I’ve been having some fun making myself a new avatar. I’ve got a WeeMee (see right), a Yahoo avatar (wearing a Spanish football shirt or a Sevillanas dress), a DoppelMe wearing the Swedish football kit, and a beaver Voki of me pretending to be Mrs Beaver from Narnia (for the benefit of my kids :o))
Build your Wild Self is a site run by the Wildlife Conservation Society and New York Zoo and Aquarium. It allows you to choose a basic body and then add bit of animals, reptiles, birds etc to it to make a ‘wild self’.
I had great fun making myself into a rein-pol-conda-guin-peacock. Cute aren’t I?
I can see using this in the PLL classroom, linking body parts (los brazos, las piernas, la lengua, las orejas, la cola, las alas etc), animals (un pingüino, un reno, un pavo real, una serpiente, un tigre, una tortuga etc), descriptions (colours, characteristics like feroz, grande, tranquilo, orgulloso, peludo etc) and habitats (la selva, la jungla, el Arctico, la sierra, el desierto, el río etc) in a fun activity. Pupils could collectively discuss and describe a model Wild Self, perhaps using a scaffold text. Then they could create their own Wild Self either to match a given description (listening and / or reading) or choose their own design and then describe it (speaking and /or writing).
e.g. Tengo las orejas de un oso polar. Tengo los cuernos de un reno. Tengo la lengua muy larga de una serpeinte. Tengo la cola impresionanate de un pavo real. Tengo las piernas de un pingüino.
Perhaps the class could then play a game with all the Wild Selves – someone says a sentence in Spanish about one of them, and teams have to find the correct image, or perhaps five images and five descriptions to be matched. And what about a quiz akin to the baby photo game – whose Wild Self is whose?
What do you think? Anyone got any further ideas or comments?
