit of time practising these new letters, "squiggles" and combinations of letters.  I have created some resources for Spanish and French which allow children to have a go at making these shapes (I do sometimes catch them turning the sheet upside down to do upside down questions marks!) before they start writing "for real".  This alerts the children to the fact that there are different characters to write, and that the accents such as tildes and cedillas are important parts of the letters which need to be included accurately.

Pictotraductor

A few years ago I discovered Pictotraductor, a Spanish website which allows you to create pictorial representations of Spanish sentences.  The resulting sentences make excellent decoding activities.  I like to give them to the children in mixed-ability pairs, where the children take it in turns to write, and each writes in a different colour so that you can see who did what. (This is a collaborative, Kagan-style activity.)

For example, can you work out what these sentences are saying?

I like to leave out the definite and indefinite articles for added difficulty!  These just appear as words in the squares:

I have been using it to prepare some sentences about opinions of sports for my Year 5 class, but found that there was no symbol for me encanta.  If you click on "Login" at the bottom of the screen, you can create an account and upload your own images.  So I now I have an image for me encanta:

If you click on "Funcionamiento" at the bottom of the page, there are some useful tips on making Pictotraductor work for you.  For example, if you put "no-" before a word, the picture will appear with a red cross through it.

Pictotraductor is only available in Spanish, but if you know a little bit of Spanish you can make it work for other languages too.

I contacted the people at Pictoaplicaciones (they are based near Santiago de Compostela) and they are happy for me to use and share their images in resources.

If you click on "Una idea" at the bottom of the screen, you'll find the other applications offered by Pictoaplicaciones.  I like Pictosonidos, which lets you hear the word and see it included in a sentence.  You can also play a guessing game with the words (click on "Jugar" under one of the pictures).  There is a minibeast one which I'd like to use with Year 1.  Also of interest is Pictocuentos, which tells and illustrates well-known stories.

Have a play with it and see what you think!

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