I’m currently experimenting with various Spanish units from the new QCA SoW for KS2. I’m using Unit 5 Los cuatro amigos with Year 3, El carnaval de los animales (Unit 11) with Year 4, Year 5 are doing Unit 14 Yo soy músico and Year 6 are looking forward to some café acting with Unit 23, Poner una cafetería.

I’ll report more fully when the units are completed as to how good, bad or indifferent I found them etc, but as a taster, I thought I’d share a snippet!

Hot off the press, here are Year 5 singing ‘Somos músicos’ with great gusto.

This is my first attempt at embedding a player on my blog – if it doesn’t work, you can listen tot he same audio from the Podomatic player on the right ;o)

Whilst searching for suitable clipart for the previous post, I came across some quirky flamenco / sevillanas related videos that I thought deserved a post of their own!

A woman dressed in sevillanas dress is a classic image that means Spain to so many – I’m sure there are at least 25 little girls at school who have a sevillanas outfit (they wore them on EDL day!!) As part of their Spanish lessons, I think it’s important that pupils learn more than the language. They are very curious about life in Spain and particularly fascinated by anything that is different to England. We’ve had a go at flamenco ‘palmadas‘ before – a challenge when the class find clapping a regular rhythm hard – and certain classes enjoy watching me demonstrate the first compás of sevillanas – probably as I end up dizzy!

There are many videos of ‘real’ flamenco but I can’t wait to get back to school to show these little videos as I know they will appeal to this curiosity as well as their sense of humour!

Firstly, a simple animation using the image of the sevillanas dress.

The second is a clay stop-motion animation – not sure I could do that, but could have a go!

And the final one, my favourite – a flamenco dancing frog! What could be better, eh?

Today I received an email from the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencias about a record breaking attempt at the largest ever flamenco display. Here’s the message!

Come and join the world’s record breaking Sevillanas dance!
London’s Regent Street will be given over to hundreds of Sevillanas
dancers on Sunday 25 May as they attempt to set a new Guinness World
Record™for the largest ever flamenco dancing display.

If you want to take part and help break the record, simply register at
http://tastespain.info/registeration.php?idioma=uk and we’ll be in
touch with details.

If you are also interested in attending free sevillanas lessons in
London, find  further information at
http://tastespain.info/schools.php?idioma=uk

The record attempt launches a two week festival of Spanish culture in
Regent Street, Heddon Street and Borough Market organised by the Spanish
Tourist Office, and marks the start of the build up to Big Dance 2008,
http://www.london.gov.uk/bigdance/
the week-long celebration of dance organised by Greater London
Authority.

Click on the menu to the left for details of Spanish cultural events
including live entertainment and the chance to try the best food and wine
from Spain.

If you would like to receive further information, please go to
http://tastespain.info/masInformacion.php?idioma=uk

So, if you’re at a loose end, fancy a trip to London and have a bit of angst to express, why not join in?

I went to ‘sevillanas’ lessons for a year when I first began teaching – I loved it and it was SO therapeutic but the lessons were on the other side of Birmingham and life got too hectic – unfortunately. But I still feel the urge to stamp, clap and look very haughty when I hear the music. This is just the sort of thing I’d have loved to be involved in, but I will be in Spain, possibly not dancing flamenco, but having a great time I’m sure ;o)

As part of QCA Unit 11, El Carnaval de los animales, 4AT have been learning a song that may yet replace La Vaca Lola in their affections. Well perhaps not, but it’s quite popular!

Here’s the video from Youtube – I’ve downloaded it, converted it via Zamzar and uploaded it to the school network so that everyone can access it (and other things). Youtube is not currently blocked, but you can never be sure how long that will last.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJVib32-kf8&hl=en]

Finishing off a display based on the topic – come back soon for the pictures!

I spent this afternoon at the aptly named Beaumanor Hall near Loughborough in the company of teachers of pupils with special needs, drawn from both special and mainstream schools. I had been asked by the British Council to present a case study on eTwinning as part of the afternoon’s proceeding led by Lorna Belsey and Tom Birtwistle, and I was happy to do so.

After a delicious lunch – my healthy first course of mackerel and salad was followed by not-so-healthy bread and butter pudding – although the bread seemed to be brown so that must be good??- we adjourned to the ICT suite where Lorna explained Comenius and the ISA awards. Then it was by go to present a case study about last year’s project at WCPS – Somos lo que celebramos – and to share some ideas of how eTwinning might work for them, and some ideas of tools that could be used.

You can access the presentation and some of the documents in a previous post, but here are some links that I mentioned that you might wish to investigate.

British Council website
eTwinning home page
eTwinning portal

Whitehouse Common Primary School website
Colegio Público César Hurtado Delicado website (etwinning section)

Voki
Voicethread

Voices of the World wiki of previous months’ activities
Euro 08 project
Animation

David S Stewart’s interview about Special Schools and eTwinning
Nick Falk and Anne Jakins’ presentation about eTwinning at Sackville School (with SEN pupils)

Wishing you all happy eTwinning! :o)

I’ve been posting powerpoints to Slideshare for a while, first pointed in that direction by Chris Fuller (I think) in the days when he was just a name to me, not the fun person I now know! I knew that it was possible to make a Slidecast, combining audio and presentation but hadn’t made one ….
until yesterday!

I recorded the London ALL Show and Tell at Language World on my iRiver – and so did Joe Dale. I just fancied hearing what other people said – as well as checking out how I sound recorded (very odd is the answer, and not at all as I hear myself!) After the event, Joe mentioned in a Skype chat that he had edited his version of the audio and thought that I should make a Slidecast of it with the presentation I had prepared. As I had lost the lead for my iRiver, I said I’d do it when I found the offending item. (Still haven’t found it but the lead from our camcorder works – in case anyone else has the same problem)

This week, I received a message from Joe saying that he’d send me the audio so I could do my Slidecast. As it’s necessary to have the audio file saved online somewhere, and Blogger doesn’t have that facility, Joe kindly hosted it on his blog and I set about my challenge!

Basically, you upload your presentation to Slideshare – already done!
You click on ‘make Slidecast’ and enter the URL of the audio.
The audio track then appears under the Slideshow and you can decide how you want to synch the slides with the audio – equally spaced or, as in my case, to coincide with when I turned the page to the next slide.
Then you save it and there you have it – a Slidecast.

I found out that I had stretched my 7 minutes to over 10, ( sorry Nick!) that I spent a long time on the first few slides and not very long at all on the later ones as I ran out of time, that i talk very fast, and that my ears don’t hear what everyone else hears.

I also discovered that making a Slidecast is easy peasy lemon squeezy – and I’ll be doing it again in the near future.

Here it is – it features the lovely aforementioned Mr Fuller singing!!

| View | Upload your own

PS just noticed that it’s already been viewed 51 times – that’s pretty impressive. Let’s hope all those who watched it have gained something and will put even one of the ideas into practice.

Whilst fiddling with my blog today, my hit counter reached the 4000 hits mark. Not quite as impressive as Joe Dale’s 100,000 I know, but I’m still very pleased with 4000 since ¡Vámonos! started at the end of October 2007. Here’s to reaching 5000 by the end of the summer term!

Unfortunately I was occupied by saving and reinstalling widgets when the counter tipped the magic 4000 so I didn’t get a screen shot – so here’s an image from Spell with Flickr , a site with which I love to play.

After I posted Joe’s quiz yesterday, I had an exchange of comments with Langwitch about how tricky it is was to name all the bloggers from their photos with so many people using avatars.

My obsession with widgets and avatars is well known (and well documented on this blog) but less is known about my love of quizzes and very competitive streak!

So, combining the two, here’s my version. Let’s see how ‘Joe’s best class‘ as José put it yesterday in a comment on Joe’s post, you get on with this.

(apologies to those who I’ve missed – any more avatars to declare?)

Click here to get your own player.

5MW have been working on QCA Spanish Unit 14 Soy el músico this half term and today we gave our opinions about types of music. I thought after we’d sung our song and revised opinions and shared our reasons that they’d make posters to show their pinions – displays need changing!

But I felt like being different today!

So out came my laptop from home and my head / microphone combo. I set it up in the book corner and, having set the rest of the class off on their RE webquest about what priests do, I invited anyone interested to pop over to the recording booth and, using Audacity, record their opinion in Spanish.

I was so glad I did it as everyone of the volunteers enjoyed the experience, and the looks on their faces as they listened to themselves played back were priceless.

Zach’s comment made me laugh and cry at the same time!
As he listened to himself back, he said
‘Miss, have you done something to my voice?- I sound Spanish.’
I assured him that I couldn’t do that, and that the voice he heard was him –
‘That can’t be me Miss’

So, I’ve spent the evening uploading all the soundfiles to our Podomatic account (signed up last July and didn’t put anything on it until today!) and above is the first set of WCPS Spanish podcasts. Please leave comments if you wish – the pupils will be very encouraged (as will I!) I’m expecting more volunteers next week – we ran out of time today and one of the quietest girls in the class is first in the queue for next week!

Joe Dale of Integrating ICT into the MFL Classroom fame has been playing around with a new tool called MyStudiyo and come up with a quiz.
It’s based on MFL bloggers – multiple choice with four names to choose from for each photograph, so even if you don’t know the answer, you can guess.
Being a girly whirly swot, I got full marks – how will you fare?
PS I’m in it but the less said about the picture, the better ;o)