Let's post-it!

My contribution to the #ililc4 Show and Tell this evening was some ideas for using Post-its.  I have a fairly substantial collection of Post-its at home.  Speech bubbles, hearts, flowers, t-shirts, arrows.... but of course you can use ordinary square ones too!  Here are some ideas, in no particular order, for how you can use them.

Label a poster.  Each student writes on their Post-it what they think the person on the poster is saying.  If you're practising foods, likes and dislikes, they can all choose an opinion and a food, write the sentence and stick it on.  Then they can read others' contributions.  I got that idea from Steven Fawkes some years ago.

Post-it grids, for which you can use picture prompts, mathematical problems to solve, short passages that need translating....

Guess who.  You know, the game where you write the name of a famous person on a Post-it and stick it on your partner's forehead.  They have to ask questions to work out who they are.

Use online Post-its with Padlet and Lino.it.

Give students secret feedback.  While they are working on some writing, jot down a note for them on a

Post-it and stick it in their book without speaking to them.

Students can contribute to a question wall by writing their question on a Post-it.

Use them for Venn diagrams or any other kind of sorting.

Students write their name on the Post-it and use it to vote, or to mark their position on a scale.

Use them to record success and praise.

Use two Post-its, one on top of the other, with the question on the top and the answer underneath or vice versa.  Good for students to test themselves and each other.

Use them to add a contribution to a vocabulary wall.

Students use them to write a question for the teacher.

Write a question on the board, or a sentence that needs translating.  Each student writes their answer on a Post-it and sticks it on the board.  Formative assessment for the teacher, and students can use them to work out the right answer.

I recommend Post-its' own teacher site for lots of lesson ideas.

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:

A bit random

Fellow NE-tweep Dom McGladdery often blogs about random things.  I don't mean random in the "no specific purpose" sense or the "haphazard" sense, but in the sense that many of his posts are about random number generators, name generators and language generators.  Very useful things.  Dom gave me the link once to the Fresher Schools random name generator, a PowerPoint based generator which is very easy to use.  You just put the children's names on it, set it off and then press S to stop it, randomly.  A good thing to keep on your USB to bring out when needed.

Last week I adapted it for my Year 4 Frenchists, with whom I have been doing the weather.  I put the eight weather pictures that we have been using on the slides and we used the resulting PowerPoint to randomly select us a weather picture lots and lots of times.  The children thought of some good ways to use it.  They are a bit addicted to playing Round the World, so we used the PowerPoint to generate the weather for each turn of that.  Then they had to predict which one would come up, earning a point if they were right.  And of course we did the "say what you see" one as well.

Here is the PowerPoint if you fancy trying it out:


I'm sure this can be adapted for different areas of language.  For example choose an infinitive, then randomly select a personal pronoun or tense and the students have to give the right part of the verb.

Vision On!

Early on Friday morning I read an email from Pinterest.  I registered with Pinterest quite some time ago, but have to admit that I haven't really done anything with it. Anyway, there was an interesting link in this email.  The skeletons reminded me of the 70s children's programme Vision On, and the character that Tony Hart made by writing and mirroring the programme name.  In 1981 I was in the 4th year of middle school, and we did a piece of art work inspired by this, where we wrote our names, mirrored them, and then painted each little section in a different shade of the same colour.  I seem to remember mine was various shades of red and pink.

Then this morning my six year old downloaded yet another app for her Android tablet.  It's called Doodle Toy, and she showed me how you can make mirrored writing with it.  So, instead of doing the work which I really need to do, I have been having a play with Doodle Toy, and thinking about how it could encourage Year 3 in particular with their writing of single words, as specified in the Key Stage 2 Framework for Languages.

Using this app it's easy to create an image of, for example, an animal name, and then embellish it to make it look even more like that animal.  I have done the French animals lapin and lion.  I have also created one of my own name, about which I could write something like "Me llamo Clare.  Soy un insecto." because of the shape my name makes.  It was straightforward (after a few false starts!) to save the images to my tablet's Album for later use.

I hope it gives you some ideas for having fun with text.  I'm going to put this on my old Android tablet, which I let the children use, and see what they come up with.

Take One Picture

The school where I teach Spanish has begun work this term on the National Gallery's Take One Picture project.  The current picture is Bartolomé Bermejo's Saint Michael Triumphant over the Devil (1468).  The fact that Bermejo is a Spanish artist is great news, and means that there will be a lot of cross-curricular Spanish stuff going on this term in at least PE, literacy, history and geography.

I have started to incorporate the picture into my Spanish lessons, and it is proving considerably easier for some year groups than for others.  Year 5, for example, are currently learning how to tell the time in Spanish.  Ideas on how to get Bermejo into that are very welcome!

Here's what I've done so far.

Year 4 have been working on days, numbers to 31 and months, and putting these together to make dates in Spanish.  As the picture is of St Michael, I took the opportunity to do some intercultural dates, namely saints' days.  I made 24 different saints' days into cards and we used them for a game of Showdown.  If you haven't tried Showdown yet, I recommend that you read Helena Butterfield's blogpost about it.  It's so easy to adapt and the children find it very useful and enjoyable.  Here are the cards if you would like to have a go yourself.



Year 3 have just started colours.  They are already familiar with them from Year 1 and Year 2, so I welcomed something different to do with them.  Bartolomé Bermejo was actually called Bartolomé de Cárdenas.  Bermejo means red, and he was always known by that name, maybe because he had red hair or a red face.  This gave me the idea to combine colours with names (more intercultural input).  The children are drawing Mr Men style characters in one colour, and then using the sheet below to find the name of the colour and a Spanish first name to go with it.  My examples on the board were Verónica Violeta and Rodrigo Rojo.



If you have any brainwaves about other ways that this picture could fit in, please let me know! The devil is going to inspire the "describe a monster" part of Y4's next topic, but apart from that.... I'd also be very interested to hear from anyone else who has been involved in this project, not necessarily for this picture.

And on an entirely unrelated matter I have also learned that you can embed documents from Box.