Today, I had Year 2 for Spanish for the whole afternoon . I usually have them for between 45 and 60 minutes before swapping with the art teacher for Year 1. As Year 1 are doing a pottery module, I was asked if I would have Year 2 for a ‘double’ to give the littlies more time to get stuck into the clay (hopefully not literally!)

So we had the time to do all kinds of things! First of all we had a look at ¡Quiero mi plátano! (I want my banana) a Talking Big Book from Early Start and b small publishing. We read the story together with the pupils working out the meanings of words from the context and by looking for cognates. They even made the link between the colour ‘naranja‘ and the fruit ‘la naranja’. Once we had read the story, we had a go at some of the puzzles based on animals and fruit. The favourite was the ‘reveal’ game where a picture is hidden by seven numbered tiles and pupils have to choose a tile to uncover and then make a guess as to (in this case) the animal or fruit. This enabled the pupils to practice numbers as well as the new vocabulary, and was accessible to all as there were two options given for the answer thus allowing the less confident to make a 50/50 choice, whilst the more advanced guessed before the options were given.

We then went back to a favourite song we had learnt a couple of weeks ago – Diez animales en la pared. One afternoon I was inspired to rewrite Ten green bottles in Spanish as the class needed some number practice and bottles aren’t interesting – to 6 year old anyway ;-). Diez animales en la pared was the result. The original was created in five minutes (how long I had before the class arrived!) on the SMARTboard, but the beauty of that is that you can export the file as a Powerpoint and then use it on other IWBs (great as WCPS had Promethean!). In the original, the pupils took it in turns to make an animal fall off the wall; in the powerpoint version, I animated it so that the animals fell off the wall on cue so that I could ask the pupils to predict which animal will fall next. Today it was a popular move to revisit the song which was particularly surprising as at this point choir members had to go off to rehearse for the Christmas production, leaving six boys and me!

And we had a great time! Such a good time that I recorded them for posterity – and you can listen by going to my new Box of goodies! (you can also download the powerpoint if you want!) We didn’t stop there either – break came and I was inspired again – why not take the classroom outside – so we did. Outside went the box of puppets and we had another chorus of Diez animales this time using the puppets as the actors and the shelter as our stage. The boys weren’t happy with the outdoor picture so we moved to the cloakroom for some more!

Then we went back to the class and made our own walls with animals on. Some walls were more successful than others (don‘t think we have any future bricklayers in the class!) but the animals were selected and named (mostly!) in Spanish. Comments at the end of the lesson included ‘That was fun, Señora, do I have to stop now?’, ‘I’ve just put it in my desk to finish tomorrow – is that OK?’ and ‘Oh! I missed it all cos I was at choir!’.

Next week we’ll go back to ¡Quiero mi plátano! as we’re moving on to talk about fruit, but I’m sure we’ll have to sing Diez animales again!