Writing a school trip diary

This is a neat little exercise that I've done with my 5th year class to work on their speaking skills and then to follow on with their writing skills.

We went on a school trip to visit 3 local sites linked to the St James Highway, Eunate, Viana and Los Arcos. The children had worksheets to complete as they visited the different sites and while we were there I took lots of photos.

In class when we return, I show the photos and we brainstorm other words and verbs and put them into a wordcloud. Then the children have to select 8 photos and write sentences about their day.



It's an excelent exercise as they want to talk about what they did, it's far more real and relevant than exercises from a book.

As a demostration, I've put some of these into a ppt and created a word cloud with sample key vocabulary and past tense verbs they will need to describe their day out. I've loaded the ppt and wordcloud into slideshare and embedded it below.

School trip

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Listening to instructions

This is an exercise I’ve prepared for my 5th year primary class. It’s a listening exercise using "voice-thread" to review directions. You can use a far simpler version without directions just using the numbers of the squares to work listening for numbers (2nd -4th year primary). Here as I’m working with 5th year, we’re making it more complex and they have to follow directions from the black reference square.

If you click on the image it will take you to the voicethread exercise



We’ve done similar exercises in class so the students are used to this kind of exercise. Once you have the grid, you can record lots of different instructions, making it simpler or more difficult as you require.

Each student has a copy of the grid and a link to the voice-thread so that they can listen to the instructions. They know to pause the listening exercise as often as they want and they can listen as often as they want. The students have to follow the instructions, drawing or writing the correct things in the corresponding boxes.

They love it!

Learning languages can help you get on in life!

If only I could speak French!

Splash!

Here's a webquest that I made for use in school with my 4th year primary class. They loved it.

We did the webquest over 3 classes in the school computer lab. The children were divided into groups of 3 students. Each student has a separate but complementary role and they have to use various resources on the "Riverquest" to find information and then prepare a report copying pictures from the varios pages and writing a short text. I used some videos I found on youtube, a couple of nice fun pictures and a cmap I created about rives in Spain. While the kids were working, I went round the class checking to see everyone was working well together and cooperating.



If you click the image, it will take you to the webquest. Feel free to use it with your classes.

The writing is on the wall...

A big thanks to David who told me about this message wall. It's called "Wallwisher". Again, it's super easy to use and very simple to get started. You can register using your gmail account or set up a wallwisher account (just give your email. a "nick-name" and a password for the site, and you can build your message wall, select a background, give it a title and get posting!

It's really easy and good fun to use. I'm already using it with my 5th year class to exchange ideas and to post information about class activities and exams.
You can set it so that anyone can post on the wall, which is great for exchanging ideas;or so that you as the author is the only person who can post/authorise new posts. This is better if it is for posting information about homework they have to do!

The picture below shows how I've set a message board up for my 5th years. If you click on the image it will take you to the page but please don't post a message!

More wordy fun!

I've made this using a resource on the "teachers-direct website" . It's an interactive wordsearch for students to practice irregular past tenses. This is ideal for 5th and 6th year primary. I'll explain how I did it, the whole process takes less than 10 minutes!

If you click on "make your own wordsearch" which opens a new page with a few easy steps.
1st - give a name to your wordsearch.
2nd - select the age of students you are making it for (this helps other teachers find your puzzle and share resources)
3rd - select: grid size - 15 x 15; wordsearch type - interactive wordsearch; text - lower case then click - "next" and a new page opens with a space for you to put in the words you want to use in your wordsearch.
4th - I just copy pasted a table of irregular veb endings from any of the hundreds you can find on the net, but you can use anything, animals, fruit, halloween vocab etc and you can use as many words as you want. I used about 44!
5th - select word direction - all directions and unused letters - normal (this is incase the programme needs to add extra letters to fill spaces).
then click preview which shows you how the wordsearch will look.
Then you have an option to add a description to help other people find your puzzle and you press create. All done!
You now have a pdf version and a link to the interactive wordsearch on the web.
Here's mine!

Lifeboats and Icy Sea

Although this class actually works better in ESO, we can ask high level students to watch the video and then give their opinions about people who work at sea, using some of the words that appear in the word cloud. This is basically a speaking activity that allows the teacher to help with pronunciation.

It can be done in an even simpler way where the students have to describe what they say and say how it would feel to be in any of the boats in the video. A new word cloud can be created with key vocabulary that has been brainstormed.

This new word cloud can then be the basis for writing work where the students have to use at least 50% of the words to write a short text summarising the class discussion (guidelines for the written text: min 75 words, max 250 depending on student ability).