Category: animals

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

When I first started teaching Primary languages, I went on a course run by LFEE in Salignac for French teachers (thoroughly recommend it – I worked hard but had the time of my life and rediscovered a love of French that I’d lost when I was made to start from scratch at secondary school.)  During my time there we went on a trip to Souillac and several of us spent a while in a bookshop looking for suitable books to use in our classrooms. And this was the one we all loved.

De quelle couleur est ta culotte? is a lift the flap book that poses the title question to a series of animals.

Each animal has a name that rhymes with its species e.g Lucie le Brebis, Mumu la Tortue and Émile le Crocodile …

and you lift the flap to find the answer:

At the end there’s a big surprise as Armand l’elephant is a little forgetful…

I’ve used this story with EYFS – and younger in fact. They love the animals, recalling their names, and the colour of their pants. And everyone giggles hysterically in mock horror as the surprise is revealed – because we are, of course, surprised every time we read it ;o) I ask questions e.g. Valentine a la culotte rouge ou bleu?   Qui a la culotte rose? De quelle couleur est la culotte de Aimee? offering choices if needed and then we read it again with choral responses as we lift the flaps; sometimes a particularly confident child will want to ask the question too although it’s more usual to just say the name of the animal. When I shared it in Reception, we drew a washing line of pants and coloured them in for the animals. I’d probably make it into a game now, either on the IWB with a race to match the animals and pants, or as a team game with images of the animals and coloured underwear. And I’d also look to make the story our own, perhaps not about pants this time but about another item of clothing: De quelle couleur sont tes chaussettes? perhaps or a teddy bear: De quelle couleur est ton nounours? or even change it a little and ask Comment est ton chapeau? which could be answered with adjectives other than colour.

I used to teach Kindergarten at the (Catholic!) school with children from 18 months to 3 years, and was sharing this book with them when an inspector arrived. My momentary fear that the inspector wouldn’t share my love of the book, and that of the Kindergarten head who had a great sense of humour, was unfounded as she was giggling along with all the children and said she thoroughly enjoyed the French lesson!

I’ve found a sound file of someone reading the story too! De quelle couleur est ta culotte? sound file

One final (for now!) Storybird, this time a little more complex than previously. This book is about animals and from where they come. It could be used as part of a cross curricular unit (geography /Science / Spanish). Whilst making it, I found a great website called Animalandia which has information in the form of short ‘fichas’ and a paragraph about over 400 animals and great pictures too. I particularly like the Carrusel de imágenes that can be set to flick through a certain animal group or just pop up images of random animals.
I wish I’d known of this site when I wrote this post about the QCA unit El Carnaval de los Animales, but it would certainly help with the latter tasks such as writing about an animal in the first person,  creating My Wildself and describing it.
¿De dónde viene el yak? on Storybird

PS I promise to get a new ‘obsession’ for November! ;O)

Thanks to @AliceAyel on Twitter for flagging up a great post on a blog called Teaching Spanish w/ Comprehensible Input by Cynthia Hitz. The post is entitled Using videos of children’s stories and lo and behold, there was my son’s favourite story as a child, playing to me in Spanish.

Entitled Click Clack Muu, Vacas escritoras (Click Clack moo, Cows that type) the story is set on a farm where the cows get hold of a typewriter and start sending letters to Farmer Brown demanding electric blankets. And then the ducks get involved… Isaac is now 14 and can still recite it verbatim. And so can I! So it’s great to see this post with so many ideas of how you might use it in the classroom. If only I had a class with whom to share it.

httpv://youtu.be/MQS-_5_MP-Q

I found these Resources from PBS  – they’re in English but there are some great ideas that could be translated into Spanish.

Gracias @sonrisadelcampo and thanks Isaac for the memories ;o)

Having posted my presentation on the QCA unit El Carnaval de los animales earlier today, it seemed rather appropriate that I should find a free resource that goes with the unit this evening!

I knew that the Consejería de Educacción had a wonderful poster to illustrate this unit, but until now didn’t know that they had a downloadable animation that features the same wonderful illustrations. With files that are compatible with Mac or PC, the animation presents the vocabulary if you press the musical notes, then asks you to drag the correct word to the correct picture. If you make a mistake, there’s a lovely chorus of children saying ‘no’. Only does one thing but fun nonetheless.

There’s also an animation for Christmas featuring a Christmas decorated with baubles from the Spanish speaking world and the villancico Campana sobre Campana which is lovely, and an animated alphabet which is only downloadable on a PC :O(

Lots of other great stuff on the site for the primary classroom too. More at a future date!

I am so behind with posting things – rather a lot going on at the moment!

Apologies to those who have been patiently waiting for my presentation at the Comenius Conference at Newman College on June 29th – here it is!

It was a really great day and it was a wonderful way to finish this phase of the project.

The last video has a footballer reading 2 non-fiction books about animals – always a popular subject in primary schools.

The first links into geography, culture and the environment; life cycles – who eats who – and habitats – who lives where.

Here’s a link to the West Sussex Grid where there are some resources linked to habitat. And some animal / habitat flashcards.

The second is about elks – venados – and how they live. Really interesting!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE_AtnV0Cjo

Last one – for now anyway!

A Colombian Old MacDonald called Tío Ramón.

You know the drill – click the picture and it’ll take you to the song!

And thank to 123SpanishTogether for the wonderful songs!

Having never been to Stoke on Trent previously, I was there twice in three days! This time I’d been invited to speak at a ‘Creative Spanish’ afternoon for Primary Language teachers, organised jointly by Lorna Harvey from Staffordshire and Helen Thomas from Stoke on Trent. I really enjoyed the presentation on using Art by Shirley Kliment-Temple and was sorry to miss the salsa and skipping!

My presentation was a repeat of the one I did at the Primary Language Show in Liverpool about the QCA unit based on SaintSaens Carnival of the Animals, and I have posted the slidecast from that event below so that you can listen and watch the slides! If yu want any of the resources, they are in this post.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Brilliant ideas on how to recall pets in French using ‘pegging technique’-

un chien – a ‘she’ dog called Ann
un lapin – a rabbit on your lap in a pan
un hamster – a staring hamster
un perroquet – a parrot on your shoulder eating a pear saying OK
un souris – Sue the mouse looking for her friend Rhi(ann)
un cochon d’Inde – a cuddly guinea pig munching a dand(elion)
un poisson – a fish munching a croissant

Thanks Michelle!

I was very privileged to be invited to present this year at the Primary Languages Show in Liverpool, not once but twice!

I promised at my two sessions that I would post my notes and resources on my blog for people to download and use.

So here’s my first presentation. If you download it, the hyperlinks all work – or did when I tried them. However, if they don’t, remember that I have bookmarked all the sites to which I referred (and more) on Delicious tagged PLS09 – http://delicious.com/lisibo/pls09

The Powerpoints I used are also below –

I have blogged this unit previously here and you will find my worksheets, the SoW and more ideas here and a fuller description of how we animated our animals here.

A couple of things I mentioned but didn’t put in the presentation – the masks were downloaded from Sparklebox and the animation was done using FramebyFrame on my Macbook. You can also use SMAnimator (free to download on a PC) or ICanAnimate (for PC or Mac costs about £40)

If you’ve got any questions, feel free to leave a comment below!