Cinderella, Masks, Carnival Time ,Drama and the verb " to be "

Cinderella and Carnival Time ,

Characters and Masks ,  

Drama and the verb " to be ".

This year we have been trialling approaches to the teaching of grammar in KS2 and we have focused our attention  recently in how we can engage young children with the active learning of high frequency verbs in the present tense  

As it's nearly carnival time though I thought that the lesson frame and the  resources I created based on "masks " and Cinderella characters might be something that some of you may like to try with your UKS2 children to find out more about the high frequency verb "to be" .

The lesson frame provides you with the key language in French, German and Spanish - should you be unsure, like I was,  how to say the "ugly sisters" in the target language! 

The activities take the children from being able to ask and say who a character is in the first , second , third person singular and plural to developing personalities behind the masks for the characters and adding performance and drama !

The aims of the activities are: 

• To introduce and practisethe names of the main characters in the pantomime Cinderella, using theparts of the verb “to be “ in the target languages of French /Spanish or German
• To ask questions and givetarget language responses  with thecharacters’ names
• To create personalitiesfor the characters through the use of the voice, actions and performance 
• To extend the characterdescriptions to allow the children to give the characters' personalities and feelings
• Tocreate a simple performance ( groups of 5 children) based on the idea of a“masked ball

 The children can use our Cinderella masks (download the zip file of the five characters here) masks to create their own face masks for the activities , like the one below ......or as part of their carnival focus they could work out for themselves how to create a mask and design their own masks for the characters in Cinderella.

Here's the activity sequence Cinderella PDF to download and follow.Please note that on the PDf the phrase "Who are they?" in Spanish should read “¿Quiénes son?”

The children will need to make dice with smaller versions of the characters for several of the games they will play.   

With some of the network schools we have focused upon creating full sentences using a high frequency verb and nouns to create a poem such as
"A wizard's potion" . You can listen to a non-specialist linguist and Y6 class teacher describe the sequence of lessons she put together to explore the resource and the lesson framework I provided her with. Click here to listen to her describe  the work her class has done around the wizard's potion on JLN Network News.I will be sharing this sequence of activities at a later date on the blog should you like to try this . Will tweet about this when I put it up on the blog on @JanetLloydnet