Month: February 2008

My current fascination with Youtube continues! There will be no doubt be more posts later in the week with more of my discoveries, but here is the first ‘joya’.

The ideal for Primary Language Learning (PLL) is that the learning is embedded in the curriculum.

During my browsing, I discovered some lovely little videos of tables in Spanish. Some are chants and some are drills, ranging from 47 seconds to 1 minute 55, but all have captured the interest of my 6 year old – ‘I don’t know my tables’ – as well as 9 year old who is a maths whizz.

They cover the 2 to 10 times tables, multiplying by up to 10.

See what you think! My particular favourite is ‘tabla del 5’ but I’ve embedded all the videos in a custom player (fancy eh?!)

For more ideas on using Maths in PLL, check out Jo Rhys-Jones’ post on Talkabout Primary MFL.

I’ve had my boys with me all day – their school was shut due to industrial action but mine wasn’t so they spent the afternoon helping me teach Year 2 Spanish. Actually Isaac was so excited last night that he declared ‘I won’t be able to sleep cos I can be your TA!’ Jude just wanted to hand out books but Isaac was up for teaching – and he did, leading a rousing chorus of El granjero tiene una granja, complete with finger puppets of various farm animals.

As we have been looking at farm animals today, I was amused by this video I found on Youtube called La vaca Lola.
It’s really simple and very catchy! See what you think!

The words are –

Twitter strikes again!

@acsutcliffe seems to be featuring a lot on ¡Vámonos! recently – perhaps it’s because we’re both language teachers. Except none of the Tweets have had anything to do with MFL! Anyhow, I saw the following last night –

Looked interesting so I investigated, reading the blog post Adam wrote and following the link to International Edubloggers.
I submitted my details, and lo! My badge (displayed above and right) arrived this morning, as did my details on the site. And I did make it to #22 – just pipped Alex Blagona!

It’s interesting to see the other bloggers registered on the site – several I’ll add to my Google reader. And registering also makes sense for me as it seems a good way of promoting my blog. Not something that I find comes naturally, but I’ve been thinking – if I’ve taken the time to blog it, I think it’s worth reading so why not?

Following on from my previous post, here’s the ‘end’ of the story of the Fall exchange of Hands across the World.

Having sent off around 500 handprints to Michelle Mock in USA, we had hoped to receive our return prints before Christmas. Unfortunately, post at Christmas is a fickle thing and whilst we did receive four envelopes, there were still 11 outstanding by the time we broke up.

Fortunately, when we returned from our Christmas break, the other envelopes had arrived.
Unfortunately, the envelopes were mislaid for a time.
Fortunately they were found and this week, after sharing some with the school in assembly, each class was presented with their envelope of prints to explore.

We had lots of prints from America, but also from Canada, India, Lithuania, Ireland, Austria, Scotland, Wales, Switzerland and , much to the bemusement of the pupils, from Birmingham. We even had half a dozen that had made the trip to America and come back to us!

I took photos of some of the hands and below is a slideshow showing the wide range of festivals and celebrations depicted on the prints.

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

If you would like to find out more, visit the Imagiverse site – there is a Spring exchange about to start with the theme Hands around the BLUE MARBLE.