Every year we love carnival! Last year we celebrated with a theme based upon:

"carnaval des animaux-camille st saens"

The theme linked so well with our Y3 focus on animals and teachers found ways to create masks, perform dances linked to the music and to investigate Art and DT - all based on this theme.Truthfully this was a theme and a focus that whole schools took as an opportunity to use as creative shared learning across Music,Dance.Art,DT and Language Learning

We were able too to look at nouns in the singular and plural , to investigate unfamiliar animal nouns using bi-lingual dictionaries and to generate simple question and answer role-plays about animals and descriptions of animals: "What is it? What colour is it? how many can you see? Do you like.....? "

(Teachers decided upon the most appropriate questions and answers for their learners and the prior knowledge of the learners).

i knew about this book "Au carnaval des animaux" by Marianne Dubuc based upon the music by Saint saens and so as a carnival activity, mask making and fancy dress followed quite easily.The book is available in several languages.

We used the book in French and Spanish:

The blog link here gives you a flavour of the book in French Litterature de jeunesse .Simple repetitive story which allows the children to invent their own animal characters. We used simple cut out cards such as these below, to create our own fantastical fancy dress animal costumes and the cards where ideal for simple "Guess who I am ?" games- where one child holds a card and the other children /or another child has to guess which animals are on the card the first child is holding.

Leads to the children being able to make up the most amazing animal names - combining all the names of the animals they have know in one fancy dress mixed up animal written or spoken description.

And hot off the press just found this brilliant primary unit of work guide for a whole unit of work based around la danse des animaux- useful if you are a French speaker!

Brilliant ideas

And don't forget the possibilities of a wonderful dance to this famous song! Le livre de la jungle!

Here are some ways that we have in the past developed very simple beginners language learning based on carnival celebrations and the story of au carnaval des animaux

This afternoon was a wonderful afternoon and to be truthful it always is! I am meet with the language teachers who work with me in 31 schools on a regular all year weekly basis. It's our half termly training session. They bring their news and success stories and we discuss ways to develop and enhance the next half term's work over KS1 and KS2!

Today the planning focus was the final half term during this Summer term 2014 and the language learning that will take place.

What a final Summer half term 2014 with

the World Cup, the Tour de France and the Commonwealth Games

already offering us wonderful ways to celebrate the diversity of languages and the sense of a global community through sport !

We also want to encourage the children to think about the diversity in local languages as we live so near to Wales, Ireland, the Isle of Man and only a couple of hours from Scotland. Some of the resources sourced for the

Commonwealth Games

will allow the teachers the opportunity to listen to and practise languages that are spoken a matter of miles from where we live (15 miles to be exact from Warrington is the Welsh border) and one of the colleagues who attends the training today speaks Welsh! Indeed as we sat and discussed languages from quite near to us (and explained to our target language native speakers what we meant by "Manx"), it dawned on us that as many of us are local north-western people, our heritage and ancestry is tied up with these local languages! Many of our children and families will be able to trace their roots too in this way ... so what a great way to track all the children's family trees of languages too!

I think it’s also important that we look not just at the World Cup as a sporting occasion but as a chance to throw the spotlight on Brazil itself and celebrate culture and the environment in the target languages. We deliver currently French, German and Spanish.

So let's open the doors on Brazil !

Set the scene with music !

The sound and traditional children’s music of Brazi!

Here are short beautifully sung sound files which you could use to introduce the flavour of Brazil to your classes. Just to listen to and enjoy and maybe to vote on which is the class favourite!

musique-bresilienne-enfants

Listen and join in with the French versions of the Brazilian children’s songs that you can hear first in Portugese on the wonderful Mama Lisa site

Take a look at the geography and climate of the continent !

Learn some facts from Enchanted Learning Brasil page

Find out too from them about the Rainforest habitat and vegetation

Let the children read along with you this wonderful French story where they can investigate and learn about the animals from Brazil in this wonderful repetitive story based on a toucan finding out who else is awake in the jungle

Below is a clip in French, created for children in France to give them a taste of the tropical rain forests of the continent . The French is far too hard for young children but the ambience it creates – to just watch and see visual clues with the French commentary , adds a certain je ne sais quoi!

In Year 4 Summer 1 with JLN SOW we become jungle explorers...

So, here is a chance to revisit those jungle explorer rhymes and to create a Rainforest display filled with target language animal caligrams and shape sentences to describe the animals!

Learn some basic Brazilian Portugese !

Don't forget to learn a little language on the way! This

Brazilian Portugese Omniglot webpage may help!

Daily life for children in Brazil

Using this marvellous site 24heures vie de enfant we can explore with the children the everyday life of a young child in Brazil through pictures and puzzling out of facts. Take a look

here

Let's celebrate, samba style!

Finally when we think of Brazil we think of carnival and sambas , dancing and music and here I have found on the website Momes ,a Brazilian crown headdress which will leads us very nicely into the world Cup itself!

My suggestion is that we find out the names of the countries that will be participating in the World Cup in the target language studied and select 12 feathers for our headdress.Each of the feathers created as “paper feathers “ are made up of the flag and the name of participating country in the target language we are learning.Here are the French instructions on how to make a

Brazilian crown

Now we are ready for own samba style crown parade!

The dance class here for children could help your class to do this dance with proper

samba style