Monday 15 October 2012

Imprinting verbs

I don't know about you, but I find that all my best ideas occur to me when I least expect it.

On Friday I looked at my work plan for Year 6 and saw that the next thing for me to do in my Places in Town unit is "verbs - what you can do in each place/what you can buy".  Now Year 6 know a lot of Spanish - phonics, gender, nouns, plurals, adjectives, opinions, big numbers, time, weather..... but we have never focussed specifically on what verbs look like in Spanish and how they work.  They have used many first person forms like juego and veo but are as yet unaware of the infinitives that they some from or how they could use the dictionary to find and work out verbs.

And I couldn't think of a good way to introduce it.

So I left my planning to do some housework, and found my elder daughter's school library book lying somewhere in the house that it shouldn't have been. Lightbulb moment!  One of the images on the cover gave me the idea I needed.

The fly-thing on the cover is made using a blot of ink with the legs, wings and face drawn on with a black pen.  Why not create characters who will do the verbs?


I borrowed the finger printing set belonging to my younger daughter and tried it out.  The rabbit at the top of this post is a print of the side of my right-hand little finger with the details drawn on.

So Year 6 are going to discover a number of infinitives via Quiz-Quiz-Trade.  If you would like to know more about Quiz-Quiz-Trade, have a look at this blogpost by Marie O'Sullivan - it was Marie who first told me about it.  It is also described in this post under "Ask-Ask-Switch".  Then after finding out what infinitives are all about they will have a go at making their own print pictures like this one, where they will be using the infinitives in the context of me gusta, which they already know.



If you would like to do something similar yourself, I've put all my resources for this lesson here.



UPDATE 28.10.12:  I have made a little movie to show Year 6's work so far, and you can watch it on our school blog.

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