Dame Tartine

This week at our conference we had the opportunity to consider ways to develop phonics activities in target languages that help children understand the reading code of the new language. We consider the use of song, phonics in a target language,ways to record creatively written work, use of APPS and we briefly considered simple drama activities .
Let's bring these all together and celebrate their use linking this to an authentic text in the target language!
I have chosen for this example the comptine "Dame Tartine" ,as it's nearly the end of the school year and has a feel of a celebration cake!
We will be focusing on one verse only but here are two video clips with subtitles that can help your class to read and practise and sing along with the comptine.

Here is the verse we will focus on....

Il était une dame Tartine,

Dans un beau palais de beurre frais.

La muraille était de praline,

Le parquet était de croquets.

La chambre à coucher

De crème de lait ,

Le lit de biscuits,

Les rideaux d’anis.

It's an amazing palace that's being described made from tasty sweets and cake ingredients.

Step One - let's practise the comptine (listening,reading,joining in and singing)

• Let's listen to the whole comptine.
• Now let's listen to the first verse again with the subtitles visible.
• Now let's join in and try to practise the first verse
• Now let's sing along.
• Play the first verse again and conceal the screen - how well can the children remember song?

Step Two:Phonics and phoneme-grapheme/letter string recognition

• Draw an outline of the bedroom(walls/floor/bed/curtains) described in this verse and give each table an outline.Give out the five ingredients as word cards to each table.Ask the tables to decide where they would put each ingredient from the rhyme. Ask the table to say the rhyme to each other and decide where their ingredients should be stuck with blu-tac on the outline.Share the tables decisions.
• Now take the children phoneme - grapheme/letter string shopping like Julie Prince demonstrated at the conference.Each table needs a bag with a grapheme or letter string of a sound contained in one or more of the ingredients.Take a look at the picture here.

Remember!

This really brings out the competitive element! More than one table may have a sound on their bag this is contained in the ingredient noun. The table that reacts quickest and loudest will win the ingredient!

Step Three:Word recognition/memory and listening-reading

• Can the children match the items in the rhyme to the ingredients.Give out to pairs the words for the items and the words for the ingredients .
• First they must say them and match them
• Then they must say them , match them and order them as they remember them in the comptine
• Play the comptine first verse again ....where they correct? Or do they need to reorder some of the components?

Step Four:Speaking for a creative purpose with drama and the use of Yakit APP   

• Now add a touch of drama and performance.Ask the children to imagine that they are museum curators. Can they take it in turns working with a partner to show visitors around an the very special bedroom of this "palace".Can they not only make it sound delicious but also look delicious too?
• The children could draw the "delicious" bedroom and create a Yakit voice over of the bedroom- just like Emilie showed us at the conference. Take a look here at Emilie's fashion show  Yakit to give you an idea how this could work

Step Five:Making a written record and writing creatively in the target language.

• Let's make a mini book record of the Dame Tartine.A glorious celebration cake shaped mini book with flaps for the door where "la dame Tartine " can be seen and a flap (upon which is written the description of the items from the comptine) .When you open the flap it reveals the bedroom with the floor, the walls, the bed and the curtains all decorated as calligrams with the words for the ingredients.
• Why not let the children create another bedroom in the palace with calligrams of different ingredients - you can decide how many of the ingredients must rhyme with the items depending on how challenging you want this to be.

Find out more about @vallesco's mini books here.

Using the template described in the blog above to create your own sequence of lessons 

One sequence of lessons leads to another and one of the great things about the colleagues mentioned in this blog is that we all inspire each other and challenge each other to try new ideas. Julie Prince has developed a sequence of lessons, inspired by this blog post on one of her favourite action rhymes trois petits chats. I love it! Hope you find it useful too!

Non fiction in the target language and the wonderful links we can make with the primary currciulum

We can focus on creative aspects of writing in the target language and just like me I am sure you really enjoy developing children's imagination and creativity through story and simple poems etc.I think though we have also met many children who actually prefer to read and write about factual information.Indeed I can see how non-fiction books really help us to explore "familiar everyday language" and make comparisons and differences between ourselves and others.

Today I was tidying a language book shelf and came across these books,which  a good friend had given me a few years ago , when her bi-lingual children had grown out of them.
They are factual books which her boys had read and loved.

Truthfully it's less common that I read a factual target language book rather than a story book with children in KS1 and KS2 ,but it set me to thinking, why is this? It also made me think about all the times when young children want to tell you everything they know about ...... trains,dinosaurs,space etc!

Take look here at the books that were on my shelf and how I am going to try to develop some target language work across all four skills of listening , speaking reading and writing with these books as a platform to our learning

Noune 
This story about the daily life of a prehistoric young girl and her family exists in many languages and is based around the cave dwellers of the Pyrnées.
So surely this is a story that we should unpack with target language learners and link to a history focus too!

• We can practise target language phrases for daily routine 
• Create role- plays based on the life of Noune and her family 
• Create our own cave dweller pictures with target language titles etc.
• Shadow puppet theatre would work really well here too - giving the feel of cave dwelling and poor light, with narration in the target language about everyday life.
• We can create our own target language museum table with artefacts that we can draw, make out of papier mache or paint labelled and possibly explained simply in the target language 

Le train

Why not look at the wonderful ways of travelling across Europe ,when we are thinking about  ways to travel and transport. Wonderful books like this tell us all about train travel in a target language country. Authentic text for a reason. 

• Create a poster or information photo shoot of target language country travel facts
• Make a same and different fact file - colours of trains here and abroad, places we can go here and abroad, speed of trains and journey times, train tickets here and abroad
• Investigate places we can travel from and to and look at geographical features we may pass though,distances duration and time changes. 
• Investigate all the far away places you can travel to and from ,when you are at a major train station in Europe.(I think this was one of the most "liberating" moments when I first went to live abroad- that I could get on a train and go to so many countries!)
• Create role plays to take us to far away places we want to travel to  and take a google map tour of the city or country when we "arrive" there.

Les petits malheurs :

Here's an opportunity to 

• compare and investigate doctors and what the surgery looks like and what the signs mean (you could create a target language doctor's surgery in the role play area etc)
• hospitals 
• practise illness role plays
• practise key language to describe illness as a child might describe illness
• create a traveller's hand book of "les petits malheurs"

J'observe

I love this series of books and this one inspired me to think about history ."J'observe la vie sous la ville". It's all about the history under our feet !

I absolutely adore the book as it opens so many opportunities.It's about the layers of life that are under current day streets. It considers what we would find if we began to dig below the surface- 18th Century life , medieval artefacts , Roman roads etc. The book allows us to make links between previous times in our own culture and those of the target language countries.The book  once again offers us the opportunity to 

• explore daily routines,target language role-plays  based on everyday life but in different ages 
• explore and visit museums on line that show us life in medieval times/ romans times in  the target language countries etc
• performance to portray life  
• factual simple present tense first person singular descriptions as if we are visiting in a certain time period.
• create our own fact sheet about the ages below our feet - in the present tense as if we are going back in time to visit these people and their daily lives
• a 3D street that takes us back in time with simple target language sentences as we peel back the years.

I am off now to find all my other non-fiction books and see what else I can create! 

Circus ! An independent project for early target language learners

Summer time and all across Europe you will find  the circus is coming to town!
Last year I sat down with a local teacher to plan and consider how we could link the target language  learning of her Year 5 and 6 to the language and context of the circus and the culture of circuses at the seaside in France and Spain.Circus was the focus of the UKS2 children and the school was trying to encourage independent learning at the end of the school year, looking back at what they had learned throughout the year

We set out to be the facilitators of the Summer focus and give the children the time to explore the language skills and knowledge of the language they had acquired during the year.

The children were at the stage in language learning where they could understand ,say,read and write simple spoken and written sentences using nouns, verbs and adjectives in the present tense.

The important points were that we wanted to 

1. to allow the children the opportunity to explore the language of the circus by independent access to text be it written or spoken
2. to allow the children to create their own final product - an advertisement for a Summer circus in the target language in either spoken or written form.

• The task

The children were asked to work in groups of four - differentiated ability- and to include in their project:

1. A poster (dates, times, venue,cost,participants). 
2. A simple description of the circus  ( simple present tense description of a circus using there is/are and third person singular of the verb (to be and to have). 
3. A rhyme, song or poem about the circus ( simple "advertisement jingle" style poem/ song/rhyme describing the circus and giving simple opinions e.g it's good/fantastic/ fun etc).

The expectation was that the children would use their prior knowledge of language and the skills required to access key language to generate the three components mentioned above.

• Core language gathering 

We let the children explore the language of the circus through simple authentic text.In groups we asked the children to explore an authentic text (here a French book or a Spanish video) and to find the key words for acrobat, trapeze artists, magician , the circus clowns etc, giving them access to bi-lingual dictionaries to check the language.

We found a brilliant book about in French about the circus









And this great simple video clip in Spanish introducing the key nouns associated with the circus. We gave the children the hyper-link for the clip on their chrome books

• Let the children explore how to create their own circus posters 

Using posters of the circus coming to town we decided to ask the children to use these as information banks they could  access to find and see how to use  target language in their own posters. The important thing was that the children should access the posters to find out for themselves for example how to describe the action , how to write the date and times etc.

Care was taken to select posters that had sufficient examples of key information so that the children had a text from which they could find examples for their own posters.

• Generating your own advertisement jingle 

We understood that these would need to be simple as the children had limited language but we wanted also to consider how added a flavour of the circus to their advertisements 

We watched with them video clips  and asked them to discuss how they could make sure their jingles had a circus flavour. We added the hyper- links to their chrome books so they could watch again for inspiration!

Here is a Spanish example 

Here is a French example 

• Over to the groups 

Then it was over to the groups to create a package that sold their circus to the class!

We found that the children really enjoyed the feeling of independence when using the target language and having to think of ways of accessing and checking language.The children valued the material that each group.

The  project worked because the challenges were not beyond the limits of the language but the project allowed the Year 5 and 6 children to feel the responsibility we often bestow upon them in other subject areas to organise, access and generate their own materials and outcomes! 

A great end of year project !

Seaside special three: a sandcastle building poem and performance

Encourage the children to take an imaginative look at sandcastles !

The child who built this sandcastle on a Welsh beach at Easter most certainly had used their imagination ...and it captured mine as a I walked by.

You require  simple skeleton sentences (see below in French and Spanish).

Allow the children to determine the missing words in the gaps (quantity? colours? size) as they read the poem skeleton with you. 

Il y a .............pâtés

Il y a un…………..fossé

Il y a un  ........... pont

Il y a  ..............  tours

Il y a ……………drapeaux

Et voilà un château de sable fantastique!



Hay.........tartas de arena
Hay un foso
Hay un puente
Hay.........torres
Hay .........banderas
¡Y aquí está un fantástico castillo de arena!

Practise the poem with the class. 

Now send them a way in groups of four to create a visual performance of the spoken poem that builds  the sandcastle as they imagine it. 

For example you may have children making sand pies and counting etc, you may have children depicting the moat a water running past with their hands as the moving water, you may have children who pretend to ride on horse- back over the bridge etc. They can decide , the important element is that they are being creative with the target language in the way they use the language to design their castle in their imaginations and then generate a spoken performance of their group’s sandcastle for the class.

Seaside special two: Design brief for fantastical sandcastles

Design brief for a fantastical sandcastle

A very simple activity but one our children always love is to set up a competition to design their own sandcastles!

Explain to the children how many sandcastle beach competitions you will find on beaches across Europe in the Summer

There is a slight twist though because as we all know the sea washes away the sandcastles from the day before .

Can a second group or pair take the design brief and recreate the sandcastle design that a first group or pair has written?

How similar are the two designs when the drawings are compared?

What’s very important is that the children can write clear sentences to describe the features of their sandcastles in the target language. This means that the teacher can determine the degree of difficulty – 

• beginner writers in a target language we would suggest - noun, verb and adjective  and quantity. 
• moving on writers in a target language  we would expect  adjectives that agree with nouns as well as simple well constructed sentences
• advanced writers n the basic target language we would expect more detailed information – nouns, quantity, adjectives that agree, prepositions and possibly directional language.

Brasil, Celebrating the World Cup with a twist!

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

.

Linking parts of the body and movements with mime performance, Art and dance

Linking parts of the body and movements with mime performance , Art and dance

I love mime artists and the way they can control their bodies and isolate parts of their bodies to exaggerate movements

This next half term we teach parts of the body to our Year 4 children . 

We have great fun learning rhymes , playing response games , designing  fantastical creatures etc. The other day I was inspired by a poster of a famous work of art from the Tate Henri Matisse Cut Outs  series. It was “Icarus “ by Henri Matisse and this  led me to think about how we could develop some movement activities around parts of the body nouns in target language learning.I think it makes a great creative primary cross curricular learning  experience for the children .Hope some of you may give this a go!

Henri Matisse Icarus.

Stage One 

First teach the parts of the body nouns and explore the nouns in both singular and plural forms. We all love "Heads, shoulders , knees and toes " in target language teaching because it gets the children up , moving listening, responding and joining in.

Below is a link the wonderful Mama Lisa songs and the page that offers you the chance to explore this song in lots of languages!

Mama Lisa and many target language versions of Heads Shoulders Knees and Toes  

Once the children are up and moving why not let them listen to , join in and sing along with one of the two following clips in French or Spanish ...

Here in French is "Jean petit qui danse ..."

And in Spanish here is "Juan Pequeño baila"

Using these clips help you to create active  learning parts of the body and some great class performances for assemblies!

Stage Two 

Inspired by Icarus I decided to put together the simple sequence of learning above with  some activities which will  develop understanding of instructional language to generate a physical response 

You may read this and think well I can achieve part one of this or  I can combine part one and part two or part one and part three ....That’s fine , it’s about pushing boundaries and exploring the link between language learning and communicating a whole creative outcome .

1.  Parts of the body and physical movements

1.       Practise and teach the parts of the body – usual games and activities –listening and responding. Make sure that the children have practised both the singular and plural of the key parts of the body you will need for the activities below.Engage the children in the singing of one of the songs mentioned at the top of the blog or a song that is your favourite for teaching parts of the body  Make sure it is a physical response song.

o

2.       Introduce and practise the key instructional language for “run”, ”jump”, ”touch”, “clap”, “hop”, “move”, ”walk”, ”crawl” ,”slide”, “kick”,”push”,in the target languag .Link the language with an action , create mime performances of the language and the actions. Ask the children to do their actions slowly , quickly , softly etc

3.      

4.       Now call a part of the body and the class should respond with an action representing the command they think best fits with that part of the body e.g.  “hands” – children might respond by clapping or “legs” children might respond by walking or running ....but if you shout  “leg” then maybe they will respond with “hopping”- as it’s on one leg!

5.       Play the game a second time but this time the children should say the command and do the actions.

6.       Can the children work in groups of four to create a flowing movement from one side of the hall to the other which involves them saying a part of the body  , then an action, then a part of the body , then another action using the instructional language you have practised with the class? They should  use at least five movements and five body parts to get from one side of the room to the other!

7.       You can change the focus slightly  and add challenge by asking the children to call a number of the body parts e.g. three legs   – so the children will have to demonstrate three people hopping or two children – one running and one hopping .

8.       If you have IPads then the children can take photos or a video of their sequences and then back in class can add their own written statements or  record themselves saying the sequence of movements and body parts in time with the video clip or photo show .

2. Bring Art to Life .

Creative consolidation of language

Using the picture of Icarus explain that mythical character Icarus wanted to fly but he flew too near to the sun!

Can the children make the painting of Icarus move ?

Ask the children to observe the picture of Icarus and make their own painting of Icarus but they need to paint the body as words , using the key body parts to create the background of the painting.

For example each body part will be made up of the noun printed or written in the target language over and over again.

Over the top of the part of the body the children need to add a piece of instructional language representing a movement.The background of the body will be covered with grafiti style vibrant  instructional commands that are in  explosive word shapes  bringing the specific limb to life  e.g over the hand they could paint "push" and over a leg they could paint " run" etc in the target language. 

Mime artists.

Challenging and creative performance of new language

Give the class a picture of a sportsman or woman in action

In pairs ask the children to create a sequence of three movements that the sports star makes when they move in their specific sport . Can they create a repetitive mime routine and add to it a repetitive target languagespoken sequence made up of parts of the body and actions that fit the sequence of movements ? 

Ask the pairs to demonstrate to the class  through repetitive spoken mime how the sports person moves in their chosen sequence of actions

This will be a repetitive  , rhythmical spoken performance e delivered  to demonstrate the physical  process taking place .