A little later than planned, and with huge apologies, here are my presentations from the East Midlands Primary Languages Conference held on Nottingham on 5th December!

Más vale tarde que nunca.  Mieux vaut tard que jamais! Besser spät als gar nicht.

Firstly, my presentation on Crosscurricular links:

And here’s the presentation on Technology for collaboration:

It was a pleasure to speak, and I was also able to attend a few other sessions which are sketchnoted below.

A marvellous keynote by the ever effervescent John Rolfe.

An inspiring session by Chris Henley about being BRILLIANT – finding my WHY? and being Ms Different.

A Taste of Spain delivered by Carmen Santos from the Consejería de Educación in Manchester – loved making – and eating – my brocheta de fruta!

And Elaine Minett charing her Healthy Eating resources based around the story ¡Hoy no, Claudio!

I received an email on Thursday from a young man called Matt J at Tutorful:

My name is Matt and i’m getting in touch today with some great news – ¡Vámonos! has been featured in our Top 50 Spanish Learning Resources.

As you know, there’s hundreds if not thousands of sites offering Spanish resources, but we love yours! Which is exactly why you were chosen – you give great tips and tricks to teachers, allowing them to find new ways to spread their knowledge and passion – this is why we wanted to share it with our audience.

Well, that was a surprise!

I headed straight over to the article in question and discovered that I’m in good company alongside sites like OneThirdStories, Rockalingua, Spanish Playground, Duolingo and Calico Spanish that are very familiar to me as well as some new discoveries. For example  Spanish Blog 365 that has a Spanish language podcast of about ten minute each day. I think the episodes about festivals are particularly helpful – for example, the folk art of La Catrina dolls  and El Día de Reyes.  I found an interesting post about Why teach your child Spanish? on Alhambra Spanish site and another on World Language Cafe about challenging stereotypes. It was also good to be reminded of sites like Spanish Games and Spanish Town.

I’m very touched by the description of my blog:

 ¡Vámonos! is an enchanting and enlightening collection of blog posts sharing teachers experiences and expertise, telling tales of techniques tried and regaling us with how they worked and failed, as well as ways to think about things differently, so as best to become better teachers.

And I’m especially grateful to Tutorful for going to the trouble of explaining to readers why my latest post is about Lithuanian not Spanish!

Have a read for yourself and see if you find a gem that could help you!

And if you don’t find what you want there, why not try Zapatito Inglés, LightBulb Languages, Changing Phase, or Rachel Hawkes.

SaveSave

I wholeheartedly believe that learning a language shouldn’t be a ‘bolt on’ but part of the curriculum as a whole, and I am therefore always on the look out for new ideas.

I found this short video clip on Youtube earlier and it started me thinking. Again! httpv://youtu.be/58IoBEoNyWQ

Whilst I’m not sure that this is something that could be done at the moment given the weather reports I’m seeing, it’s certainly an interesting idea and it could be completed using the second clip. Just use a stopwatch and count for 10 or 60 seconds then complete the sum to find out how hot it was when that film was recorded.

httpv://youtu.be/CQFEY9RIRJA

I’ve blogged before about teaching Maths in Spanish and I also taught Maths in Spanish during my last observation at WCPS. I can’t believe I didn’t blog it but I’ve uploaded the plan and resources below.

table names (2D shapes in Spanish)

Ratio definition

Proportion definition

Lesson plan – Razones y proporciones

Worksheet for círculos y triángulos

Worksheet – pentágonos y cuadrados

Worksheet – hexágonos

Since then I’ve found a few more things that look quite useful.

¿Quién quiere pizza? is a series of lessons by Cynthis Lanius on fractions. It’s also available in English. Each ‘lesson’ gives a short explanation then poses four or five multiple choice questions. Answer the questions and then receive your score at the bottom of the page including the correct answers.

Cynthia also offers some counting activities in Spanish that you could easily use with much younger learners, counting things, saying which is more, and completing sequences. And finally, a more advanced type of Maths linked to Science – in La tina caliente learners work on interpreting graphs

Then there’s  Maggie’s Earth Adventures. These activities from Scholastic are also offered in both English and Spanish.

In El Dilema de Dude you must rescue Dude the dog from the roof by solving sums in Spanish. Every sum solved takes your helicopter closer to Dude. You can choose which operation you wish to practice – or you can choose a mix – and also the level at which you play.

In a similar vein, in ¡Alrededor del Mundo en 80 segundos! you travel around the world by solving sums. You must do it quickly or you’ll not make it home!

And then there’s a brilliant Science activity that involves labelling. In Diagramando a la ciencia  learners see a diagram and then have to label it for themselves. Included are things like parts of a plant, the layers of the earth and parts of a fish.  Good resources to use to reinforce learning.

There are others activities here too worth investigating – code breaking, a Spanish vocabulary game and a grammar game too.

Other links –

a Maths terms worksheet 

Maths glossary (far more information than you’d need in a primary classroom!)

much more simple maths terms

Logic puzzles for Year 7 from the inimitable Rachel Hawkes

On the Juegos Educ.ar site, Cuenta con cuentos and Cuentos y leyendas are both word puzzles. Figuras geométricas is a simple matching activity.

And how about the Matemáticas section here for some simple fun activities, or the site of Colegio Público San José de Calasanz for some Maths appropriate for KS2.

And finally, lots of activities here on RinconMaestro plus some good word puzzles – Problemas – on Aprendiendomates.

How’s that to keep you going? Need to find more science links now…

Thanks to Liz Fotheringham last week for telling me about this wonderful site!

As it explains here,

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

Today see the second Website of the week in QR code – this one is still under construction but is looking great!

The colour was chosen especially to match the colour scheme of the site – and the school ;o)

(For those of you without a QR reader, click here)