Teach With A Bang This Bonfire Night
Whether your learners are beginners in primary languages, or more advanced, introducing or revisiting colours is a brilliant place to start if you are linking language learning to a school celebration of Bonfire Night.
Different activities will suit different stages of primary language learners. Consider encouraging other members of staff to do a specific activity with a class, or put the activities together and to create a short school assembly celebrating Bonfire Night combined with your target language!
Speaking For Beginners (KS1 and KS2): Word Association and Colours in a Spoken Poem
First, take a look at the video below - the drama game in here makes a fantastic starter.
Then, ask the children to create a simple word association poem in English, with the colours spoken in the target language and actions/mimes of their colours. For example, ‘blanco’ is white like snow, so children could mime snowflakes as they fall. Practise as a class and create a colourful performance.
Listening For Beginners (all year groups): Sounds of Colours Physical Firework Display
Creating fantastic firework sound displays with our Y3 Aut 2 lesson 1: colour sounds firework performances with @joanne_hornby pic.twitter.com/asDTnJlHMX
— Janet Lloyd (@JanetLloydnet) September 24, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
This is a tried and tested activity – our Associate Teachers have been using it for years. This Twitter clip shows Joanne leading a group of teachers through the activity at one of our PLN CPD sessions. It’s all about thinking about how the word sounds and asking children to create a physical representation of this sound as a firework. Joanne conducts the teachers as if they are a class, indicating when groups should join in, stop, restart, make loud sounds or small sounds, to build to a crescendo.
Practise with colours in the target language with your class. Divide them into groups and ask them to work together with a colour and build a performance. Practise and then execute a class performance of the sounds of the fireworks, nominating a child to be the sound orchestra conductor.
Reading (advanced learners): Firework Poem and Performance
Since early in 2000s, we have been using this poem in French, German and Spanish to inspire young children. Teachers share the poem, unpack the meaning, and look for nouns, adjectives and verbs, so then children can practise and create a performance. The poem is used as a template to create their own poems with different colours, or (if more advanced) with a change of one of the verbs.
Although the focus is on colours, the poem also uses three key present tense verbs, and the phrase ‘there is’ or ‘there are’ with the noun for stars. The poem has two verses and repeats the three verbs and the phrase ‘there are a lot of stars’. The poem is very simple, but it opens up a lot of room for discussion – new words such as ‘montent’ in French are similar enough to the English that many children can recognise them, or the use of colours as adjectives without nouns next to them, and the difference this makes. You can challenge the students who are beginning to think about verbs to see if they notice any patterns in the ways they are used in the poem.
To extend the poem into a performance, get younger learners to add sounds and actions to match. For older learners, get them to write a further verse to the poem as well as adding in actions and sounds!
French poem:
Bleu
rouge,
jaune,
vert.
Zoum, zoum!
Ils glissent
Ils montent
Ils descendent .
Il y a beaucoup d' étoiles!
Violet,
orange,
or,
argent.
Zoum, zoum!
Ils glissent
Ils montent
Ils descendent .
Il y a beaucoup d' étoiles!
Spanish Poem:
Azul
rojo
amarillo
verde.
¡fantástico! ¡ fantástico!
Suben
bajan
hay muchas estrellas
violeta
naranja
dorado
plateado
¡fantástico! ¡ fantástico!
Suben
bajan
hay muchas estrellas.