Thanks to Pat Sweeney on the Yahoo MFL Resources group for pointing out this group.

If you like Hi5, and you love a bit of 90s “cheese”, you’ll love Nubeluz.

As Pat writes –

“Many of Nubeluz’s songs seem to be innocent good fun and definitely have catchy tunes that make you want to dance and sing along.
However, some “carry a message “. For example “Papi, deja de fumar!”
( Daddy, give up smoking!) or “Cuidado ” ( Be careful!) which warns of being mislead by friends to get involved in things that are not right or good.”

She goes on to pose a question –

“I would be very interested to know what people think of the songs and whether they would deem them suitable for using as teaching aids..and if so..with which groups..how?”

So…here are some ideas for how to use  Yo quiero ser

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm1ZqJel8-c

I think this would fit well with the topics People who help us or Jobs people do that are part of EYFS and KS1. I think that the chorus is the most useful part.

Activities you might do:

• ask learners to identify the jobs they hear in the chorus. They are repeated at the very end so there are 2 chances to catch them. You might provide a tick sheet with pictures for younger learners or the names in Spanish for older ones.
• make a pelmanism game with job images and names in Spanish for matching first then for playing.
• cut the lyrics (chorus) into strips. Ask learners firstly to see if they can match the jobs with the description of what they do. This uses their LLS as they will look for cognates, make connections between the word for the job and words in the description and so on. Then they can check their answers by listening and watching again.
• I might use Amara (was UniversalSubtitles) http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/ to put Spanish subtitles on the video too. (See this example and also this post about how and why)

• I might use other video clip such as Los oficios which features a famous song, or this version with the words.
• This clip Cuando sea grande would be a good step onto using the future tense. Seré dentista/artista etc. I also like the final lines – “Cuando sea grande, haré mil cosas/Porque estoy seguro que podré. Y mientras tanto llega la hora/Solamente niño quiero ser”
• There is a whole unit of work on Udicom on Los oficios. These resources are intended for ‘alumnos de compensatoria’ or learners needing extra help in Spain so many are very simple exercises on copywriting, phonics, matching and writing words and short phrases. I particularly like the phonics sections and the use of little rhymes too.
• This interactive site is useful for learning the names of jobs by hovering over the people, and clicking to see/hear a short sentence about what they do. Further forward (click on arrow bottom right) it talks about “profesiones” – professions as opposed to “oficios” – jobs.
• Here’s a free poster that you can download – I believe you need to purchase the other posters tagged Los oficios but you can look at them for ideas!
• I also found this blog with an image and short descriptions for 6 jobs/professions.
• And this is a wonderful site with lots of ideas and materials for a wide age range. There are a number of stories at a variety of levels (primary and secondary) as well as comics and ‘information books’, all presented online. As this resource is aimed at social studies for Spanish learners, so you need to bear that in mind e.g. Look at the complexity of language rather than going by the age indicated. I looked at a few stories – Alejandro el canguro pintor (basic) is a lovely tale about a kangaroo that draws all the time, and Maria auxiliar de ayuda a domicilio is more complex and a home help who makes Grandma’s life better. There’s a teachers guide that includes ideas and some activity sheets. Well worth an explore if you’re looking to work cross curricularly at primary or secondary level!

So, Pat. Does that answer your question? 🙂

A message from Linda Parker of ALL

Primary Spanish teachers – join us for free at Language World on Saturday 31 March! http://www.all-languages.org.uk/events/language_world/language_world_2012

Are you looking for ways to improve your Spanish?  ALL Corporate Member, the Fundacion Comillas, will be with us at Language World to talk to teachers of Spanish about their professional development courses in the beautiful village of Comillas in Cantabria.  As well as these opportunities for teachers, this region has a lot to offer for school group visits and exchanges. Want to know more? Then why not take up this invitation to come along and find out for free on Saturday 31 March?   As well as visiting the Language World Exhibition (open from 08.30 – 14.00), you can come along to the following session completely free of charge:

11.55 – 12.40

 Fundacion Comillas

The Comillas Foundation: research, academic programs, and professional development

Professor Kim Griffin will present the Comillas Foundation programmes for professional development for Spanish teachers.  The Comillas Foundation was created in 2005 as a centre for the teaching and learning of the Spanish language and Hispanic culture.  Located in the picturesque town of Comillas on the northern coast of Spain, the Comillas Foundation offers a variety of courses specially designed for primary and secondary teachers of Spanish.  Courses are taught at all levels of competency and “classroom-without-walls” activities complement the academic environment.  The Comillas Foundation courses are total immersion courses and professors are trained to help participants use the Spanish language to their full potential.  Courses are also available for teachers who bring groups of young students to Comillas.

Dr. Kim Griffin has been a resident of Spain for thirty years. Dr. Griffin currently directs the academic program at the Comillas Foundation. Previously she directed the Middlebury College School in Spain; an undergraduate and post-graduate institution. A graduate of SUNY Oswego, Middlebury College, and the Ohio State University, she has taught both English and Spanish as a Second Language, founded and directed the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation for a Spanish university, and teaches post-graduate courses at several Spanish institutions. Dr. Griffin has also presided over the Association of North American University Programs in Spain, which represents over fifty of the most outstanding American universities that host programs in Spain.

Interested?  Contact us for a free pass today!  Email info@all-languages.org.uk

Please note that this invitation does not include refreshments, lunch or any other Language World sessions.  To join us for the full event, register HERE

A day early I know but I figured it would be more useful to tell you about it BEFORE the day so that you might be able to use it ON the day…

Via Twitter, I discovered this lovely activity from OnlineFreeSpanish.com for making Valentine’s Day cards.

I particularly like this resource as it offers lots of choice! You can choose a border, an image and a bilingual message to suit your personality and the recipient. Not all the messages are ‘slushy, lovey-dovey’ ones so it’s quite safe to use with a group of children who might not be into romance. And you can also choose to have the image in colour or leave it black adn white to be coloured in. Additionally, you can choose to print the card as a poster (one loveheart icon), as a sheet of four (four lovehearts) or as a sheet that can be folded to form a proper card (heart on card icon) The only downside is that the inside of the card is only in English 🙁

More Spanish Valentine’s fun here  on Youtube from Babelzone/LCF with a little video and a new take on He loves me, he loves me not!

For more Valentine’s ideas (mostly in French) check out Jo Rhys-Jones’ post on Talkabout Primary MFL.

And why not get adventurous and follow the lead of @wizenedcrone aka Fiona Joyce who had her Y9 learners writing a simple collaborative poem. Following a simple structure

Te quiero como ………… quiere a …………

learners can use dictionaries to suggest nouns to fill the gaps. In the example from Fiona, my favourite line is

‘Te quiero como las abuelas quieren a los crucigramas’

My example –

Te quiero como el mono quiere al plátano.

Te quiero como el pato quiere al agua.

Te quiero como los profes quieren a las vacaciones.

Te quiero como la fresa quiere a la nata.

Or you could try it with this pattern

…………. son rojos

…………. es azul

Quiero a ……………

Como quiero a tí

substituting the dots with a plural noun, a singular noun and another noun that you like a lot.

My poem might be

Las cerezas son rojas

El cielo es azul

Quiero al chocolate 

Como quiero a ti

Not sure how I got to this today – I think the cold in Konstanz has wiped my brain! However, I just had to share this lovely magazine in Spanish for small people, downloadable free from elnuevodia.com All you need is Acrobat Reader and the PDF downloads for you to read it.

The graphics are big, bright and bold, and the topics covered fit well with the primary curriculum – healthy eating, family, the world, animals, festivals and so on. Lots of puzzles and activities, and short pieces of writing make it ideal for using with young learners.

I like the current issue which celebrates the 13th birthday of Mi pequeño día, with lots of lists of 13 things including 13 great inventions, 13 places to visit in Puerto Rico (the country of origin of the magazine) and 13 ecological habits.

I also enjoyed the issue Somos más about the world population reaching 7000000000. It includes some nice activities about people of the world and someone talking about their life.

It seems that you can only access the last 10 issues so might be worth visiting periodically and downloading some for future reference…

by SirSnapsalot on Flickr

One of the problems with submitting an article to a journal / paper is that you have no control over how they publish it. In my article in The TES I hyperlinked to the toe nail game to which I referred. Obviously this didn’t come out in print but I’d hoped (naively) that it might in the electronic form.

In my blog post yesterday it was hyperlinked, but to respond to queries, here it is!

Go to the SpanishSpanish site and click START.

Follow the instructions.

Listen and watch – a toenail will flash and the colour (word) will pop up in Spanish. You will also hear it.

When it says GO click that toenail.

Following on from a mentions here and here and a short review, I had my first article published in The TES today! So exciting!

Here’s the link to the article as it appeared. The original text is below – doesn’t look like it was edited much, a fact about which I am very chuffed!

I emailed Whitehouse Common immediately and told them – and within minutes it was on the school website.

Lots of lovely tweets too – thanks to @valleseco whose tweet was the first I knew of publication, and @bellaale @IrisConnect @davidErogers @matttodd1 @NajmC @suzibewell @whcps @bootleian @bgflnews @chrisfullerisms @TaskMagic @dughall and anyone else who’s tweeted it since I wrote this post!

Hope this won’t be my last article…

When I think back to my best experiences as a learner, they were memorable because they captured my attention and imagination. And it seems that many other learners have a similar experience.

I asked my pupils aged 3-11 what they enjoyed about learning languages, and they came up with many ideas. A class I taught in Reception who are now in Year 3 always want to play a memory game involving painted toenails because a member of their class holds the school record for the game (he was 4 when he set it!), and a Year 6 group remember retelling the story of El Nabo Gigante (The Enormous Turnip) when they were in Year 2 with silly hats and actions.

These were one off examples – when I asked a group of year 6s, they were more general, listing singing, rhymes and chanting as a favourite activity because they don’t do that in other lessons. They also said that they could better remember things that they had learned this way as they recalled the tune or the rhythm as well as the words. Towards the end of Year 6 we do a unit on a Spanish café and one activity involved rewriting a song about ordering in a café to the tune of The Twelve Days of Christmas. The task involved recalling vocabulary but was more then that as learners had to consider whether the rhythm of the words they were suggesting fitted the tune, making them concentrate on stress patterns and syllables. It also offered the opportunity to be imaginative as each group wanted to be the most original and perhaps funniest.

This type of creative task, using language in ‘unusual’ ways, is popular in other year groups too. In response to the story ¡Fuera de aquí Horrible Monstruo Verde! (Go away Big Green Monster), Year 3 used 2D shapes from their Maths lessons to create faces, feature by feature with a photograph taken at each stage. They then to wrote their own (simplified) version of the story saying hello to each new facial feature then telling it to go away using the photographs to create a comic strip. The sense of achievement – “I wrote a story in Spanish!” – was echoed in Year 5 when they rewrote a section of a famous Spanish poem, La Primavera by Antonio Machado, then went on to write their own poems about seasons in Spanish. Many of them were unsure about writing poems in English let alone Spanish, and here the language learning fitted well with their Literacy lessons. Year 4 were equally proud of their work in Healthy Heroes week, creating Superheroes Saludables (Healthy Superheroes), and building on their previous learning about sport and food in Spanish to create a clean living hero and unhealthy enemies. They did something no other class had done and, in a theme week, that holds great sway.

What do all these activities have in common? They were all led by the learners, all involved independence and imagination, and they all involved a challenge. The learners enjoyed themselves, feeling a sense of achievement when they’d finished, and I enjoyed ‘teaching’ them as each learner was able to stamp their individuality on the task.

Lisa is a Primary Language educator and consultant.  She is PLL and International coordinator at Whitehouse Common Primary School, and works with her LA (Birmingham) as a Language Coach supporting schools with their language provision. She is an Apple Education Mentor, an eTwinning Ambassador and BGfL MFL Curriculum Associate, and is on the Spanish Committee of ALL. 

(I know – that’s not all strictly accurate, but it was when I wrote the post!)

Below is a press release from CILT / CfBT – interesting stuff!

CfBT Education Trust to provide curriculum support for languages

International education charity CfBT Education Trust has been selected as the preferred provider of curriculum support for languages in primary and secondary schools in England. The contract from the Department of Education (DfE) runs until March 2013.

Neil McIntosh, Chief Executive of CfBT Education Trust, said: “We are
delighted at the success of our proposal. It marks the beginning of a
renewed emphasis on support for languages in schools. CfBT’s record of
success in school improvement, partnering with CILT’s considerable assets
and expertise, developed over many years of service to the languages
community, has proved a winning combination.

“We aim to work with organisations and individuals across the country who
share our passion and ambition for languages. We are determined to
ensure that the resource provided by the government achieves maximum
impact on schools and learners.”

Kathryn Board, Head of CILT, added: “Both primary and secondary schools
continue to need high quality support. This support is essential to sustain
and develop languages in the curriculum and raise the numbers of young
people taking languages to GCSE and beyond. Our proposal is to develop
new models of mutual support within the new structures for teacher training
and CPD. This will underpin the drive for an improvement in languages.”

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!

Cada día sé un poquito más

Yo voy a aprender tú ya lo verás

Cuando sea grande voy a saber

Un millón de cosas tú vas a ver

Que yo voy a aprender

para poder ser mejor.

Cada día sé un poco más que ayer

Todavía falta lo sé muy bien

Pero poco a poco lo aprenderé

Si tienes paciencia  lo vas a ver

Que yo voy a aprender

Para poder ser mejor.

Cada día sé un poquito más

Yo voy a aprender tú ya lo verás

Cuando sea grande voy a saber

Un millón de cosas tú vas a ver

Que yo voy a aprender

para poder ser mejor.

httpv://youtu.be/7yGE_hGJOaI

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:

1. Family & Home

2. Friends & School

3. Languages in Public Places

4. Languages & Travel

5. Languages & Food

6. Languages & Sports

And the best bit? It’s freely downloadable from the publications tab under material didáctica.

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.