It’s nearly Christmas so here’s a lovely little video brought to my attention by @Mother Goose Club.

The Spanish Christmas song Navidad, Navidad (To the tune of Jingle Bells) with cute animation and karoake lyrics too!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRS1PjprrTQ

A little story featuring Caillou to mark Thanksgiving.
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

httpv://youtu.be/1K4Z8wtJH2A

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…

As regular readers will know, I am an eTwinning Ambassador (that is a very old picture!).  I say ‘I am’ as, whilst I’m no longer in the UK, I am hoping to continue to help promote and encourage involvement in eTwinning now I’m in Switzerland. Why? Because I’ve seen the difference it’s made to my school in terms of teaching and learning, the experiences that it’s brought and the new openess to ‘otherness’ that’s it’s brought. I see a school that looks outwards, celebrates the heritage of its pupils and understands more about UK traditions through looking at others. I see a school that is proud of differences and actively looks to make contact with people with different life experiences. And I see pupils who have grown in confidence through seeing that speaking a language other than English, or having a different religion to most others is actually a brilliant thing, not something to hide as well as experiencing the joy of talking to their peers across the world.

There is currently an Impact Study being carried out by Education for Change into eTwinning – see below. Evidence is being collected in a numbeer of ways but one is via a survey. I’d encourage you to fill it in as I suspect that the future of eTwinning with depend on this study!

If you want to find out more, please feel free to contact me and ask questions!

EfC has been has been commissioned for a 21 month study of the impact of eTwinning on pupils, teachers and schools.  The study will also be an analysis of the factors which contribute to, or hinder, successful participation in eTwinning.

eTwinning Partnerships is an activity under the Comenius sub-programme of the EU Lifelong Learning Programme. It was launched in 2005 with the objective of enabling school twinning as an opportunity for all young people to learn and practice information and communication technology (ICT) skills, as well as promoting awareness of the multicultural European model of society. The European Commission foresaw that eTwinning could be a major catalyst in intensifying the sorts of cooperation already underway among schools. Since the launch of the new platform in 2008-09 visits to the eTwinning portal have increased by over 300%, indicating a steep rise in interest among teachers. Registration continues to rise, and there are currently almost 100,000 registered eTwinners in 73500 schools.

The impact study will look at participation in eTwinning and what hinders or helps it success, specifically:

•    the networking of schools and teachers across Europe and their capacity to build social capital, and the way in which eTwinning is managed and promoted

•    the perspective of participating teachers

•    the impact of eTwinning on pupils, teachers and others at school level

•   the overall impact of eTwinning within the context of the Comenius Programme
The main activities will include:

•    Desk research and consultation with Central and National Support Services and others

•    A general survey of all eTwinning teachers, in 23 languages

•    Case studies research on impact in at least 20 schools in 10 countries, using country-based researchers

•    In the light of findings, will make recommendations on possible improvements to the eTwinning action, its design and management.

Thank you to June da Silva for pointing this out via primarylanguages@mailtalk.ac.uk.

November 21st is World Hello Day on which people are encouraged to greet 10 people to demonstrate the importance of personal communication in maintaining peace.

  World Hello Day was begun in response to the conflict between Egypt and Israel in the Fall of 1973.  Since then, World Hello Day has been observed by people in 180 countries.

    People around the world use the occasion of World Hello Day as an opportunity to express their concern for world peace.  Beginning with a simple greeting on World Hello Day, their activities send a message to leaders, encouraging them to use communication rather than force to settle conflicts.

    As a global event World Hello Day joins local participation in a global expression of peace.  The World Hello Day web site address is http://www.worldhelloday.org.

As June says in her email, what an opportunity to promote communication in other languages too. I will be attempting to greet 10 people in Swiss German and / or their native language. I’m sure I can find 10 people who speak 10 different languages at home amongst my boys’ new classmates and parents…

www.ipl.org/div/hello will help me in my task as will http://www.digitaldialects.com/ 

And how about these lovely song?

httpv://youtu.be/kjwkMmdqmH4

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!)

A few of videos to help you celebrate EL Día de los Muertos (which I much prefer to Halloween!)The first explains the festival, the second is a piece of music and the third is a song from Babelzone that my pupils all love!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kimX-rwPmyk

httpv://youtu.be/lFYE_RGSaec

httpv://youtu.be/CYyRibaMQoA

Here is my presentation from the Spanish workshops yesterday.

Entitled Sorpresas y sonrisas, it was a reflection on how to keep everyone in the primary language classroom happy and engaged. For the second time in a row I failed to record myself so I’m afraid no slidecast this time 🙁

However, if you want me to clarify anything, please contact me via the form on the right.

Today I was privileged to take part in the Talleres españoles para primaria run by the Consejería de Educación at Instituto Cañada Blanch in London. I was sharing ideas for the primary classroom from my experiences with a presentation called Sorpresas y sonrisas. More of that later but I thought I’d try to summarise the day as I went along. (No wifi so publication will have to wait until I get home!)

The day started with a presentation on the situation of Spanish in the context of world languages – did you know that all the time we’re losing languages? In 2008 Eyak was lost in Alaska when the last speaker died. With the arrival of the Romans in Spain, Latin was imposed on much of Europe so the languages of the Iberian peninsula as well as other places started disappearing. Over time, Castillian took over from regional languages although some still exist, becoming the common language of Spain. Much the same happened in the South America although until there was little imposition of Castillian by the missionaries or conquistadores, but rather by the independentistas who decided to use Castillian as lingua franca. The Hispanic population in USA continues to grow and will continue to do so. Very interesting to see how Spanish compares with other world languages – it has a greater spread of speakers compared to more localised Russian, less dialectalisation than Arabic, more standardised in terms of written form than Mandarin Chinese and so on. And also to see how the statistics can be skewed depending on who you count as a ‘speaker’ of languages. There are more native Spanish speakers than English but if you add those who have it a a second or peripheral language, English soars ahead. Spanish occupies 5th place in books published, 3rd in books and 3rd in Internet. But it’s not doing so well in Wikipedia entries! And let’s not talk about economic power…. As Munoz Molina said ‘el enemigo del español no es el ingles es la pobreza’

Next I went to a session entitled Learning Spanish and other school curriculum contents (CLIL) with Maria Teresa. She talked about using stories as a starting point for exploring languages. Phase 1 to capture their attention, phase 2 to tell the story and phase 3 and 4 more activities to reuse what we’ve used and then producing something based on what they’ve learned. The story is about un oso pardo who lives in the north of Spain (would our kids know that there are bears in Spain?) ‘Una historia para imaginar’ tells about Mummy bear and her daughter Perica and son Ramirín who are cold as winter is about to come. ramirín doesnt want to go to sleep but Mummy says lets go to sleep and dream. They sleep all winter and wake as spring arrives. What did they dream about? Pupils can use imagination! Having read the story, we can take parts with sections being Mummy, Perica and Ramirín- and a confident child could be the narrator. Then in phase 3 we do activities that exploit the text and take it further eg
1. hopping and counting the paw prints!
2. presenting your family using family tree handout.
3. Reordering the story
4. months and seasons

After recharging my batteries with coffee and choccie biccies, off I went to Irene Wilkie who was talking about integrating Spanish in the curriculum. Irene started by apologising as her presentation was aimed at teachers with little Spanish and the room was more or less full of Spaniards (I’m going to have the same problem) then talked of how we might look at the Tudors in Spanish. Firstly we looked at flags  and talked about nationalities -(era) española, alemana, inglesa- and then talked about children – tuvo un hijo / una hija, no tuvo  hijos – then how they died – fue ejecutada, fue divorciada, murió, sobrevivió.
With these few words, you can discuss the wives in Spanish, use texts that include more complex structures and ask questions on history in Spanish.

Then we looked at El cuerpo humano – recycling what pupils know in Spanish! Using cognates/ palabras parecidas it’s easy for learners to follow. Short paragraphs lead to a table to match phrases. Then definitions for parts of the body – give the name of the organ. And her third example was healthy eating – lots of pictures with which you can ask simple questions ¿Bueno o malo? Or sí y no. You can do some grammar if you want but you can avoid! Irene talked lots of sense and I’ll certainly be passing on her ideas to my colleagues!

Lunch consisted of delicious tapas – won’t go on but ¡riquísimo! SEGL presented Superdrago their ELE (español lengua extranjera) textbook for 7-11 year olds. Very colourful and imaginative. Need to have a good look before further comment!

Final session I could attend was Learning by doing in a global team – Emocionaros 1.0 para que emocionéis 2.0. Mercedes Ruiz had a suitcase full of bits and bobs like a black skirt that could be a nightmare, a monster; a blue piece of material that is the sky, the sea; gloves to show hot and cold. Then we looked at the book Perdido y encontrado and Mercedes recounted how she’d told a story about an escaped penguin at London Zoo and been believed. So the class made posters to find it again, in Spanish and English. And so started a whole exchange of lost and found penguins across the world – in Zaragoza, Argentina, Thailand. Then the penguin was in lost property and they sent him messages via paper airplanes – they didn’t want him to go back to the zoo. The imagination, creativity and ingenuity involved was remarkable leading to bilingual conversations and cooperation. Mercedes went on to talk about using web2.0 as that’s the language of our learners. They don’t just talk in words but in gesture, video, sound, image. She shared the  Osos y leones blog belonging to the younger pupils of Instituto Cañada Blanch on which they share all sorts of things they do.

I couldn’t stay for the last session which is a shame as I might have learned how to carve jamón serrano. However, a really great day, only slightly marred by the inefficiencies and dire lack of information of London Transport making my journeys a nightmare.

And I am VERY proud of my certificate – official stamp and everything!