I, amongst many many other people, used the extra day we have this year and blogged on Feb29th.net. Brainchild of @deputymitchell to get the world blogging in a simple and easy way, Feb29th.net has collected flags from 91 nations and been visited over 21,000 times. More importantly, thousands of people, young and old have added their post, however short, to the project. If you look at the tag cloud on the website, it’s great to see the size of the Under12 and 12-17 tags – the bigger the word, the more it appeared.
I read several posts and this one caught my eye. I hope “Harry Gardner” doesn’t mind me copying his blog post – did ask him in the comments! Love that an under 12 has chosen to post so many reasons for language learning! I love number 6, and can tell you that you do need number 11 to learn a language (intensively especially!) as it doens’t just happen. Unfortunately.
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…
Zachary Jones’ site Zambombazo is a great source of inspiration for all things Hispanic.
And I love it because it proves time and again that there is always something to learn about a language you thought you knew quite well.
I’m often challenged by pupils when I can’t recall the word for ‘meerkat’ or ‘spark plug’ that ‘you’re supposed to know Spanish’ to which I reply I don’t know every word in English. Especially when it comes to colloquial useage. I mean, my son tells me that when he says soemthing is ‘sickage’, that’s great. I’m not so sure…
So, I particularly like this map that Zachary has made – ¿Cómo se dice ‘cool’ en español?
As he points out in his post, the answer to that question depends on lots of factors including the country or even region you’re in, your socioeconomic status as well as your age. The post also offers ideas on how you might use the map to increase vocabulary, to encourage intercultural discussion and to promote discussion of current linguistic useage.
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!
Following on from Rachel’s Hawkes’ reminder to me of my plan to teach phonics using her grid, another reminder popped up today when i was on Slidecast and found this short presentation courtesy of Clare Seccombe aka @Valleseco aka MFL Sunderland webmistress extraordinaire.
Phonics are key to our ability to read and pronounce unfamiliar words in a language -must ask Rachel if she has a phonics grid for German!
Another of the poems suggested by Joaquín Moreno in his presentation about poetry in Spanish teaching and learning was Nanas de la cebolla by Miguel Hernández.
He played us the poem sung by Joan Manuel Serrat – here it is below, along with a perfomance of it in spoken form and also the words.
Spoken version
httpv://youtu.be/ktZEWJAoai0
Nanas de la cebolla
La cebolla es escarcha cerrada y pobre: escarcha de tus días y de mis noches. Hambre y cebolla: hielo negro y escarcha grande y redonda.
En la cuna del hambre mi niño estaba. Con sangre de cebolla se amamantaba. Pero tu sangre, escarchada de azúcar, cebolla y hambre.
Una mujer morena, resuelta en luna, se derrama hilo a hilo sobre la cuna. Ríete, niño, que te tragas la luna cuando es preciso.
Alondra de mi casa, ríete mucho. Es tu risa en los ojos la luz del mundo. Ríete tanto que en el alma al oírte, bata el espacio.
Tu risa me hace libre, me pone alas. Soledades me quita, cárcel me arranca. Boca que vuela, corazón que en tus labios relampaguea.
Es tu risa la espada más victoriosa. Vencedor de las flores y las alondras. Rival del sol. Porvenir de mis huesos y de mi amor.
La carne aleteante, súbito el párpado, el vivir como nunca coloreado. ¡Cuánto jilguero se remonta, aletea, desde tu cuerpo!
Desperté de ser niño. Nunca despiertes. Triste llevo la boca. Ríete siempre. Siempre en la cuna, defendiendo la risa pluma por pluma.
Ser de vuelo tan alto, tan extendido, que tu carne parece cielo cernido. ¡Si yo pudiera remontarme al origen de tu carrera!
Al octavo mes ríes con cinco azahares. Con cinco diminutas ferocidades. Con cinco dientes como cinco jazmines adolescentes.
Frontera de los besos serán mañana, cuando en la dentadura sientas un arma. Sientas un fuego correr dientes abajo buscando el centro.
Vuela niño en la doble luna del pecho. Él, triste de cebolla. Tú, satisfecho. No te derrumbes. No sepas lo que pasa ni lo que ocurre.
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:
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.
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.
Google News automatically groups news tories with similar content and places them based on algorithmic results into clusters. In Newsmap, the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News Aggregator presents. In that way users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Through that process it still accentuates the importance of a given article.
What’s really great is that you can choose the country from which you’d like the headlines – the list includes Spain and Mexico as well as Germany and Austria which allow a comparison of headlines in the smae language. Canada is included as well as France but the headlines are in English!
And there’s a tool bar at the bottom as well where you can choose the type of news that you’d like included.
Here I’ve just selected Sport in this screen shot :-
Another thing I like about this site is that if you hover on a headline, you get the beginning of the article plus a photograph. Just enough to give you more information about the headline, and just enough to be a ‘short text’. The ‘hover’ also tells you how many articles have been written on the same topic, and from which paper that headline came.
Liz mentioned it in the context of KS3 and 4 and using authentic materials for reading. I wholeheartedly agree – and would venture that it might be good to use with KS2 for
gist
looking for cognates
ICU about what’s in the news in other countries
comparing languages by using an unknown language eg by choosing Brasil or Netherlands
match the headlines
And that’s just a quick think!
I’m having a great time exploring. What do you think you could do with this site?
