Interesting how different colours mean different things according to culture.
For example, no 16 – death – is represented by black in Western / American, Native American and Japanese or white in Hinduism and Chinese but silver in Muslim culture and green in South America.
Would make quite a fun activity finding similarities and differences.
Another nod to Neil Jones today for introducing me to the lovely Pimpollos, Peru’s answer to the Hoobs. Cheery, friendly and with ‘karaoke subtitles’, I think a very useful series.
On his blog, Neil has posted materials for using their song Las verduras. Great stuff!
There are many more videos by Los Pimpollos and here are a couple of my favourites.
1. Arriba abajo.
This song is about things that are either up (arriba) or down (abajo) and I can see Nursery and Reception enjoying dancing along to this. The video supports the language with visual clues and actions can easily be added to show which way -arriba o abajo – each object is found.
httpv://youtu.be/_PVbDErQkGg
2. Cada día se un poquito más
I like this song for the words, meaning every day I know a little more; when I’m older I’ll know millions of things, just you wait and see! Well, I’m ‘older’ and I still want to sing this song as I’ve still got plenty to learn!
Following on from Rachel’s Hawkes’ reminder to me of my plan to teach phonics using her grid, another reminder popped up today when i was on Slidecast and found this short presentation courtesy of Clare Seccombe aka @Valleseco aka MFL Sunderland webmistress extraordinaire.
Phonics are key to our ability to read and pronounce unfamiliar words in a language -must ask Rachel if she has a phonics grid for German!
Another of the poems suggested by Joaquín Moreno in his presentation about poetry in Spanish teaching and learning was Nanas de la cebolla by Miguel Hernández.
He played us the poem sung by Joan Manuel Serrat – here it is below, along with a perfomance of it in spoken form and also the words.
Spoken version
httpv://youtu.be/ktZEWJAoai0
Nanas de la cebolla
La cebolla es escarcha cerrada y pobre: escarcha de tus días y de mis noches. Hambre y cebolla: hielo negro y escarcha grande y redonda.
En la cuna del hambre mi niño estaba. Con sangre de cebolla se amamantaba. Pero tu sangre, escarchada de azúcar, cebolla y hambre.
Una mujer morena, resuelta en luna, se derrama hilo a hilo sobre la cuna. Ríete, niño, que te tragas la luna cuando es preciso.
Alondra de mi casa, ríete mucho. Es tu risa en los ojos la luz del mundo. Ríete tanto que en el alma al oírte, bata el espacio.
Tu risa me hace libre, me pone alas. Soledades me quita, cárcel me arranca. Boca que vuela, corazón que en tus labios relampaguea.
Es tu risa la espada más victoriosa. Vencedor de las flores y las alondras. Rival del sol. Porvenir de mis huesos y de mi amor.
La carne aleteante, súbito el párpado, el vivir como nunca coloreado. ¡Cuánto jilguero se remonta, aletea, desde tu cuerpo!
Desperté de ser niño. Nunca despiertes. Triste llevo la boca. Ríete siempre. Siempre en la cuna, defendiendo la risa pluma por pluma.
Ser de vuelo tan alto, tan extendido, que tu carne parece cielo cernido. ¡Si yo pudiera remontarme al origen de tu carrera!
Al octavo mes ríes con cinco azahares. Con cinco diminutas ferocidades. Con cinco dientes como cinco jazmines adolescentes.
Frontera de los besos serán mañana, cuando en la dentadura sientas un arma. Sientas un fuego correr dientes abajo buscando el centro.
Vuela niño en la doble luna del pecho. Él, triste de cebolla. Tú, satisfecho. No te derrumbes. No sepas lo que pasa ni lo que ocurre.
Ages ago I bought a book of little plays and poems by Gloria Fuertes, and have to admit that I haven’t looked at it much since I bought it. However, I was reminded of it on Thursday at the ALL NorthEast Spanish day in Gosforth when Joaquín Moreno was talking about using poetry in teaching Spanish.
He mentioned using a particular poem by Gloria Fuertes to read aloud and act out in order to practice getting English mouths around Spanish sounds – in this case, ‘rr’ is particularly practiced.
The suggestion was to chorally repeat the odd numbered, repeated line “Doña Pito Piturra” and for volunteers to read the even, varied line, with feeling and an action to accompany it.
A very simple idea that I shall be using in my classroom soon!
Below is the poem, and also a video of the poem being recited plus two versions, as a song!
DOÑA PITO PITURRA
Doña Pito Piturra Tiene unos guantes, Doña Pito Piturra Muy elegantes.
Doña Pito Piturra Tiene un sombrero, Doña Pito Piturra Con un plumero.
Doña Pito Piturra Tiene un zapato, Doña Pito Piturra Le viene ancho.
Doña Pito Piturra Tiene toquillas, Doña Pito Piturra Con tres polillas.
Doña Pito Piturra Tiene unos guantes, Doña Pito Piturra Le están muy grandes.
Doña Pito Piturra Tiene unos guantes, Doña Pito Piturra ¡lo he dicho antes!
Another little gem I found on the Consejería site last night was a resource aimed at language awareness.
Entitled Languages all around you, it was developed by
Consejería de Educación
Consolato Generale d’Italia Edinburgo, Ufficio Scolastico
Goethe-Institut Glasgow
Institut Français d’Écosse
This is a collection of activities showing how modern languages are part of everyday life. The idea is to make pupils more aware of the importance of languages, the role they play in many aspects of young people’s experience and how languages can be learned while having fun and playing.
This booklet is aimed at children of Primary six and seven (that’s our Year 5 and 6 I think) although I reckon it would be good as a transition project between Primary and Secondary to get know pupils and find out about their experiences.
In the six units pupils explore the following topics:
I particularly like section 2 where it asks pupils to talk about languages spoken by their family as well as their peers. And I discovered something about Haribo too!
I recommend you explore the site if you haven’t already – there are other resources (some paid) that are well worth considering including PDFs of resources that are now out of print.
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.
Google News automatically groups news tories with similar content and places them based on algorithmic results into clusters. In Newsmap, the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News Aggregator presents. In that way users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Through that process it still accentuates the importance of a given article.
What’s really great is that you can choose the country from which you’d like the headlines – the list includes Spain and Mexico as well as Germany and Austria which allow a comparison of headlines in the smae language. Canada is included as well as France but the headlines are in English!
And there’s a tool bar at the bottom as well where you can choose the type of news that you’d like included.
Here I’ve just selected Sport in this screen shot :-
Another thing I like about this site is that if you hover on a headline, you get the beginning of the article plus a photograph. Just enough to give you more information about the headline, and just enough to be a ‘short text’. The ‘hover’ also tells you how many articles have been written on the same topic, and from which paper that headline came.
Liz mentioned it in the context of KS3 and 4 and using authentic materials for reading. I wholeheartedly agree – and would venture that it might be good to use with KS2 for
gist
looking for cognates
ICU about what’s in the news in other countries
comparing languages by using an unknown language eg by choosing Brasil or Netherlands
match the headlines
And that’s just a quick think!
I’m having a great time exploring. What do you think you could do with this site?