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!

Let's play darts!

 

This morning I took part in #ShareStuffSunday on Twitter, offering minibooks, making a flag and the LiPS Listening Project.

I had a look through the other tweets, and was very interested in this one from the multi-talented Jasmine Kay (have a look at her Etsy shop!)

Hopefully saving an UKS2 teacher’s Sunday with this one. Maths challenge which will help you to identify gaps too #ShareStuffSunday pic.twitter.com/4rzyTq53ab

— Jasmine (@MissKay_MissKay) April 25, 2021

I could see straightaway that this was something that could be easily adapted to use in the Languages classroom.  Indeed, Jasmine says that she has used this activity in her French teaching.  I can see it being used for things that need drilling, in other words for phrases or sentences which are repetitive in structure.  It could be another activity to do using sentence builders.

I like how the completed dartboard will provide quick feedback to the teacher as to how many questions each child has got right, and children will like it as it involves colouring in!

For differentiation purposes, children could try to complete the questions without support, and could look at their books, wall displays or knowledge organisers for support.

Thinking about what my classes are doing at the moment, I've made a example of the dartboard activity for my Year 4 unit ¿Tienes hambre?

For further feedback for the teacher, I've used four different levels for the questions, and use a quarter of the dartboard for each level:

Level 1: 1, 18, 4, 13, 6

Level 2: 10, 15, 2, 17, 3

Level 3: 19, 7, 16, 8, 11

Level 4: 14, 9, 12, 5, 20

It should be easy to see at a glance which quarter and therefore which levels children have coped well with.

The Frayer Model

The Frayer Model is a graphic organiser of information which was developed by Dorothy Frayer and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin in 1969.  It is intended to support students as they analyse vocabulary in an engaging way.  This webpage has a good overview of the model.

This visual representation comprises 4 boxes:

• Definition: defining the concept, word or term
• Facts: describing its essential characteristics.  When I was creating my examples, I found it difficult to differentiate between Definition and Facts.  However Facts is sometimes shown as Characteristics, which I think makes the difference clearer.
• Examples: providing examples of the concept or word
• Non-examples: knowing what a concept or word isn't helps to define what it is.  This box is sometimes shown as Common Errors or Misconceptions, which are sometimes more suitable.

I first found out about Frayer Models thanks to a tweet by @i_teach_things:

I shared some examples of using the Frayer Model for Maths last week and was interested in seeing if they might work for English too! I have now created these SPAG versions and think they could work well in class for pupils and display! Happy to share these and format if useful! pic.twitter.com/RGGRsyZtuK

— i teach things... (@i_teach_things) April 24, 2021

Seeing how useful they can be for English, maths and science, I decided to have a go at creating some for Languages.  

The first one I did was for Spanish accents:

Spanish accents are pretty simple compared to French, and I was able to fit them all on one Frayer Model.  However, having done further examples for the French accents (like the cedilla one above) I think it's better to have one single concept per Frayer Model.  Then the text can be bigger and the information clearer.

Languages Frayer Models can be used as display resources or for information for students.  I think there would also be value in students using the format to demonstrate their understanding of key grammatical terminology and core vocabulary, perhaps as part of the revision process.

 

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.