April 9, 2013 – ¡Vámonos!
 

Day: April 9, 2013

Spanish Playground is a great site packed with ideas, and their latest post is full of ideas for celebrating National Poetry Month – April. (It may not be where you are but I like poetry and any excuse!) I liked their suggestions and was inspired to share a couple of their ideas, and a couple of mine!

I particularly like Idea 6 which suggests using ETTC’s Instant Poetry forms. Once you get the idea of the structure, there’s no need to use the site although I like it for the reminder about structure. I had a go at a few…

A Lune (using the 3 word, 5 word, 3 word structure)

tulips La primavera viene 
Corderos nacen y flores crecen 
Hay vida nueva

A 5W, or in Spanish 5Q poem (each lines answer a question who, what, where, when, why)

Pocoyo 
Juega con Pato,
En el campo,
Después del cole,
Porque sí.
Screen Shot 2013-04-09 at 17.12.04

A Quinzaine (7 syllables, 5 syllables, 3 syallables = 15 syllables)

icecream Me gusta el helado 
¿Chocolate o 
vainilla?

And a Verb Verse (think of something you do and six verbs that go with that activity.)

Respirar, esforzarse, disfrutar 
Subir , seguir, bajar 
Corriendo en el bosque
Pictgram_running_man

I also liked Idea 10, using ReadWriteThink’s Theme poem tool. I used the sun as my inspiration (hopeful, aren’t I?)

I took a screenshot but you can save the poem as a PDF and also share it via email.

Screen Shot 2013-04-09 at 15.52.31An alternative to this would be to write the words in the shape of the subject as a calligram like the cat one below (from here)

Screen Shot 2013-04-09 at 16.19.09

I also like the idea of using Wordle or Tagxedo with poetry, either to create word clouds of existing poems or to give shape to new ones. Here’s an example below that I made using Tagxedo and ‘A Mexican Night before Christmas’

night before

About 18 months ago, I posted about a lovely poem by Gloria Fuentes called Doña Pito Piturra and she has many others that could be used for reciting, learning and also making presentation/slideshows with narration. There’s a link on the Spanish playground post to a PDF of activities too!

I also wrote about the QCA unit La Primavera and taking part of the Antonio Machado poem La Primavera and rewriting it. This would be a simple activity to do as a celebration of National Poetry Month too. We posted our on a Padlet (was called Wallwisher) wall so we could share it with a wider audience.

I’ve found this post about Spanish poetry by Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén and Rafael Alberti (for older learners I’d say!) and these are more suitable for younger learners. And this post about using poetry to look at rhyming is also very interesting, using one of my favourite little poems –

Red_eyed_tree_frog_edit2

Sana, sana,

Colita de rana.

Si no sanas hoy,

sanarás mañana.

And to finish off, as a 15 year old I was captivated by Joan Manuel Serrat singing poems by Antonio Machado so Dedicado a Antonio Machado (Cantares)

Screen Shot 2013-04-09 at 13.23.34

Last Wednesday I was invited to be the guest on Radio Edutalk.

EDUtalk is organised by David Noble (@parslad) and John Johnston (@johnjohnston) and encourages people to talk about education, using mobile and web technologies.

I was really honoured to be asked and enjoyed the talking about my experiences and thoughts on education.  We talked about my background, how I came to be in Switzerland and what I’ve been doing here before going on to talk about creativity and technology in education.

My summary of “the important bits”!

  • Be patient – things don’t happen overnight.
  • Lead by example. And if learners enjoy it, they’ll be your greatest help!
  • Technology is just another tool that can be used to enhance and transform learning – it’s not THE answer.
  • Before using technology ask “why?” – it should suit the task rather than the task being made to match the technology.
  • When starting out using new tools, don’t try to do everything at once. You’ll end up with too many plates spinning. Start with one or two ideas and “practise” for a bit before adding something else.
  • Learning should be celebrated. Loudly. And I love doing it.
  • Twitter is wonderful for keeping in touch and feeling connected.
  • We need to support one another, especially as other support, such as advisory teams, is being decimated.

Thanks to David and John for the opportunity. Great to talk to you again! You can listen to the programme here.

 

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