Illuminating nouns

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Toward the end of this first half term, many of you will have introduced some nouns to your classes or will have revisited familiar nouns and used these in new contexts. Certainly if you are using one of our Primary Languages Network Schemes of Work then Years 4, 5 and 6 will have been using nouns in the target language this half term.

We love this activity as it makes purposeful and effective display and can be a display that works with beginners and more advanced learners and potentially allows you to create a whole school target language grammar display too.

The idea is inspired by one of the great celebrations here in the North West of England, the Blackpool illuminations. You will see strings of bright lights and light displays all around Blackpool, lighting up the night sky at this time of year. Below are the steps we suggest you take to create your illuminating nouns display.

  1. Play a game with the nouns you have practised , a spoken memory chain game or a game of listening, respond, mime and show the meaning of noun (for example Simon says).

  2. Talk with the children about how we can group the nouns. With beginners, this might be just to highlight the use of “le” and “la” in French for example before the nouns they know. With more advanced learners this may be to the group into singular and plural nouns in categories of masculine and feminine nouns. You may be able to think of a focus that you want to dig deeper with the class.

  3. Ask the children to create their own paper light bulb shapes and to add drawings of nouns and accurate target-language spelling of the nouns.

  4. Give the children short pieces of string and ask them to create their own illumination strings following your grammar focus. This may mean that all the masculine nouns should be put on a string and all the feminine nouns should be put on a string or you may want the children to divide the nouns into singular and plural nouns etcetera.

  5. Collect in the strings of nouns and display. In fact, you could have strings of nouns from beginners and more advanced displayed together.