Plant pot story actions and song
Plant pot story , actions and song
Last year as part of a JLN network project during the Spring term I created a series of simple activities to link to KS1 growing things science focus we developed a these materials and the activities below .
Thanks to Ana Garcia Lavado who drew the pictures and Emilie Woodruffe @EWoodruffe, Barbara and Flora who provided the target language phrases and Joanne who created the simplest of plant growing songs based on the familiar refrain of Frère Jacques.
Our Learning Objectives
To understand how a plant grows and the conditions it requires
To listen and respond to commands in a target language
To practise performing a simple sequence of actions in the target language
To learn a song in the target language
(As some of our schools have now developed their own vegetable gardens and plots we found real examples from the target language countries to share with the children .
Here is a project at a school in Limoges , where you can find a chart explaining what they planted and in which month and pictures of the young gardeners planting their vegetable seeds
The Simple Lesson Activities
The activities below are based on five simple pictures made in to a story that describes how we grow a plant from seed .Here's a plant pot pictures downloadable zip file
Here is the French plant pot story
.......and here are the PDF power point plant pot stories in the other target languages :
1. Discuss with the children the conditions required to grow a seed or a plant .
2. Look at crops from the target language country . We selected sunflowers in France, water melons in spain , Kohlrabi in Germany and rice in China. Share with the children pictures of these crops and compare the pictures of real crops with art work linked to the crops :
And shared with them art work that depicted crops as paintings .Here is a goauche after Rufino Tamayo
And don't forget the all time favourite Van Gogh's Sunflowers
3. Read the story power point slides to the children .
Here is a sound file of the reading of the story in Mandarin Chinese Mandarin plant pot story
Give out the pictures from the plant pot picture zip file to five children and ask the class to help you to reorganise the pictures into the order that you saw them on the ppt story .Move the children holding the pictures into the correct order and then retell the story a second time .
4. Order the plant pot pictures on the flip chart in the correct order . Ask the children to help you tell the story this time .Can they help you to create actions for each story slide .
5 . We then shared with the children the simple song to the refrain of Frère Jacques in the target language .It's made up of the sentences on the power point. For example in French we sang :
Plante les graines
Arrose les graine
Brille soleil brille
Brille soleil brille
Regarde comme elles poussent
Regarde comme elles poussent
Voilà vos fleurs
Voilà vos fleurs
Here's the sound file of the Mandarin version Mandarin plant pot song
We asked the children to stand up and listen and join in with the correct actions .
Then we encouraged the children to practise the song with us and try to sing along and join in with the actions
Finally the children were able to perform the song on their own!
You could go on to link this work with previous blogposts
