httpv://youtu.be/d_smmARX-TI

Cuento de Navidad. Matias ha pedido un tren a los Reyes Magos. Matias sabía que los Reyes Magos no dejan regalos a los niños que están despiertos pero esa noche le entran unas ganas terribles de hacer pis. Un cuento divertido para disfrutar con los niños esta Navidad.

Beatriz Montero cuenta una adaptación del cuento “Cuando a Matías le entraron ganas de hacer pis en la Noche de Reyes”, de Chema Heras, Ed. Kalandraka.

A great story for tonight! You can see the original story here and here’s a lovely little song to go with the story!

I came across this website earlier when searching for something else and thought I’d share it.

TuDiscoveryKids is the website for DiscoveryKids in Latin America and features all sorts of activities in Spanish linked to some of their programmes. I thought I’d highlight a few that you might find interesting!

Juego de los colores

In this game, learners are given five tubes of paint and challenged to make the colour indicated – in the example above ‘bordo’ or burgundy. They squeeze the tubes to squirt the paint onto the palette, use the paintbrush to mix the colour and then paint the picture with the colour they mixed. Great for linking to colour blending in art.

Fábrica de palabras

In this game, the crane challenges you to complete words by finding the missing consonants. The letters are then hoisted into the word and the crane repeats the sound and tells you if you’re correct. Then you are asked a yes/no question about consonants and vowels before being given another challenge. Great for looking at sound/letter link.

Todos a bordo

A game for dinosaur fans – and every class has them! The dinosaurs travel from Triassic to Jurassic to Cretaceous period and you are in charge of showing the dinosaurs to their seats, checking the tickets, feeding them and making sure that they get off in the correct period. As you go, you learn what type of food the dinosaurs eat and also in which time period they belong.

 Conoce los 5 sentidos

This game links to your senses and asks you to choose from three objects that match a description e.g. Algo que tiene olor – something that smells or algo brillante – something shiny, and then decide which sense you would use to find out. As you play, you can learn the names of the objects from which you select, increase your knowledge of adjectives, and also consider your senses. You need to be careful as well not choose the correct sense for the adjective e.g. I had to find something ‘silencioso’ (silent) which was ‘una pluma’ (a feather), and this linked to ‘Oido’ – hearing rather than touch which you might have chosen had the adjective been ‘suave’ – soft. A fun link to science!

Each game also has links to other activities that have a link – for example, a video called Masa repugnante is suggested for this game which links to a video about an experiment to make a gooey yucky dough!

And there are also articles that would be of interest to educators and parents. This one links to the game above.

  Así se dice

This is a very simple game that wants you to indicate the animal that makes a certain sound by clicking on the animal. This is made harder by the animals being in silhouette on what looks like a sight chart! A fun game that could be played when discussing animals as well as when thinking about how languages have similarities and differences.

 Leer es un juego

Our final example is accessed via the image of a library where you click on the book you’d like to read. The book is read to you but there is a missing word in the text. In the first example, there are three images from which to choose to fill the gap; in the second you have to choose the word that has the syllables correctly ordered. A fun way of keeping attention if you are using the story with the whole class as well as a little challenge for an individual reader.

I hope you’ll investigate the site more yourself – there are many more games and activities that merit attention. Perhaps I’ll come back with a follow up post in the future to explore further!

One final (for now!) Storybird, this time a little more complex than previously. This book is about animals and from where they come. It could be used as part of a cross curricular unit (geography /Science / Spanish). Whilst making it, I found a great website called Animalandia which has information in the form of short ‘fichas’ and a paragraph about over 400 animals and great pictures too. I particularly like the Carrusel de imágenes that can be set to flick through a certain animal group or just pop up images of random animals.
I wish I’d known of this site when I wrote this post about the QCA unit El Carnaval de los Animales, but it would certainly help with the latter tasks such as writing about an animal in the first person,  creating My Wildself and describing it.
¿De dónde viene el yak? on Storybird

PS I promise to get a new ‘obsession’ for November! ;O)

A new Storybird that has not been seen previously, especially for Halloween – and specifically written for RGo at WCPS ;o)

Count with Calabaza (Pumpkin) from 0 to 9, and then find the Halloween objects in the story.

Hope you enjoy it!

UPDATED October 2020

Storybird have changed the ability to share so here it is narrated as a PPT.

In celebration of the new features of Storybird, I’ve been back to the site and had another play around and written a new book!

I’ve written about Storybird before here, here and here. Oh, and here and here too!

New things on Storybird that I think are particularly useful from an educational point of view –

1. No more Flash so you can use and view the Storybirds on any smartphone or devices including iOS such as iPads and iPod Touch devices. This also means that you can write Storybirds in scripts that do not use Latin characters such as Greek, Mandarin and Arabic.

2. More categories, making it easier to search for a story written by someone else, and also filter for age appropriate stories.

3. New ‘create’ page and new covers.

HOWEVER,  you may now be able to write in other scripts but you still can’t publish them to the PUBLIC gallery, nor can you publish in any language other than English. The Community Guidelines state

‘While we celebrate all cultures and languages, we can not at this time moderate and thus approve Storybirds for the public library that are written in languages other than English. We will be expanding internationally soon, and we will add specific language support as we do. In the meantime, the stories can still be published in your private library and shared with your family and friends.’

Whilst I know that this is a small company and moderation in lots of languages costs money, the MFL Twitterati did offer to help, and I’m sure that offer still stands?! And I wonder what their plans are – the site is now 3 years old. I will tweet and ask. Watch this space!

UPDATE

Here is the Twitter conversation with Storybird! (NB read from bottom up!)

So it seems we have a while yet before we can freely share our Storybirds on the site.

HOWEVER, to get around this, you can embed them into a blog (as I have here), or share the URL of your Storybird (I shared with my own email address then opened the book and copied the URL)

And there is also the wonderful MFL Storybird wiki. Whilst the URL way will still work, the fact that you are now given an embed code means that the books can now be embedded on the page and read there and then rather than having to be transferred to Storybird.com to read!

A shame that you have to “know the right people” to be able to access all these stories in other languages but better than nothing!

La vida sana. on Storybird

Thanks to @AliceAyel on Twitter for flagging up a great post on a blog called Teaching Spanish w/ Comprehensible Input by Cynthia Hitz. The post is entitled Using videos of children’s stories and lo and behold, there was my son’s favourite story as a child, playing to me in Spanish.

Entitled Click Clack Muu, Vacas escritoras (Click Clack moo, Cows that type) the story is set on a farm where the cows get hold of a typewriter and start sending letters to Farmer Brown demanding electric blankets. And then the ducks get involved… Isaac is now 14 and can still recite it verbatim. And so can I! So it’s great to see this post with so many ideas of how you might use it in the classroom. If only I had a class with whom to share it.

httpv://youtu.be/MQS-_5_MP-Q

I found these Resources from PBS  – they’re in English but there are some great ideas that could be translated into Spanish.

Gracias @sonrisadelcampo and thanks Isaac for the memories ;o)

Just rediscovered a lovely website for stories in Spanish. La Biblioteca Infantil and La Biblioteca Pre-Escolar are great for native speakers and young learners alike with stories on a variety of themes complete with accompanying activities.

For example, La Pelota Dorada in La Biblioteca Infantil is a story based on a fairytale (won’t give away which one!) in which you can name the princess, the prince and also the hero which you choose from a duck, a beaver or a tortoise. The story has passages of text to read and sections of dialogue that appear in speech bubbles and are read to you.

Accompanying the story is an activity – in this case a ‘Find the difference’ – and also a list of books on a similar theme.

In La Biblioteca Pre-Escolar the stories are more simple and are all read aloud to the reader. In El canto del corral features a little girl who wants to sing but everyone is too busy until he goes into the farmyard. To accompnay the story there is an online activity – choosing musical instruments – and a craft activity as well as a list of books ona similar theme.

There aren’t a huge number of stories, however they are on a variety of themes that are suitable for integration into the primary curriculum, particularly in the  EYFS / PSHE areas.

The site also exists in English so good for comparing language, and also for the less confident Spanish speaker who wants to check out the meaning of the story!

Ages ago I bought a book of little plays and poems by Gloria Fuertes, and have to admit that I haven’t looked at it much since I bought it. However, I was reminded of it on Thursday at the ALL NorthEast Spanish day in Gosforth when Joaquín Moreno was talking about using poetry in teaching Spanish.

He mentioned using a particular poem by Gloria Fuertes to read aloud and act out in order to practice getting English mouths around Spanish sounds – in this case, ‘rr’ is particularly practiced.

The suggestion was to chorally repeat the odd numbered, repeated  line “Doña Pito Piturra” and for volunteers to read the even, varied line, with feeling and an action to accompany it.

A very simple idea that I shall be using in my classroom soon!

Below is the poem, and also a video of the poem being recited plus two versions, as a song!

DOÑA PITO PITURRA

Doña Pito Piturra
Tiene unos guantes,
Doña Pito Piturra
Muy elegantes.

Doña Pito Piturra
Tiene un sombrero,
Doña Pito Piturra
Con un plumero.

Doña Pito Piturra
Tiene un zapato,
Doña Pito Piturra
Le viene ancho.

Doña Pito Piturra
Tiene toquillas,
Doña Pito Piturra
Con tres polillas.

Doña Pito Piturra
Tiene unos guantes,
Doña Pito Piturra
Le están muy grandes.

Doña Pito Piturra
Tiene unos guantes,
Doña Pito Piturra
¡lo he dicho antes!

Just discovered this ‘channel’ on Youtube – coloradolibraries. It’s the site of Colorado State Libraries and features several clips of people reading stories.

A Colorado Storytime includes read-alouds of childrens books along with literacy tips. It includes different types of short books, in English and Spanish, with colorful pictures, related in some way to Colorado through publisher, author, illustrator or theme, and read by Colorado personalities.

Over the next 4 posts I’ll be sharing some Spanish ones and making the odd suggestion about how they might be used.

The first is a story about Cucumber soup – Sopa de pepino – a great story about working together (think The enormous turnip) featuring minibeasts!

Linda Owen has some lovely ideas about using minbeasts in primary languages and here are some resources (in French I think but they could be adapted!)  and there’s a wonderful song about a labybird on this page (scroll down the page)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRRWnRO7dm0

Yes, I’ve been to IKEA again in search of a blind and more inspiration in the form of squishy things!

You’d think I’d bought up the whole shop by now but I did purchase this set of farm animals.

How might I use them?

Well, I’ve thought of the following-

a) colours –

Busco algo negro.

Busco un animal de color rosa.

¿De qué color es la vaca?

¿El cisne es amarillo?

b) size/shape

Busco algo negro y pequeño.

Busco algo blanco con un cuello largo.

Althernatively, you could give half the information and the pupils to ask for more information.

Busco algo grande.     >    ¿Es negro?

No, es marrón y blanca.    > Es la vaca

c) a song (there’s always a song involved isn’t there!)

El granjero tiene una granja or En la granja de mi tío or En la granja de Pepito or whichever version you sing would work well!

d)looking at names of baby animals –

una oveja – un cordero

una vaca – un ternero

un cerdo – un cerdito

leading into the use of -ito to mean little  (cf un pollo – un pollito)

(btw – if you fancy a giggle, have a look at this for finding out how to say little baby cow in different languages!)

e) storytelling

Una vez había un grupo de animales en una granja había una vaca y su ternero, un cerdo y sus tres cerditos, una oveja y su cordero negro y un cisne.  Su vida era perfecta aparte de una cosa… en la granja también había un toro gruñón..

I’ll leave you to finish off the story!

So, there’s a few ideas. Perhaps you could add your own in the comments below?

PS I was very taken with these wonderful large squashy fruit and vegetables. I resisted the temptation to buy them though!