Carnival,harlequin and describing hats with extended sentences
Carnival and languages just go together so well !
Last year I was inspired by Art and all the incredible paintings through the ages of Harlequin , a key component of carnival and any fancy dress party to celebrate carnival . Have a look here at just two pictures ......
The children and myself in Year 5 had been working during the previous half term on clothes and descriptions of clothing ,placing adjectives in the correct position with nouns in extended sentences and trying to think carefully about how we needed to spell the adjectives to match the nouns and agree with them.
This lesson was a final celebration and we designed hats for harlequin to wear for carnival in all his finery!
We found out facts about Harlequin
I found out information to share with the children from here on wikipedia
We used the picture by Pablo Picasso Seated Harlequin (I selected this one,as he doesn't have a hat!) to design our own hats and add them to the picture . Before we could add our hats though , we had to design them , describe them and play a game with a song where we missed out parts of the song as we sang it through several times with actions!A fun lesson in the spirit of Carnival with language , memory skills and grammar all included!
Here is what we did ......
1..Look at pictures of hats and ask what colour the hats are – showpictures
2.Now develop extra questions about the hat - colour / size/ pattern .
3.Turn pictures of individual hats over and blu-tac to the flip chart.Ask children to guess the colour or the size or the pattern of the hat –you will need numbers on the back of the hats so they can say for example “ number 2 is blue ”.If the child is correct they come to the front and select the hat. If children are in teams , that team wins a point
4. Can the children link the hat to faces -Who does the hat belong to?Can they give the faces personalities , names , ages , where they live , what they like- in either the first person singular or the third person singular .
5. Introduce and practise the rhyme "My hat it has four corners " in the target language . Here is a link to the rhyme in French mon chapeau a quatre bosses and in German , here is a You tube clip of Mein hut der hat drei Ecken
Practise the rhyme with the class – can they link it to arhyme they might know in English (My hat it has three corners , three corners hasmy hat)
5. Add actions for the children to do every time the word “hat” is said , for each number and an action to representa corner.
6 . Practise the rhyme. Add the actions .
7. Now repeat the rhyme and miss a key action word out .The children should only do the actionand not say the word .
8.Repeat until all key action words have been replaced byjust an action.
9. Can they say the whole rhyme with actions for a partner?
10. Allow the children time to design the hat that they think is missing fro the "Seated Harlequin's " head . Remind them it's carnival so the hat will be bright , fun and creative! They need to write an extended sentence to describe the hat .
10. Now add the hats around the picture of Harlequin and create a "hat gallery" with written descriptions of the hats - or as we did draw our own faces of Harlequin and add our own hat designs with simple descriptions in full sentences!
Great fun and a couple of very lively and creative lessons, linking language learning and Art!