When I saw this book on the Little Linguist stall in July (yes, I’ve had it that long without sharing it!) it immediately sparked ideas in my head so I had to buy it. And now I’ve got around to sharing them!

The Spanish version of The Smartest Giant in Town, it’s written and illustrated by the wonderful Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, famous for The Gruffalo/El Grúfalo and Room on a broom/¡Cómo mola tu escoba! The main character is Maxi who always wears the same clothes and same sandals, and is fed up of being the scruffiest giant in town. When a new shop opens, he buys himself some lovely new clothes, becoming el gigante más elegante. Feeling happy and content, he leaves the shop to go home… but he keeps meeting animals who need help on the way home. Item by item he happily gives away his clothes, singing as he does it. Then he gives away his belt… and he’s no longer happy as he’s cold now. However, there is a happy ending as he finds his old clothes, and all the animals he has helped thank him with a crown and a lovely card.

My immediate thought was how well it would fit with other activities I do based around clothes – using Te visto y te como, doing activities to accompany Juguemos en el bosque and singing ¿Qué hay en la lavadora? from ¡Español Español! (Have a look at this link to see how Y2 did this!)

Reading the story reminded me of El Pequeño Petirrojo which is my favourite Christmas story, and one of my favourite books full stop as the robin in that gives away all his clothes too. It works really well for acting out with props; I’ve even got a knitted robin and vests with which to dress him! (See my blog post about it!) So I could see us doing something similar with this book. The video below shows how the story has been used as a class assembly – I think that would be easy to do in class too!

And like El Pequeño Petirrojo, there’s a message to El Gigante más elegante. Both el gigante and el petirrojo happily give their clothes to others in greater need than them, end up sad, but are praised and rewarded for their selflessness. Therefore they are both a good way to link to the PSHE curriculum and be creative with the curriculum! Perhaps learners could write a simple thank you letter to el gigante, following a model/scaffold, and then write one to someone they’d like to thank.

I think that having read the story, younger learners would certainly enjoy designing clothing for el gigante, labelling them in Spanish with nouns and adjectives, and beginning to write simple sentences with a scaffold. Equally, work around the animals, their names and the noises that they make would also work. Older learners might like to link emotions to parts of the story:
El gigante está muy contento feliz cuando da su …. al …..
La cabra está muy preocupado porque su barquito no tiene vela.
I also thought it might be fun to think of other uses for the giant’s clothes by different animals. El mono necesita el cinturón para escapar el cocodrilo.
Being even more adventurous, I think that this could be a good story to retell (in a simplified version) using Talk4Writing as it has repetition and would be fairly easy for learners to adapt.
This blog also gives some further ideas of how you might use the story, both before and after reading.
And I love the ideas suggested by Teaching Ideas – they’re for the English text but many of them, such as drawing and labelling a map of the tow, trying to sing the giant’s song, and making a scarf for him, are easily adaptable to another language.

I have another two Julia Donaldson books that I’ve recently purchased. Hopefully it won’t take me six months to share those…

If you found this post interesting and/or helpful, please comment. And if you have ideas for using the book, please let me know too!

I love visiting IKEA and wondering around the children’s department as my attention is invariably grabbed by something I think I can use. It’s not often that a  specific lesson is ‘born’ as I browse, however.

Meet Señor Brócoli. Our eyes met and I was inspired!

I saw his pockets and thought of using him like a food triangle , filling his pockets with play food. And a lesson was formed, which was a bonus as I had a lesson observation looming and this was perfect!

I had adapted a presentation by Rachel Hawkes that she had shared on TES Resources previously for use with Year 4 in their unit on healthy eating but felt that it would work well with Year 6’s unit on food as well. The preceding week had been healthy eating week and we had made Wordles and Tagxedos of healthy eating vocabulary (they only had 40 minutes to find the words, type them in and print them so it wasn’t in great depth!) That was the starting point for the lesson.

We then played ‘ping pong’ with food vocabulary, seeing how long they could keep the rally up.

Having gone over pronunciation, pupils used the vocabulary from slide 3 cut into slips to classify vocabulary according to certain criteria using Tesoro o basura sheet; feminine nouns, plural nouns and finally healthy foods were the treasure.

The next step was to consider what healthy means as it’s not easy to decide definitively. That’s where Señor Brócoli came in. Using plastic play food, pupils ‘fed’ him, placing food in his pockets. The pocket into which they placed their food item corresponded to the frequency with which you should eat it – top pockets are smaller and correspond to a veces, the middle pocket to a menudo, and the bottom pocket to todos los días. The pupils all wanted to take part and say the appropriate phrase in Spanish.

They then classified the food in the triangle (slide 7)

I assigned each table a text from slide 8 to read, and encouraged them to ‘magpie’ useful phrases. They compiled lists together and then shared them with other groups.

The final part of the lesson was to write their own short text using slide 10.

If we had had more time, slide 11 was the extension activity with pupils suggesting food to match the definitions.

Pupils really enjoyed the lesson and didn’t want to go to lunch – and that’s very unusual. And it proved to be an outstanding observation too.

Throughout the lesson pupils RAG-ed their work using the fruit scale  – ¿eres un tomate, una naranja o una manzana? That was a hit too; much more appealing than traffic lights!

Señor Brócoli will appear again soon; Year 4 are looking at healthy lifestyles too!

Download the presentation – adapted from Rachel Hawkes’ PPT and with Tesoro o basura from LightBulb Languages La_Comida_sana_y_malsana final

Download lesson plan sano malsano lesson

Lisibo’s been shopping again.  This time, though, it’s not IKEA that has inspired her but TK Maxx that has come up trumps.

In the sale (!) I found this Very Hungry Caterpillar felt set.

Ideal for –

• telling the story to the class
• getting pupils to follow the story actively by adding / moving/ substituting the felt pieces
• animating – and because it’s a felt board, you can do it horizontally or vertically
• small group work
• independent play

Sad that Year 3 have finished with that story for the year and we’ll have to wait until next September to ry it out with them.  perhaps it’s time I invaded Foundation stage again…

The Hungry Caterpillar is a great story to use with kids as it’s familiar and repetitive.  The vocabulary is simple and everyday – numbers, colours, food – and it looks at healthy eating as well as the life cycle of the caterpillar / butterfly, so very cross curricular!

There are great resources all over the place for this story including

• videos on Youtube – one two three
• a whole series of lessons here
• a page full of ideas here
• a lovely song here – with music file too
• a powerpoint of the story in Spanish
• a PDF of a teaching sequence including cross curricular links
• another PDF with ideas and the pattern for a caterpillar mobile
• some art / craft activities to do with butterflies and caterpillars

And that’s just gleaned from a quick Google search!

I was privileged to be asked by David Noble (@parslad) to join TeachMeet ASN-SEN Online tonight and invited to speak as well! A huge privilege when you look at the other speakers!

I choose to talk briefly about using puppets and sound recording to encourage speaking skills in the classroom. As I teach languages, my examples came from my experience in the primary language learning classroom but, as I said, are equally applicable in other contexts.

If you want to catch what I said, you can watch the replay here

And here are some posts I’ve previously made about using puppets in the classroom –
Puppets! (video at the bottom of the post)
Los animales hablan
Inspired in IKEA pt 2

And about using sound recording-
5MW on Podomatic

And also moblogging –
La Primavera
Saved by the blog

Last Friday 26th September was European Day of Languages and, after very successful celebrations last year, Whitehouse Common decided to celebrate once more!

Not content with one day, we had a week of activities with each class doing at least one language based activity during the week, assemblies focussing on awareness of other languages and special attention being paid to intercultural understanding. We invited parents to volunteer their language skills – 9 parents / grandparents volunteered with others saying they would’ve done but it was not a good time.. So we had visits from relatives to tell various classes about Punjabi, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Basque. Sadly, I wasn’t able to stay for any of them – I’m particularly peeved about the Basque as I still only know one word – goodbye! However, the pupils were buzzing about it. And the lovely thing for me was that the children whose parents had come in are all usually quite timid and having their languages celebrated brought them out of their shells – one teacher siad that a particular child was ‘glowing’ – that, for me, is what it’s all about.

The week culminated on Friday with special assemblies at which each class presented what they had done during the week. We had Reception spelling out the school name in hieroglyphics, Year 1 singing in Spanish, one Year 2 class singing in German and the other counting to ten in Japanese and conducting an exacting Spanish quiz! Year 3 celebrated the languages spoken by the families of pupils in the class by greeting us in their languages, and the other class counted to 10 in Punjabi, Urdu, Gujerati, Chinese German and Spanish. Year 4 had used my del.icio.us bookmarks (at last someone has listened to me!!!) and found the wonderful Italian song written by Mark Pentleton which they sang with great gusto. The Year 5 classes had researched different languages and the countries that spoke them.

Year 6 rounded off our assemblies (we had two – A and B team) with lusty song! 6VH had researched Chinese characters and written their names in Chinese script with their classteacher, but felt that this was not enough so had begged me to teach them a song to go with it. So what did I teach them? what do you think!! La Vaca Lola! We made up actions that involved 70s disco dancing, Makaton and bum wiggling – and it was a hit (not easy to do in a Sevillanas dress I can tell you!) 6JF concluded the other assembly with an unusual choice of language, but one of which I have only myself to blame! When I sent links for EDL to staff, I suggested, tongue in cheek, that someone might like to learn to talk like a pirate. So they did! And sang like pirates too!

We had so much fun that there was almost no time to judge the international fancy dress contest! We had lots of footballers, some Greeks and Romans, countless mini flamenco dancers – christened the ‘MiniMes’ as they wee all dressed like me in miniature! – and a couple of bullfighters, some Italian icecream and pizza salemen, a Chinese dragon, Big Ben, an English rose, Japanese girls, Russian cossacks, a Scottish lassie complete with bagpipes, Carmen Miranda and a Dutch boy in clogs. (Did you know that there are little hole sin the side of clogs to allow the sweat to drain away?!) So hard to judge – I felt really mean, but everyone got a sticker and a round of applause.

I love EDL – so much that I went in on my day off. I see my job as PLL coordinator as being more than teaching Spanish, but as one of encouraging the school family to celebrate and share the languages they know, and to enable them to learn more. I always learn so much from the pupils on such days, and I’ve yet to find a child who has not experienced great delight at trying to teach me words in their language only to find that I can’t immediately or consistently get it right!

Earlier this week David Noble tweeted a request for someone to attend a Flashmeeting on 8th May for his Access Network. Seeing it as an opportunity to virtually meet some new people, to help David and to leave school on the bell, I volunteered to share some ideas about using puppets and also some ideas for eTwinning.

On a very hot afternoon six of us met on Flashmeeting with David sharing about using GoogleEarth and also about ScotsEduBlogs. David is much more advanced in his Flashmeeting skills than me and managed to post his URLs using the URL button so they popped up for us – I managed to forget about this facility until too late, and posted any that I used in the chat. I hope that my contribution was helpful – I learned plenty from the part of David’s talk that I caught.

Below are the links I promised to post to my blog for anyone who is interested ;o)

Puppets – the following blog posts might interest you –
Inspired in IKEA part2 – ideas for where to get and what to do with puppets
Diez animales- an idea for using puppets with song to demonstrate understanding and increase motivation!

eTwinning
I quoted some of these sites in the meeting but I’ll repeat them anyway!
Have a look a the post I wrote last week about my talk at Beaumanor Hall for teachers of pupils with SEN in special and mainstream schools – there are several useful links including to the project at Sackville School run by Anne Jakins I mentioned and to a few projects/ideas I mentioned. You can also find the links to the outcomes of Whitehouse Common’s project with Spain.
There are other posts on eTwinning on my blog – use the search feature on the right- perhaps you’d be interested in this one as well.
The British Council site has an eTwinning section and then there is the eTwinning portal where you register your interest, search for partners and can record your project.
And then there is the all important eTwinning Ambassadors page.

Much excitement this evening as Chris Fuller has just posted a video on his blog Facing the currently unknown related to the Euro 08 project he’s organising. The Project involves classes finding out about one of the countries participating in Euro 08, using Web2.0 tools to share what they find, and hopefully all meet up in June for a football / netball tournament in Devon at Chris’ school, Edgehill College.

Filmed at ITV West Country and aided by Seth Conway, Chris drew the names of the schools participating in the Edgehill Euro08 project to pair them with a country participating in the Euro 08 tournament. First out of the draw was … Whitehouse Common Primary School. The kids were sure we’d get Spain when the draw was done as I’m so Spanish crazy, but Spain stayed in the hat and instead we drew….SWEDEN!

So, after Christmas we’ll be finding out all we can about Sweden as well as practising our football and netball skills – we might even ask IKEA to sponsor us!

To find out more about The Project, visit Chris’ blog where you can watch a presentation that explains it all better than I can – there is still space for more schools to become involved, and I know he’d love to hear from you. Spain are still up for grabs, as are France. Doesn’t matter if you don’t live in Devon – Whitehouse Common is near Birmingham and there’s a school in Fife taking part!

I’ve made a start on learning some Swedish – thanks to Translation Guide. The title is supposed to say – Sweden all the way – so if you know Swedish, let me know if it’s correct!