Greetings and feelings, activities to encourage all staff to get on board

Getting on board with primary languages can seem really challenging and especially when you want everyone on the staff to grow in confidence. This week Emilie, Ana and I are out and about ,delivering staff CPD to every member of staff within a school,practising language and encouraging staff to try out some transferable activities using simple language.

Remember these are start up activities and they will also become favourite activities that can be played for five minutes when teachers have time outside of the language learning allotted time.

Below are some short activities which can help to build staff confidence and also engage young learners using target language feelings and how to ask how someone is feeling.

How are you feeling?
Here are three songs that can easily be adapted so that the teachers and the children can sing along and practise feelings and the question how are you feeling ?

In French

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uvzHXvqDrk]

In Spanish

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TULi3hiJbk]

In German

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTYGKcvEPOw]

The songs are catchy and teachers and children will love to sing along.The songs lend themselves to adding actions and missing out an agreed different word or phrase but keeping the action every time a verse is sung.

Teachers can then  

• play charades with feelings and greetings and questions
• build more detailed dialogues by linking this language with greetings and simple name question and answer
• play guessing games ,where chldren have to anticipate the next ppt slide or the next picture on the IWB and which emotion or greeting symbol they may see.
• play pass the message on games ,using different voices or actions
•  have a register week where the teacher asks the children how they are feeling in the target language.