This book is amazing! It has flaps, dials, double page factfiles, stories, quizzes, jokes and puzzles, all teaching facts about our planet – Planète Terre. In fact, it’s so amazing that I couldn’t just take photos, I had to make a video!
It’s the kind of book that would go down well on the class bookshelf for children to access in their free reading time. The facts are short and therefore less threatening than in your average non fiction book, allowing learners to concentrate on decoding a few unfamiliar words using their knowledge of cognates and other languages as well as context and of course their existing geographical/scientific knowledge. And although Spanish is the language we learn at my schools, I would still put this on the bookshelf as children like variety, some go to French club and others just enjoy looking at texts in other languages.
If you wanted to guide children’s reading of the book, you could compile a list of words in English that could be written in French by looking in the book (there are many words written in bold that would suit this activity) or perhaps create some sentences with gaps to be completed by reading a certain page, or even pose the six questions below and ask more advanced learners to answer in a sentence or two.
I’m off to find more of these – in Spanish this time!
And here’s my session on Making links across the curriculum.
I didn’t get to share my Pinterest pages as they were blocked by the firewall, but here’s the link to my Roman resources for Spanish. If you click through the presentation, you’ll find links to things like the music for The Carnival of the Animals, a slideshare of Querido Zoo, links to BuildyourWildself and Switchzoo for making hybrid animals and a cheesy song in Spanish about the planets.
On Friday I was fortunate to attend the Stafford Primary MFL conference. I spoke twice, the after lunch keynote and then a workshop on cross curricular links, but really enjoyed listening to others and learning from their brilliant ideas.
I like to share what I learn when I go to conferences. Sometimes I tweet madly and fail to make notes, and other times I try to take notes. On this occasion I started out trying to do both but went for the latter in the end.
So here are my notes (without much editing!) I hope that they make sense!
Lorna Harvey – A link with Geography
We looked at the PoS for languages and also for Geography, and looked at areas where they overlap e.g. “inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people” from the Geography PoS fits well with language aims.
Ideas –
En France …. on trouve? in French
Link to other countries in French – where might you find these features? as a starter activity for Geography
En Afrique je voudrais visiter…. – looking at the rest of the world rather than just UK and USA.
Where might you go on safari? Learn the phrase Je voudrais… and survey table about the most popular place to go
Make up a song! (tune of Pop goes the weasel)
Have a little conversation (about where you’d like to go on safari and what you can see) and video it – basic phrases but great acting and lots of repetition
Write a mnemonic for walking around France – BLGSIS
One idea was – Big lions growl scarily in SouthAfrica
Why visit France? Create an advertisement – given rubric of requirements – cross curricular
Lorna Harvey – A world of celebrations
This began with the question – How can we integrate languages into KS1 each week with little time and little language?
Can we find a festival every two weeks form Christmas to Easter?
created a list of festivals
learned songs and performed plays (Christmas),
made une fève – figurines for La galette de rois and described it using colours,
Chinese names for Chinese New Year – became a panda bear and chose a name; Chinese New Year song
Japanese snow festival – looked at images and guessed where they were, used video clips to introduce – linked to hot/cold and played game.
Germany for Karneval – learn some phrases for princess eg Prinzessin, Hase, and children asked to bring in one item to become that character/person the next week
Spain for Fallas – text and video clip with questions – what can we work out? learned days of the week to the Macarena (lunes, martes x2; miércoles, jueves x2; viernes, sábado x2; eeeeee domingo)
To pull together, look at a map of the places and label them – where would you go if you could choose?
Karine Guillot – Role play! Role play!
Reasons to use role play –
to develop pupils’ spontaneity
to develop pupils’ authenticity when speaking French
We looked at
phrases to get someone’s attention including yelling Coucou!
likes and dislikes – je hais – I hate (stronger than je déteste)
suggestions – Et si on….? How about….. Et si on jouait au ballon? Et si on mangeait un snack?
agreeing and disagreeing, using lots of gestures as French are dramatic e.g. ça ma branche (that plugs me in!) I’m up for it! Non, pas aujourd’hui – no, not today
Traditional French games –
le jeu d’oie
le jeu de la marelle (like hopscotch) throw une pierre starting at 1 whilst standing on TERRE to arrive at CEL
le jeu des dames (draughts) with les pions (draughts/counters)
le jeu des échecs – roi, reine, fou, cavalier, tour, pion (pawn)
les cartes – pique (spades) trèfle (clubs) couer( hearts) carreau (diamonds) l’as (the ace) le valet / la dame/ le roi
using boards games like Jeu de l’escargot – same board but new questions each time
David Moss (BEST Midlands) – 10 easy to organise classroom games for Gramur and Spelin (sic)
1. Monkey school
Like hangman
one monkey whoop for each letter
if one correct letter, you whoop saying letter in position!
best to choose from a list or a theme
2. Scene of the crime – MFL
mixed up word – detectives have to solve the word by unscrambling it
can up level by adding a blank or two to challenge
Ps can prepare for you by writing their own word and swapping in the room and across school
can be any words – cross curricular
as above, best to choose from a list/theme
3. Great Wall of China
like Chinese whispers but you trace letters on hand and pass it down the line, a letter at a time
be clear where the words come from – a list/ theme
4. Order Order!
like a human sentence, spelling a word
use accented letters to make more challenging
can also sellotape to pupils’ backs and the class reorder them by giving instructions
5a. Accents forever
using a Powerpoint with rotating words and two flyswats
swat the accent according to instruction e.g. I’m looking for a circumflex over the letter e
5b. Apostrophes forever
same as accents forever but for English!
6. On the march
assign physical actions to parts of speech e.g. march for a verb, hands on head for a noun
call out a word and pupils respond with the action
in English, a word like ‘light’ can have three actions!
7. O and X
Say the word/phrase in the position you want to win the square
8. Sword drill
using a dictionary as a sword
march! attention! salute!
possible instructions – find the word for…. what page is it on? what gender is it? spell the word and so on
perhaps photocopy page, or word list, or put your finger in the page in the early stages
9. I need a better actor
act out the phrase – three people all act out
eg the girl plays football slowly
after first, you call “I need a better actor!”
can vote for best with clapping
react using different adverbs
10. Blankety Blank
have a panel who write their word to fill a gap (from a list on the board) on a mini whiteboard.
teams try to match with as many of the panel as possible
Lorna Harvey – Show off your language learning!
How to celebrate language learning with the community
e.g. her school had previously used The Gruffalo in French with y3 and 4 as learners with parents invited to watch like at an Inspire – how can we teach parents and learners at the same time?
Some ideas shared:
Languages and countries
carnivals around the world
Martinique and France
instructional language – making smoothies
Paris
Parent workshop:
made and gave opinions about cocktails – like and don’t like
fashion show – introduced each other (linked to carnival clothes)
tour operators – persuade the parents to go to your venue! Very impressive but two verbs (c’est and visiter)
Some possible activities-
using a phonic focus
using words that we want to use rather than the ones in the book!
used FLA to talk about Martinque and Carnival there
classify fruit into countries
like/dislike
order instructions
made own cocktail!
match descriptions of places to France or Martinique – which would it likely be?
A really great day! I’ll share my presentations in my next post!
Reading Los mellizos del tiempo got me thinking about integrating language learning in the Primary curriculum. As I mentioned in my previous post, it links so well with the ‘topic’ of Egyptians, or under the ‘learning journey’ of Treasure taken in Year 4 at WCPS. So I had a bit of a look around and came up with the following ideas, resources and links that might be of use to anyone who wants to do just that!
General information
Egipto para niños – collection of fairly simple texts on a number of areas of Egyptian life including the Pyramids, food, manners and mummies as well as a bit of geography. This text is in fairly short chunks too. And Blog de los Niños has some short chunks of information, particularly about Egyptian gods and the meanings of the various crowns.
Here are some longer texts about various Egyptian ‘misterios’ including the Mummy of Pyramid KV22.
Historia Simple has some short-ish historical summaries of the various phases of the 2500 year long Egyptian era including a section on the Pyramids. There’s also some information on El Historiador.
And of course there’s Wikipedia – you can translate the pages back and forth between languages so you could have some fun with picking out key items of vocabulary.
Slideshare has some presentations for ideas and information including this lovely one from some young learners which is beautifully simple and asks some good questions on slide 4 that could be used for investigation.
And this blog has two simple presentations by Dora la Exploradora and friends, and Hello Kitty covering some of the basics of Egyptian geography and history in words and image.
However, my favourite find is from Junta de Andalucia. This site is a one stop shop about Egyptians, written in simple language and presented in short paragraphs with lots of visuals, making it really accessible. There is a dictionary of key terms as well as the facility to click on highlighted words for an immediate ‘pop up’ definition. Lots of interactive maps and also a hieroglyphics maker within the site also make it a great place for young learners to find out about Egypt. There’s also a webquest that guides learners through the site, posing questions that can be explored and investigated. (There’s another more complex webquest here along with other Egyptian resources shared on the Tiching site.)
A close second goes to a resource from Gobierno de Canarias that takes an interactive look at the Pyramids with extra information, again simply presented, appearing as you click on specific areas of the pyramid.
Videos
Videos are another source of information that can often be more accesible than just text.
And then there are these cartoons, the first from a series called Érase una vez.. and the second from a series called Martín Martín.
And here’s another I’ve just found which is a short video about the Egyptian pyramids:
You might also like to try the Barrio Sésamo approach with this video in which Lola visits the Pyramids or this video which presents images and name of the animals of Egypt before moving on to images of buildings and then some short snippets of information about Egyptian life.
Songs
You know how I love a good kitschy song! Here’s one called Momias de colores by Rockolate. When my hand is feeling better, I might try to subtitle the video using Amara or at least write them down!
(see also Fátima una momia responsable below under Stories for another song)
“Literacy” ideas
(see also Stories below!)
Perhaps with older, more advanced learners you could use some of the definitions from this ‘Glosario’ for a match the word to the definition. You could choose key words like Faraon, Esfinge, Obelisco, Momia, Papiro, Sarcófagos, Vasos canopos and so on.
And this vocabulary list gives you the Spanish word with the Arabic equivalent. Could provide an interesting language comparison activity.
And here’s an online hieroglyphics tool. Would be fun to write some words in hieroglyphics and ask learners to decode before they write their names. Or they could write key Egyptian vocabulary in hieroglyphics for display as well as in Spanish for a multi lingual display!
Maths ideas
The Egyptian system of counting and adding etc was very developed and you can find out all about it here (in more detail than I think I need to know but if you like Maths…)
This site has lots of writing at the top (useful information!) but the really ‘useful’ part for learners is the chart with the Egyptian number glyphs and the puzzles underneath, both for whole numbers and also for fractions. I foresee lots of fun with setting maths problems for each other… There are a few more maths problems here.
A document explaining that Egyptian numbers are not positional so you can write the units, tens, hundreds etc in any order! Un sistema aditivo – el egipcio
And of course there are all sorts of things you can do at a very simple level such as sequencing and using geometrical shapes when making Egyptian jewellery, and making pyramids.
Stories
I found this free video story about Egypt called El pendiente de la princess: Cuento de Egipto. Sadly it doesn’t go full screen but the man telling the story speaks clearly and fairly slowly so it could be used for a true/false activity or perhaps a multiple choice activity.
However, I found two more promising possibilities!
2. This PDF (rita_ladrones) has links to useful sites (some I’d already highlighted above before I found this!) and also some activity worksheets. Whilst the middle sheet on characters in the book would be hard without reading it, the first sheet (matching words with images and writing your name in hieroglyphics) needs no knowledge of the book, and I think that the third sheet which is a sequencing activity could also be done without reading the story, and actually gives a very simple synopsis of what happens!
3.Then I discovered that there is an online version of the CD rom of activities about the book, complete with Teachers Notes (in Spanish!) There are various activities including finding synonyms and antonyms, sequencing text and a wordsearch – see below image for contents. Some activities are quite challenging for primary learners; however, a bit of challenge can be a good thing!
Fátima, una momia muy responsable
Fátima una momia muy responsable is a lovely story about an Egyptian mummy called Fátima who wants to be a tour guide and keeps scaring people! She builds up a great collection of hats and torches by doing it, but one day…
It’s a narrated version of a book that has been used in many Spanish primary schools.
httpv://youtu.be/On5fNWq9N8w
Some ideas for using the story –
act out the story
talk about colours and sizes describing the hats that Fátima collected / was gifted
pretend to be Fátima and give a tour of a pyramid
one of the class blogs I discovered had a song on it about how Fátima dances which would be great fun, whatever your age! You can access the words here or here, and here is a recording of young learners singing it!
I love ‘being a magpie’ and collecting ideas, and here are some classes in Spanish primaries that have done an Egyptian topic and shared their ideas.
Mis cosillas de Educación Infantil – this link takes you to the posts for the entire project. I particularly like the concept map that they made which includes lots of important vocabulary organised systematically. I think that having a map of what is already known that is added to as time passes and more information is gathered is a great way of documenting learning and progress, especially if learners post questions that they’d like to investigate and see them answered as they explore and investigate!
E.I. 5 años Carlos Ruiz have been doing an Egyptian topic too and this is the first of a number of posts on what they have done. If look in the archive, there are further posts documenting their work throughout noviembre and diciembre 2012 including the sequencing activity referenced in the Maths section above and an interesting post giving instructions on making ‘papiros’.
La Clase de la Bruja Maruja have done a project on Egyptians too and have published some of their work as well as links on their blog. Of particular use I think are the simple worksheets they used that could easily be used in the primary language classroom. I also love the fact that they’ve been using the wonderful Woodlands site by Mandy Barrow using GoogleTranslate to put it into Spanish!
And the Egiptologia site has a number of resources from schools in their Trabajos en colegios e instituciones section as well as Tus trabajos escolares. Lots of the resources are written by students making them suitable for learners to access themselves as well for use by teachers as information sources and inspiration!
So, I hope you’ve find the above useful. I know that there are many more things that could be done; for example, I haven’t even started on the possibilities for art projects! If you have any ideas or resources, please leave a comment – it’s good to share! And even if you haven’t, leave a comment! Its good to know that people are reading!
A story about a girl called Maria finding some lines on the ground at the base of a mountain in Peru opens up the possibility of looking at the history of a Spanish speaking country, the culture and heritage, and the art of that area. Here’s some background information that might help!
I think it’s be a brilliant way of integrating lots of different areas of the curriculum – what about making your own Nazca lines on the school field?
I recently discovered Ben Curtis‘ Notes from Spain blog (via a Tweet from Mark Pentleton I think). The sub heading, Travel -Life -Culture, gives a flavour of what can be found on the site, but doesn’t adequately describe the breadth of information and insight offered. There’s are 3 podcasts, and the excellent Notes in Spanish section quite apart from great and varied blog posts – recent favourites of mine include photos from Spanish fiestas and ferias , a video of the madness of walking El Camino del Rey and a post about the Patios Interiores that brought flooding back the memory of descending two floors to knock on the door of a neighbour I had yet to meet in order to retrieve my smalls that had fallen off the washing line. What an icebreaker that was ;o)
Today when I checked my Google Reader there were two articles , one about news reports from Spain and the other about a new feature of Google Maps which excited me!
Entitled – Kill ten minutes in Spain with Google Maps, it points out the addition of geotagged photos and Wikipedia entries to Google maps. Really interesting and useful too as now it’s possible to look at the physical geography, satellite images, street maps and photos of places (and I’ve just discovered, you can check on traffic in the USA!). And it’s not just Spain – there are images and information from all over the world (the W is for a Wikipedia entry) Year 6 will be my first guinea pigs as we investigate the area around Wasquehal, France in Geography- they’re already very impressed by GoogleMaps and had a great time finding sites in Wasquehal on PlaceSpotting (anyone else doing this unit, there are about 8 or 9 puzzles if you use the search facility and input ‘Wasquehal’)
So I’m now off to do some virtual sightseeing before I really go to Spain next week. (click on the map to make it bigger or go to here.
I’ve just received notification from Ruth Churchill at CILT of some FREE resources available. Never one to look a gift horse …, I immediately investigated!
Apparently May 9th is Europe Day (I’m afraid this was the first I’d heard of it!) and the European Commission has produced a booklet to promote the day as well as provide information promoting the EU.
Here’s the e-mail:
Representation of the European Commission in the United Kingdom – Passport to the European Union
What do we know about the member states of the European Union?Whereabouts is the statue with more clothes than one would find in any woman’s wardrobe. Did they really use eggs to built a bridge in Prague? Could there still be an island where no female either human or animal is allowed? This and a lot more information on the 27 member countries of the European Union e.g. their size and population, famous citizens etc. is answered in our little booklet “Passport to the European Union” which also includes stickers of coins, flags, buildings and even a map. Children can find places for the stickers in the passport and on the map.
In order to supportEurope Day (9 May) activities for young people, the Representation of the European Commission in the United Kingdom is making 100,000 copies of the Passport to the European Union available to UK schools and similar organisations completely free of charge.
You can view the booklet online and then decide if you want to order up to 100 copies per school either from your Europe Direct centre or by filling in a form online. I’m planning on using them for SODA (start of the day activity) and also for incidental work. If every class focussed on a different country, we could share notes in assembly later in the week. Kids love finding things out and with stickers and things too, it’s sure to be a hit (they’ll prefer it to handwriting too!)
So don’t hang around- there are now 100 less copies as my order’s already in!
Here’s a montage of posters used in previous years to promote the day – perhaps it’ll inspire you!
To find out what’s going on in the UK, have a look at the events diary – I like the look of the Giant European Union Pub Quiz in Wrexham! And there’s also a whole page of ideas for how your school might be able to celebrate.
Just found this helpful video on Youtube that shows you how placeSpotting.com works, and as I can’t edit the previous post for some reason, I’ve made an appendix to the original post.
You may have noticed I’ve got a new widget on ¡Vámonos! labelled Where in the world…?? This follows someone (I’m afraid I can’t recall who!) Tweeting about placeSpotting.com, an online map game based on Google maps. There are numerous riddles showing a satellite picture of somewhere in the world in the top box, and in the bottom box is a Google map of the world. Your task is to find the exact satellite picture to ‘solve’ the riddle. Some people have left clues to help you – for example, I’ve just solved on with the clues
.…… Beach Crockett and Tubbs
leading me to Miami.
Yesterday I was sent to Ullaru with the clue
Kangaroos
I’m now addicted to the site – given the cold and hail/snow, it’s a fine way to spend a Bank Holiday afternoon, improving my Geographical knowledge (not my strong point). Some of the puzzles are fiendishly hard, others are very easy – I had to find the border between France and Spain yesterday!
Here are a few puzzles I’ve made to bamboozle you – they’re not hard! Congratulations to @mrmackenzie and @josepicardo for solving the first one very quickly!
