More active language work...

Phew! We tired ourselves out today...French is an active language anyway, all that gesticulation and Gallic Shrugging (apologies for the gross generalisations). I digress...we were doing a bit on "body parts" today so we played (with a little artistic license) "tete, epaule, genou, pied" which scholars will recognise as "head, shoulders, knees and toes [sic]."

Much hilarity and excitment leading to a little bit of an active connection with the language they were looking at and ensuring the associated labelling task went fairly smoothly. Quick. Simple. Fun.

I never at any point claimed the, ahem, drawing of a person was any good...

Active learning in languages...

French and English to be precise. Today I attempted to enliven the (potentially) onerous task of looking at verbs and adverbs following a slightly less-than-succesful "Shared Texts" session yesterday.


Confusion seemed to have arisen over the nature of an adverb so I devised a game to get all the children to firstly write down a verb of their choice, then to mime it at the same time as the rest of the class were miming theirs. After 45 seconds or so, all the children stopped and returned to their desks to write down the verbs they had seen. They then had another 45 seconds to perform and watch again before a second chance to write down. Even with some children away doing other things today, there were still 15 mimes going on - a hard task to follow them all!



The class then shared what they thought they'd seen - a really useful exercise for two reasons: firstly they had the chance to say what they'd seen and maybe get it right but secondly - and perhaps more importantly - if they didn't get it right they were still having to generate a verb.


We repeated the task by having the class choose and adverb to accompany their verb action and the rest of the children were again invited to "say what you see."

"Sprinting", "Writing"and "Skipping noisily"

The New Poem (for 18 words)

This is a brilliant piece by Roger McGough, available in his book "Sky in the Pie" which we looked at as part of a "Shared Texts" lesson.

Here were our "Learning Intentions" for the lesson...

16th January 2008

We are learning to:
*analyse and compare poetic styles
*investigate and collect examples of wordplay

We’ll know we’ve succeeded if:
*we can say something about the relationship of the poem to the title
*we can make and re-make sentences of our own using only a set number of words

I'll type up and post some of what the children came up with in their "write out and cut-up" exercise by way of context as soon as I get the jotters back...

RME - active learning therein...

Hmm. RME, never (for me) the easiest of topics to enliven but we managed it on Friday. Looking at the story of Pentecost with P5,6&7 with the following learning targets/outcomes/"we are learning to" thingies...

We are learning to:

*understand the story of Pentecost

*use active learning to help our understanding

The task was - having heard the story - to find others with a card which would go along with your own, then find another and another and so on...each group (pinks and blues) had a "checker" card so it was someone's job to act as a sort of "peer assessor" and sort the rest of the group it to retell the story with their cards.