PLN in the Spanish classroom
Spanish Lead at a Primary School in Birmingham
PLN in the Spanish Classroom
by Melody Morell
After 6 years teaching GCSE Spanish in a Secondary School, it took me a few months to settle into a Primary classroom. I had different trials on a variety of languages websites and PLN was, by far, the most creative, comprehensive and broad of all. When I explored all of the activities suggested by PLN per topic and stage,I could easily imagine how I would utilise those tools with my students.
“Primary students are active learners”
One of the first things I learned when teaching languages in Primary is: students are active learners who must bring the language to live. After attending Susanne Wilson’s PLN CPD last year I got a very important message: I am not teaching grammar for GCSE anymore,neither am I teaching for a national exam. But instead, I am teaching to learn and enjoy Spanish through projects, activities and games.
The moment I started using VLE resources in my lessons, students were thriving in their Spanish learning. Let me begin with one of the most successful activities: “La marioneta habladora”, the chatty puppet. I got this brilliant idea from Janet’s envelope Paper puppet from Year 4 Autumn 1 Be creative video. I couldn’t possibly find 130 envelopes (I teach in 3 different schools) so I taught the students how to create an origami puppet just with an A4 paper.
Since I did this with my Year 3, I let them choose what to write in the inside part of the puppet. It worked really well with lower KS2 but I think this could also work really well in KS1. Students took this home during half term to practice at home with their families or just to play with by themselves.
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“Adapting resources”
“El acordeón” is also a very enjoyable activity that I carried out with my Year 4s at the end of a term. Another great idea I took from a the BeCreative video from Janet. I adapted this to make it more challenging. I asked students to write full sentences and include as much information as they could in each part of the accordion. I grasped from them how much they appreciated making the languages their own including extra words and talking about themselves. This could be used as an end of term show of our work, as a display in the classroom or as homework. I found with higher KS2 classes it worked best when done at home with the vocabulary learnt rather that in the classroom.
“Superhero Utility belt”
Another of my favourite activities has been the “Superhero belt”. Great resource to practice the pencil case items. I used this after 1 lesson teaching the items (games, whiteboard writing, speaking practice) and one more lesson of sentence writing (air writing, sharing sentences, role play).
After these 2 lessons, most students could recall 7-10 items from memory and spell, at least, 5 items accurately. We only used colour card and felt tip pens.
“Talking about aliens”
In Year 5, students really enjoyed creating their alien school. The alien school story (Teach by Story) works extremely well as a project or sequence of lessons. After working on the story, keywords and key phrases, students can work in groups writing a story of their own. We also did a pop up school where they wrote sentences describing the rooms and using connectives. This could work great as a display in the classroom, however since, unfortunately, we don’t have an MFL classroom in my school, students stuck it in their books. You could also create a comic with the aliens describing each room and use the speech bubbles to write the sentences in.
In the story there are many verbs and nouns to explore, the use of dictionaries was welcomed but not compulsory. By watching the story and its actions, the majority of the class guessed what it meant so they were encouraged to use the same or similar words.
“Creativity with Year 6”
I always find my Year 6 students are the ones who enjoy creating something new the most. Due to a very demanding core curriculum, in Spanish they appreciate having some freedom of using the language learnt from Year 3 to date in a variety of contexts and settings. An example of that is writing a comic about their daily routine – following the Superhero video in Click2Teach. Some of them wrote the times and other wrote the colour of their pyjamas! I loved reading all the different ideas they came up with.
To sum up with, PLN has given us so much more than resources; a platform where we can deliver fantastic lessons with great ideas that make our students thrive when learning Spanish.
To see if your school would beneift from using PLN resources, click on the button below to recieve a free trial!