With World Book Day (#WBD) approaching next week on March 1st, I’ve been having a think over the last few days about what I’ll be doing with the classes I teach on Thursday. Last year we explored the Mr Men and Little Miss characters in Spanish as our focus at school was on illustrators. The previous year we looked at La maravillosa medicine de Jorge – you can find out about it in this post.

I had a look through my bookcases (yes, I have more than one as I have so many books!) and realised that, amongst my collection, I have a number of books about books!

The first isn’t Spanish but as I’ll probably be dressed as Heidi I might just start with this German gem.

Das ist ein Buch

I’ve shared Das ist ein Buch before but it is one of my favourites! In English it’s called It’s a book, and in it, Esel (Donkey) has obviously not seen a book before and wonders if it texts, needs wifi or Tweets; Affe (Monkey) patiently replies Nein, das ist ein Buch until he decides that it would be best to let Esel read the book …

ISBN: 978-3-446-23937-1  Link to buy

Now to the Spanish ones:

A Rosa le gusta leer.

This is a short reader style book with short phrases on each page, containing 49 Spanish words that are listed at the end. It’s about a girl called Rosa who, as the title suggests, likes reading. However, her neighbourhood is very noisy and it’s hard to concentrate…

ISBN 0-516-24698-4  Link to buy

Book Fiesta

This is a bi-lingual book, a celebration of Children’s Day/Book Day that is held on April 30th in Mexico. It’s all about reading our favourite books, the languages in which we read,  with whom we might read and where we go to read, in reality and in our imaginations. It’s a colourfully illustrated book and can be read in Spanish or English, depending on your audience.

ISBN 978-0-06-128877-7   Link to buy 

¡Se busca! Lili la liebre, ladrona de libros

I love this book about a hare who loves books so much that she can’t stop reading. She starts visiting houses to read books, and one thing leads to another and she starts to steal them! When she starts stealing the books from a boy called Arturo, she runs into trouble as he is as big a fan of books as she is. What will happen? You’ll have to read the book and find out. I love the humorous illustrations, particularly of Lili’s favourite books.  

ISBN 978-84-9101-044-9   Link to buy

¿Para qué sirve un libro?

I bought this book in Spain last year and forgot I had it (I told you I’ve got a lot of books!) but when I rediscovered it, I remembered why I’d bought it! Each double page has a sentence about what a book is for or what it does, very simply phrased as ‘Un libro es…’ or ‘Un libro puede…’ or ‘ En un libro puedes…’ and I’m planning on using it as the basis for an activity where pupils match the English and Spanish phrases, then make up their own ideas.

ISBN – 978-84-16490-27-1   Link to buyQué leen los animales antes de dormir

My final book arrived this morning and I love it! It’s all about different animals and the types of books that they read. It’s humorous and has some very clever puns that I love. Some are accessible to beginners with a clue or two whilst some are a little more obscure. I’m looking forward to sharing this with my classes and seeing if they can guess which animal reads which type of book.

ISBN 978-8426138446   Link to buy   (Although I bought the last one – sorry!)

When I’ve finished my plans and finalised my resources, I’ll share them here (although I won’t be able to share my images of the stories unless you own the books)

I’ve made a Pinterest board of all the links I’ve gathered for #WBD and, whilst I was looking at a link to materials related to ¡Se busca! Lili la liebre, ladrona de libros, I came across a board called Libros que hablan de libros that has more ideas of books about books. And also reminded me that I have another book about books – Regalo Sorpresa (link to buy)

Perhaps you have some suggestions to add in the comments below? And please share your ideas for World Book Day too!

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I’ve just come back from a lovely holiday in Bayern during which I tried hard to use my German – with some success including a heated discussion with a woman in Königssee about passports and plenty of food discussions.

As usual I found myself drawn to bookshops (and dirndls but I resisted those!) and made a few purchases as you can see:

Elefanten-Sommer is a lovely PixiBuch about a little girl called Lina and her elephant, Rufus. They ‘trumpet’ together and are happy until Rufus does something naughty…

And Kasper Mütze is a PixiBuch that contains two stories about Kasper Mütze – Kasper Mütze hat Geburtstag and Kasper Mütze hat Besuch. Each page is very simple and rhymes, the phrases are quite repetitive which is great for me – and for my planned German club who will all be beginners.

Und heut ist Montag – I love Eric Carle books and I’m familiar with this one in English and Spanish so when I saw it in the bargain bin for 2€50 I snapped it up! Days of the week, food and animals – lots of possibilities. And it can be sung too!

And then I saw this book Ich bin das ganze Jahr vergnügt in Salzburg when I was sheltering from torrential rain in a Buchhändlung. Lots of rhymes and songs for different times of the year, some with actions (like In dem Walde steht ein Haus) and others with music. I particularly liked the two above; on the left, a poem with the days of the week, and on the right a poem I could use to introduce a Christmas tradition from Switzerland  called Räbechilbi.

Finally, at the airport I found two magazines that I thought might be interesting to children – and me!

National Geographic Kids is very colourful and has a variety of lengths of text in it as well as quizzes and interesting facts. I particularly like the bilingual facts signalled with the two flags which allow you to compare German and English, and also Check diese kuriosen Fakten. I’m very tempted to enter the competition too – think I might need to find a child to enter for me though…

And Dein Spiegel is the children’s version of the famous Der Spiegel. It’s more complex than National Geographic Kids but there are short news items like the one about the boys in England wearing skirts to school as well as longer articles about Sport, Natur, Kultur, Menschen, Wirtschaft and Politik. I’m hoping that I might learn something about the upcoming elections by reading the section below right. And then there’s the jokes page. Some are a bit complex for me but I like the two below left – my trumpet playing son particularly likes the one about the violin and cello!

I might have spent far more money but tried to restrain myself!

On a recent flying visit to Switzerland I found myself in Orell Füssli at the airport and made a couple of purchases.

Firstly I had a good rummage in the Pixi Bücher ‘bubble.’ (Should’ve taken a photo of it as I can’t find one anywhere!) For those unfamiliar with Pixi Bücher, they are tiny (about 10cm square) paperback books that cost about 1 euro 50 or 1.90 CHF. There are a variety of types including stories, information books and sticker books.

I was immediately drawn to  Eins zwei drei Tier as it has an amusing cover and on opening it, I decided that it would be a good buy for my upcoming German club at school as it’s very simple. Each page has four characters on it; on the first page, three people are followed by a wolf; on the next, three wolves by a pig and so on. Each image is accompanied by a word, the third of which rhymes with the fourth which is the name of the animal.  Some are names, some adjectives and some prepositions. Hopefully this image explains it if you don’t get the idea.I thought it would be good to read the book then give learners a list of the animals and see if they could predict the name of the animal in fourth place each time the next time I read it.

My other purchase was a set of cards called Tierbabys. I thought that they were Top Trumps with statistics on, and had envisaged using them to rehearse numbers and the like in the context of animals, but they’re actually for playing Happy Families, with four animals in each of eight ‘families’ grouped by environment in which they’d be found. Interesting from a vocabulary point of view – how do you say foal in German? And calf? What does junge mean? And küken? And also good for rehearsing the question “Hast du…” as well as manners – Danke to say thanks, Es tut mir leid to say sorry you haven’t and so on. So not quite what I’d envisaged but still useful. And the baby animals are very cute too!

We’re off to Germany on holiday this summer so I expect to add more to my collection ready for September and my long planned German club at school!

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I’ve been working with Anamil Tech on Pacca Alpaca for a while now. The apps Pacca Alpaca and Pacca Alpaca Travel Playtime have proved very popular and are now available in English, Arabic, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin and Welsh.

Well, there is now a Youtube channel of free videos to accompany the app. You can subscribe to Pacca Alpaca for more kids learning videos in Spanish, English, French and Arabic here – http://bit.ly/paccayoutube

Here’s the first Spanish video, released today!

Thanks to Joe Dale for the photo (and video later)!

I had the privilege on 28th March to speak at the South West London Primary Languages Conference #SWLPLC. My talk was entitled There’s more to PLL than ‘that donkey’ (Tip Top Tips for Primary Language Learning) and took inspiration from my son who when asked what he’d done in French usually replied “oh, we did that donkey again”. I have nothing against Mon âne but there’s more to PLL than singing as I went on to explain, sharing some of my favourite activities and ideas. Below is my presentaion and links to resources I used and sites I referenced.

A lovely day and well worth the early morning; great to see Joe, Rachel, Carmel and finally meet Ceri and Sue, and also to have so many positive comments about Primary Language learning flying around the room.

Habitats matching activity

worksheet LAT SP FR ROM NUMBERS 1-31

el nabo enorme

Oso Pardo pdf

Oso pardo

blank brown bear

Simpsons song

Que colores hay

Links from presentation

Rachel Hawkes’ phonics

httpv://youtu.be/seW6lf_9pSk

Music for Los vocales D.I.S.C.O.

@lisibo teaching Spanish vowel sounds! #SWLPLC http://t.co/KDZAJhpDPd

— Joe Dale (@joedale) March 28, 2014

 Rhabarberbarbara

Jo Rhy Jones phonic activities 

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. And if you flick through, resources for lots of other topics/themes too.

I also recommended looking at The Iris Project and LightBulbLanguages (formerly MFL Sunderland) for other resources that I have found useful for Latin/Greek (former) and Latin, Planets and much more (latter) And check out TES Resources from Joan Miró resources fromHelen Stanistreet and Rachel Hawkes

Boowa et Kwala – Peut tu marchez comme un canard? Fingerpaint song

Padlet.com – for collecting ideas (online post it notes)

Storybird – make up your own stories using illustrators images.

MFL Storybird wikispace

I also mentioned Tellagami, Pic collage and Book Creator app. Check out this post for more details!

Again, if I’ve forgotten to upload something that I promised, please let me know!

(Sorry it’s taken me so long to post – illness, work and OFSTED held me up!)

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!

*This is one of a series of posts about some of my favourite story books for Primary Language Learning*

Moving to Switzerland added German books to my book case where previously there had only been French and Spanish. Not very many as books are exorbitantly priced  (I mostly borrowed them from the library) but some.

I love books. I am indeed a bookaholic and whilst I am very fond of my technology (and this series will feature ebooks), I’m not sure I’ll ever stop preferring the smell and feel of a ‘proper’ book to swiping an electronic device. So I had to purchase this book –

Esel (Donkey) asks Was hast du denn da?

Affe (Monkey) replies Das ist ein Buch.

Esel has obviously not seen a book before and wonders if it texts, needs wifi or Tweets; Affe patiently replies Nein, das ist ein Buch until he decides that it would be best to let Esel read the book …

I love Das ist ein Buch because I’m Monkey when most people think that I’d be Donkey. I also like the ‘there’s more to life than swiping and tweeting and making noise’ message.

I think this would be a great story to share with a class, certainly the “Das ist ein Buch” refrain would soon be picked up, and the language is quite easy to decipher with clues from the pictures supported by actions from the reader. And it lends itself to adaptations with the scaffold “Kannst du…+ verb?”  with other things that a book might be able to do.

Below is an animated telling of the book and the whole book appears one one sheet here.

httpv://youtu.be/nYl_nyuyn5Y

My second book is Wo ist mein hut

“Mein Hut ist weg. Ich will ihn zurück” says Bär. He patiently asks the other animals if they have seen his hat but noone has until the deer asks a good question that jogs his memory!

I like this book as it is again repetitive with Bär asking each animal “Hast du meinen Hut gesehen?” and thanking them politely when they haven’t “Schon gut. Trotzdem vielen dank” so lends itself well to class reading. It could also be developed into a game where learners hide an object whilst one of the class is outside for them to discover on their return (good question practice) or in small groups with cards, with question Hast du ……… gesehen? and reply Nein, ich habe……. nicht gesehen if they don’t have the card or Ja, es ist hier if they do. You could easily substitute the verb for gestohlen (stolen) gegessen (eaten) versteckt (hidden)and so on.

So that’s two of my favourite German books – others include the Lieselotte series about a mischievous cow, and all the Pixi Bücher that you can buy very cheaply wherever you see the stand below as well as in supermarkets. I’ll post again with my favourite ebooks another time!

As I am virtually housebound (that’s ‘nearly completely’ not  ‘housebound in a virtual world’!) I’m looking for things to occupy my time so decided embark on a blog series. I then concluded that I could kill two birds with one stone by cataloguing my books (especially as I’m being reunited with many of them out of storage!) and blogging about them. And I woke this morning to see that Clare has blogged about her favourite French and Spanish books so it seems that now is a good time to share!

So. over the next few weeks, I’ll share some of my favourite story books and try to share how I use them or might use them in the classroom. It’ll take that long as a)I have lots of books b)some are still in storage.

First post is coming right up after this one!

If you teach children aged between 6 and 11, why not encourage them to enter the bSmall Little Linguist competition.

As the bSmall website explains;

We would like you to write and illustrate a short story in a foreign language on any subject you like. We will pick two winners from the entries and publish the winning stories as e-books on our website. Each winner will also receive a b Small library worth £100 for your home or your school.

The story should be no more than four pages and you can use lots of illustrations to help tell your story. You must write your story in one of the following four languages:

– French
– German
– Italian
– Spanish

The website offers two templates for the stories, a comic book and an illustrated story book, and there’s a list of words to help as well.

There are two categories – 6-9 year olds and 9-11 year olds, and you can write a collaborative story with classmates (hence the overlap in age categories) The story can be about anything, and the closing date is June 1st with winners announced on July 1st. Entries can be sent via post or electronically, accompanied by an entry form.

Find out more on the bSmall website and happy story writing!

My second presentation at ILILC3 was called Let out for good behaviour.

The blurb said

Let out for good behaviour? refers to leaving the classroom being (often) seen as a treat. There are many ways to ‘break free’ of the walls of your classroom, both physical and virtual, and this session will involve both. Participation is required as we explore activities and games, that will enhance teaching and learning whilst bringing a breath of free air to a stuffy classroom. Technology will be involved but you don’t need anything but your imagination and sense of adventure to enjoy the activities.

Although my presentation was somewhat spoilt by the weather meaning we couldn’t get outside and make a mess with chalk, there was much giggling as we played Punto de contacto, went on a QR quest to solve animal riddles, went Placespotting and tried to win chocolate by solving dominoes. And much more of course! It’s great to know that some of the ideas I shared have already been used in classrooms!

Below are my slides from the session.

[slideshare id=16644981&style=border: 1px solid #CCC; border-width: 1px 1px 0; margin-bottom: 5px;&sc=no]