Category: animals

Another (new to me) book by Sandra Boynton

Following on from my previous post, I also purchased this book. Whilst not a new publication, it’s new to me and I thought I’d share how I might use it.

This book also features Sandra Boynton’s trademark quirky animals with all the favourites including cows, pigs and the funky chicken!

Here’s the opening of the book that sets up the ‘story.’ What do you think it’s about? I’d encourage learners to use the cover picture, the illustration on p1 and the text to try and work it out. What are the animals on the cover doing? What is the cow doing? I’d expect ‘dancing’ and ‘playing an instrument/singing’ to be included in the responses. Depending on the learners’ knowledge of music/life experiences, they might put the dancing and the fiddle together to mention barn dancing, but some might need a bit of a steer in that direction. You could show a video of some barn dancing to give them an idea!

Next I’d look at the text. Which words can you pick out and suggest a meaning? ‘Aplauden’ (clap/applaud) and ‘danza’ (dance) are the most obvious but watch out for false friends ‘corral’ and ‘pies’! If learners have met body parts they might recognise ‘pies’ and possibly ‘manitas’ from manos (several finger rhymes that my learners have met include the word manitas though) So what are the instructions? Stamp your feet and clap your hands. Again, I’d expect my learners to recognise ‘¿listos?’ as I use it often, but it would be a good opportunity to learn it otherwise. So, are we ready for the barn dance?

The book then continues with instructions to do an action with an animal. Above we have hopping with a bunny, walk with a duck and dance with the mad chickens, clucking all over the place. Below you can see that there are also animal sounds to explore – which animal makes these sounds?

The whole book is one long dance routine and it’s a great text to get learners involved!

Here are some ideas!

• Read the text and learners do the actions.
• Give learners an animal and they stand up or hold up a picture each time their animal is mentioned.
• Match the animal to the action. ¿Brinca o galopa con el conejito? Brinca con el conejito. ¿Y con los pollos locos? Baila con los pollos locos
• Match the sound to the animal. ¿Qué dice beee – una vaca o una oveja?
• Explore more animal sounds; compare English and Spanish animals; explore other languages. I’ve got a great book called Animals Speak that would be great for this! (This post is about it, and another Sandra Boynton book!)
• As learners move around, hold up an animal picture and they change the way they’re moving according to the story.
• Follow the instructions and have a barn dance!
• Rewrite the instructions replacing the animals with members of the class – baila con Charlie; brinca con Evie; da vueltas con Israel; corre con Mariah etc
• Make up a routine with each learner adding a new move to the previous one(s) like Granny’s Shopping – how many moves can you remember and perform?
• Work on verbs – lots are -ar so could you work out how to say I jump if given the verb paradigm of a regular -ar verb?
• Make your own dance routine using the verbs
• Alter the instructions so it’s not brinca CON un conejito (jump/hop WITH a bunny) but brinca COMO un conejito (jump/hop LIKE a rabbit) then write your own sentences for a game that could be played in PE or at break!

Those are just a few activities that immediately spring to mind – do you have any to add?

A new book from Sandra Boynton

In the post this morning I received an exciting package – a new book that I wasn’t expecting until mid September! I love Sandra Boynton books – Moo Baa La la la was one of my sons’ favourite books as toddlers and Azul el sombrero, Verde el sombrero was a massive hit when I recorded it for KS1 in lockdown (I received several reports and even videos of children exclaiming ¡Ay caramba!) so when I saw that she’d published a new book, I preordered it!

The book is all about emotions. Here’s the opening page that sets up the whole book:

Each page then features an animal and an emotion. Here are the first two pages:

All the emotions go with estar and include enérgico, gruñón and contenta. As you can see from the sample pages and the examples I’ve given, the adjectives are presented in masculine – enojado, enérgico – and feminine – contenta – forms as well as those that are unchangeable – triste, feliz.

I love the illustrations which make the book. All the animals have their own characters and also demonstrate their emotion brilliantly. I also like that there is some more unusual vocabulary like complacido (contented/pleased with yourself) and confundida (confused) which opens up discussion of confounded being another (stronger) way of saying confused.

The final message of the book is that whilst the hope is that everyone is happy, it’s OK if you’re not, you’re amongst friends and that emotions change day to day.

It’s a lovely stand alone book but would also be good to introduce and/or review :-

• animal vocabulary
• estar + adjectives
• use of muy (and potentially bastante) to qualify the extent of the feeling
• masculine and feminine nouns (cerdo and hipopótamo are masculine nouns but are presented in feminine form as the animal is female)
• the diminutive -ito/a

Having read the book, I’d try some of the following:

• Asking the question ¿Cómo estás? and looking for a reply starting Estoy... (I am….)
• Ask the question ¿Cómo está (animal)? to use the 3rd person with replies (animal) está (emotion) which requires learners to swap the indefinite artilce in the text for the definite article in their reply e.g. ¿Cómo está la rana? La rana está contenta
• Make new sentences about animals and emotions based on pictures (see below for some possible ones!)
• Make similes using the structure [adjective] como [animal] e.g. enfadado como un león; hambrienta como una cabra; listo como un búho

I thoroughly recommend the book – and all of Sandra Boynton’s books as they’re great fun but also great to spark ideas and activities.

What do you think?

This is the third in a series of three posts about Julia Donaldson books that I have recently purchased in Spanish.

Lo que Escuchó la Mariquita is the Spanish version of What the Ladybird heard and is a ‘farmyard thriller; a crime set on a farm‘ according to Julia Donaldson, the author. In it, two robbers, Hugo el Zurdo and Len el Largo plot to steal the prize cow from under the farmer’s nose. But they hadn’t reckoned on the very tiny, very quiet ladybird.

One night the ladybird hears the thieves plotting and relays the story to the animals who all make a loud hullabaloo – and then they hear the plan which make use of all their noisiness! Will they outsmart Hugo el Zurdo and Len el Largo? I’ll leave you to find out! It’s a great story and I love the rhyme and rhythm of the text.

How would I use this story? I’d probably read it much the way that Julia Donaldson does in the video below – but in Spanish!
The story is a wonderful opportunity to work on animal vocabulary as well as the always popular topic of animal sounds. It always amuses children that animals ‘speak Spanish’ too and make slightly – or sometimes very – different noises in Spanish. You could even sort the sounds into groups according to how similar they are. You could use puppets or masks to involve individuals in retelling the story or even a set of fingerpuppets or finger scribbles for each child to join in physically, or even use actions (my latest obsession with Makaton would come in handy here!) Nonetheless with little preparation of that kind, it’s easy to encourage learners to join in with some noises and sound effects!

Follow up activities might include vocabulary matching at word level, some simple substitution sentences with animal and sound [La vaca] dice [Muu] or [El perro elegante] dijo [Cuac] or even some simple descriptions
La vaca es bonita y premiada. Es blanca y negra con manchas grises. Tiene un cabestro azul y un premio rojo. La vaca dice Muu.
Alternatively you could ask comprehension questions with Sí/No Verdad/Mentira responses, or at a higher level, require a response in a phrase or sentence.
And finally, how about making a map of the farmyard and giving directions around it in Spanish, or making it into a game and guiding a blindfolded classmate using only animal noises (but don’t try and confuse them like the animals in the book!)
There are lots of art ideas that go with this book – you can see one below.

Looking for ideas of how to use the book, I found lots of ideas for using the English version What the Ladybird heard. I’ve collected them together on a Pinterest board.
It included the video below of Julia Donaldson and her husband singing a song based on the story – anyone fancy writing a Spanish version?

Some other posts and reviews of the book:
Tell Bake and Love
Ediciones Fortuna

La Mariquita appears in two further books – Lo que Escuchó la Mariquita Despúes and Lo que Escuchó la Mariquita en Vacaciones.

Do you have a favourite Julia Donaldson book? Do share in the comments if you do!

As I came towards the end of sharing the books I bought in Bilbao at Easter, it dawned on me that I’d bought some lovely books in Barcelona last May and not shared them. Here’s one of them!

I was initially drawn by the title as it reminded me of the game (similar reason why I bought the book I shared a couple of weeks ago, also called Veo Veo ); I explain the game in this post and also here.

However, I was even more excited when I opened the book.

1. I love a flap book as I find that they offer an extra something when you read them aloud, adding a mystery that needs solving, a secret that needs discovering. And they really engage learners who all want to uncover what lies beneath, a great classroom management tool with young kids as you only get to open the flap if you’re sitting quietly.
2. It’s on a favourite theme of mine, animals, one that is often revisited in the time learners spend at my school. 
3. There are twenty animals featured in the book, but each page focuses on 5 of them, with a single sentence leading to the identity of one of those five animals. Therefore the possible answer is limited to one of those five, making it easier for young learners or beginners to offer a suitable answer. 
4. Each clue is a single sentence followed by ¿Quién soy? and are mostly very simple. Some are simply the noise that the animal makes, others refer to the physical appearance of the animal and others talk about the preferred food of the animal.
5. Lifting the flaps is fun enough but each opened flap on the page adds to the picture of the next. Hard to describe so I’ve videoed it. Very clever!
   
6. I have another book called Animales Salvajes that has much longer clues to the identity of an animal that I’ve used with Y2 and whilst they enjoyed the book, the longer clue went over their heads (although I enjoyed them!) and their guesses were more random based on the images rather than the Spanish. This book would work better for them, but the animals are not specifically jungle animals so I guess I’d have to write my own…
7. …and writing our own version would be a really simple and fun activity for older learners to share with younger ones. Perhaps one I’ll try out with Y6 as they continue on their learning abut verbs and recap all that they have learned over their years of Spanish.
8. And finally, there are actually 21 animals in the book with ‘un regalo’ on the final page!

Continuing on my posts about books I bought in Bilbao, we come to a couple of non-fiction texts that I bought at the Día del Libro market.  I was drawn to them as they are colourful, very visual and were also very reasonably priced at €5 (always a consideration when I’m buying several!) Non-fiction texts are less readily available than storybooks and it can be tricky to find ones that are appealing as well as accessible to primary school learners. So I was really pleased to find these. There are four in the series Aula del Saber and I selected these two as I already have books about the planets, and dinosaurs is a topic that y1 cover.

Firstly Curiosidades del Cuerpo Humano, chosen as it supports the Science curriculum as well as containing pages that will be useful for Health Week.  For example, this page will be useful to Y1 who are looking at dental health in Health Week as well as Y4 who look at what happens to our teeth, completing experiments using egg shells and Coca Cola!

Y5 are looking at life cycles and human reproduction so the page above would be interesting. As you can see, even without knowing much Spanish you can understand that the table shows the gestation times of various animals. There are several pages that outline the whole process of reproduction including the female and male reproductive system so it’s perhaps not one to put in the school library but rather a resource to be used in context.

I like that the information is on bite size chunks and that there are lots of diagrams and images to support understanding. This section would be good for finding cognates.

And the second book is Insólitos Animales which has a similar mixture of short texts, diagrams, tables of information and Did you know..? sections.

I’ve selected a few pages that drew my attention.

This one could be the stimulus for a sorting activity, giving learners a list of animals to classify into groups and create simple sentences e.g. Una ballena es un mamífero. Una rana es un anfibio.

Here’s an idea of what a double page spread looks like:

Some interesting vocabulary in the tables below; learners could follow the model and complete for other animals. The short texts could be used for a ‘Find the word for…’ activities as well as simple comprehensions that guide the learner through the text, calling on their existing knowledge of elephants/frogs as well as their linguistic knowledge to respond.

Y4 will finish their unit on animals before the end of term so I think we’ll have a look at this book together! And I’ll let you know any further ideas we have to use it.

In my next post I’ll share some other non fiction texts that I have collected. In the mean time, here are some other of my posts on a similar subject that might interest you:

Muy Interesante Junior

ColoradoLibraries (the West Sussex link no longer works but there are some resources here that are based around animals and their habitats)

¿De dónde viene el yak? my own non fiction text written using Storybird.

Another post about books I bought in Bilbao.

I’ve long been a fan of Gloria Fuertes, in particular her poem Doña Pito Piturra which I’ve written about before and so has Erzsi Culshaw.

The National Curriculum Language programme requires learners to:

• discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied

and the KS2 section specifically states that pupils should be taught to:

• explore the patterns and sounds of language through songs and rhymes and link the spelling, sound and meaning of words
• appreciate stories, songs, poems and rhymes in the language

I’m trying to include more whole class poems that we read and recite together in light of this and also as a way of supporting the English curriculum which requires learners to recite poetry.

So when I saw a series of books called Lee con Gloria Fuertes I decided to purchase a couple. It was hard to decide which to choose but I settled for one on nature and one on weather.

Below are my favourite poems from the books. The first is a list of wishes entitled Todos contra la contaminación which fits well with the eco focus at both my schools and would work well as a reading/drawing activity with learners choosing a line or two to illustrate. The second poem is called Gatos constipados and is about two poorly cats who get thrown out for coughing too much!

There are lots more books in the series so I may well purchase more in the future.

You can find more poems specifically for children by Gloria Fuertes here and others here. In this post there are a number of downloads of her poems along with links to other Gloria Fuertes poems including here (poems about time) and here (poems about professions). You can find a PDF of more of her work here plus here which also has a reading guide.

One of the books I bought in Bilbao was Un bicho extraño by Mon Daporta, a book which first came to my attention at Language World last year during the Show and Tell when Jesús from the Consejería shared it.

It’s a charming book that fits in well with the work we’re currently doing in Y4 about describing our faces and body parts. I love the video below of the story being told using a picture onto which body parts are stuck/removed as the story develops. And the wonderful thing is, the Consejería have produced a series of activities to use the book as well, including activities for pre and post reading. Some lovely ideas, and the instructions are bilingual too so no need to worry if you’re not fluent in Spanish!

I’ve also found this Slideshare that discusses ideas for using the story, and culminates with making your own version of the book using felt, buttons, ribbons etc.

I’m conscious that I haven’t posted since before school started so I thought I’d share something I’ve made this week.

At WCPS, Foundation and Key Stage 1 teachers follow the Little Languages scheme of work for Spanish. It’s simple to use, has clear instructions and best of all, builds up from a +/- 10 minute activity/ies in FS to 10- 15 minutes in Y1 and 15-20 minutes in Y2. The activities can be repeated during the week or just done once, and there’s lots of repetition. Sound files are included to support the teachers (none of whom are fluent or confident Spanish speakers) and visuals too.

I’m timetabled to teach two Y2classes this half term which is great, so I’m following the same scheme but making it a bit more in depth and adding my own bits to it! At the same time, I need to ensure that the third class have a similar experience; their teacher is doing their lessons with half a class at a time as the other half go swimming and then the other half when they swap.

The last few weeks have been based around animals.

Week one we sang an adapted version of  Vengan a ver mi granja featuring a kitten (un gatito) and a duckling (un patito). We sang the song with actions then played Patito/Gatito, a game with cuddly toys.

We sent someone out of the room and hid the ‘gatito’. When they returned we had to find ‘gatito’ by listening to the rest of the class repeating its name; the nearer the person got, the louder we said ‘gatito’. One class was really good at the dynamics whilst the other needed a bit of help as they were loud from the start and didn’t leave themselves enough leeway to get louder without screaming! Then we played with ‘patito’. This led to horror when someone hid the cuddly in the class play oven! The next week, we added ‘perrito’ to the game. Very popular and the children recalled the words clearly after so much repetition.

Download wk 1 gatito patito

The next week we moved onto a story about wild animals called ¿Quién soy? in which you see small parts of a wild animal who asks ¿Quién soy? before revealing themself and saying ‘Soy un elefante / un tigre / una jirafa’ etc. Whilst reading the story for the first time, we assigned each animal an action and children showed they understood by doing the action on subsequent retellings. For example, un elefante was arm as a trunk; una jirafa, arm above head like a long neck; un tigre was claws in front; and un león was the same but whilst swishing your hair. They also joined in with ¿Quién soy? and some with the response too. Another game followed in which children mimed an animal and asked ¿Quién soy?, challenging their classmates to guess. Again, plenty of volunteers and lots of language. We also used masks to play a similar game with the images from the story; we looked at the clue images, chorusing ¿Quién soy?, and the child wearing the correct mask jumped up and announced ‘Soy….’  

Their favourite is…

… accompanied by puffing out the cheeks (which strangely helped them to say the word!)

To continue the theme I made a simple labelling sheet with 8 animals, three of which they hadn’t met: un mono, una cebra, una serpiente. This led to a really good discussion about how they could work out which animal these words matched.

‘Mono looks like the start of monkey.’

‘Cebra looks like zebra.’ ‘It starts with a s sound not a z or a c though’

‘Serpiente sounds like snake because it’s got a sss at the start’ (that followed me reading the word with a very sibilant s!)

Download jungle animals worksheet

This week, the lesson was to be based around Alarma en la jungla. But I couldn’t it. I’m sure I’ve got it so Im not buying another copy until I’ve had a good look, and I couldn’t find a powerpoint or PDF online (that didn’t require me to sign up to something requiring my credit card details!) so I had to find an alternative.

Step forward, Animales salvajes. This is a lovely book that I bought in Spain for 2€ which has a little rhyme giving a clue to the animal hiding behind the ‘plastic page’. Look at the example below!

We’d met all but one animal so I planned to read it to the class, sharing the book so that everyone could have a look, emphasising or explaining key words to help them guess. For example, the first animal is described as ‘verde’ and they have a chart of Spanish colours on the wall so that gave them a clue that it wasn’t the elephant! However, I was aware that my colleague in the 3rd Y2 class couldn’t speak Spanish and wouldn’t be able to read the book to the children. So I made a powerpoint with embedded sound for her so she could just show the pictures and turn the pages whilst the text and sound came from the IWB. And I added a question to each slide too ¿Qué es? as it’s a common question that they’ll hear repeatedly.

Download animales salvajes

Except we had two special assemblies so we didn’t use it! However, we’re all ready for next week. And hopefully the sound on the IWB in one of the classes will be fixed as the children are eager for a repeat of Veo a un animal on the BBC Primary Spanish website.

Firstly, it’s a guessing song about wild animals.

Secondly, they like the funny pictures and the catchy tune.

And thirdly, they are particularly impressed because I wrote it (and all the other Spanish/French songs, games and vocabulary /information pages on the site)  and this has elevated me to superstardom in their eyes!

We did however have a great game of ‘Secret leader’ in which we all sat in a circle and chanted a word whilst doing an action. We sent a child out and nominated a leader who would change the action whenever they wanted (I changed the word in response to their action as it was the first time we’d played but one child did it themselves so we’ll see what happens next time!). The child returned and had to work out the Secret leader.  “Oh, it’s like ‘Wink-faint’ isn’t it?” said one child which made me think of the days when we used to ‘murder’ each other and die violently and gorily! This class are only 6 years old though 😉 Again, a game with lots of repetition with the action reinforcing the spoken word.

I’ll report back on how we’re progressing at a later date. Hope you enjoy the resources I’ve shared.

Mr S has been to Mexico this week and returned bearing gifts. I suspect there will be a few posts coming up in the near future about these ‘gifts’  and here’s the first!

I asked Mr S, if he had time, to bring me back children’s books that are simple and repetitive, and that’s what these two little books are.

Very simple and designed for very young learners, each 2 page spread introduces two related vocabulary items and then poses a question that is answered by lifting a flap. Taking the example of Animales, some of the questions have obvious answers like ¿Qué ha puesto la gallina? and ¿De qué color es la mariposa? (no flap for that one) whilst other have a range of possible answers with the correct one revealed under the flap like ¿Quién monta a al caballo? but there’s no reason why you couldn’t give silly answers to any of the questions;

¿Qué come el monito? Un cocodrilo

¿Qué ha puesto la gallina? Un dragón

The other little book is called Palabras and has more ‘random’ vocabulary, presented in pairs on a double spread. Once more there’s a question and a flap that reveals the answer, and some questions are more open ended than others.

The question on the right made me giggle! ¿Qué lleva la muñeca debajo del vestido? (What is the doll wearing under her dress?) It reminded me of De quelle couleur est ta culotte?

And then I lifted the flap.

 Well there’s a word I hadn’t heard before. So I looked it up. Apparently pololos are bloomers. But that’s not all as you can see here.  In Chile, un pololo is a ‘novio’ or boyfriend and also, according to this Etimología de Pololo, an insect or a short job. And Reverso says

   pololo  (Chile)  

So, dolly might have all sorts of things hidden under that pretty spotty frock 😉

And of course, la muñeca also mean wrist…

Words are fun, aren’t they?

PS these are ‘pololos’ too

*This is one of a series of posts about some of my favourite story books for Primary Language Learning*

When my boys were little, one of their favourite books was Moo Baa La la la; in fact, I can still quote it verbatim as I read it so many times! So I was pleased to see that there was Spanish version Muu. Bee. ¡Así fue!

This simple rhyming book introduces the noises that animals make as well as animal names. I was pleased when I read it that it still (mostly!) rhymes in Spanish and that it features lots of animals that make different noises in Spanish. Or, as it’s come to be put in my classroom

“Animals speak other languages too!”

When we use this in class, after the initial reading learners want to join in with the animal noises – it is fun after all pretending to be a snorting rhino! – so I pause at the appropriate moment to allow for this before continuing. The final page  also invites the reader/learner to share what they say so can lead into a game of ‘Adivina que animal soy‘; learners take it in turns to pretend to be an animal by making the noise and the rest of the class have to work out which animal they are. This could be done with more ‘control’ by assigning learners animals in advance or giving them a mask. And a (noisy!) follow on activity could be for everyone to be assigned an animal from the story e.g un cerdo, una oveja, una vaca, un pato, un caballo, un perro; and their task is to find the rest of their family by making the animal noise  and listening out for others doing the same.

As I mentioned above,  “animals speak other languages’ was the conclusion that was reached when we read this book, and when I presented at the ALL North East Spanish Day at Gosforth High School I was given this book which reinforces just that!

Whilst this isn’t a book in the language that I teach (mostly Spanish) I love sharing this as, to me, language learning is about more than one language. It’s about exploring and making connections, and sparking interest as well as celebrating diversity. This book has the English in the corner, and then one or two ‘featured’ languages on each page  i.e. the ones that animals say in their speech bubbles as well as a section in the opposite corner which shows another three languages.

And in case you have trouble pronouncing the animal sounds, there is a glossary on the inside covers written “phonetically” to give you some help! My aim in using this book would not be to teach animal noises in 30+ languages but to look at similarities between the different languages, to consider whether we’d know which animal made that noise if we hadn’t got the picture to help us, and why, and to perhaps look at the home languages of learners in the group.

The idea that animals speak different languages just like humans seems to appeal to children; I wouldn’t be surprised if there were pupils of mine across the world these holidays addressing animals in their ‘native language’ 🙂

And if you want a French book with animal noises – and nice touchy feely patches for stroking ‘if you sit nicely!’ – there’s  Le Réveil de la ferme in which a little sheep dog goes around the farm greeting all his farmyard friends. He introduces them in a pair of rhyming sentences and then says Bonjour ………. before the animal responds with their call in French. At the end, he says goodbye to them all in a double page spread with all the animal calls in French (great as a reference point!)