Hi all
I have been meaning to collect a few links together that I'm finding useful when writing material for our new year 7 curriculum and add to year 8 and 9 too. Our year 7 at Comberton Village College do Spanish so the links are most useful for those of you planning and teaching Spanish. However, the ideas can be transferred to all languages, and it would take no time at all for you to find equivalent links to similar materials in other languages.
Activities for Pronunciation
Cartoons
I was prompted to put these up when asked how to follow up on the phonics lessons teaching the sounds, so as to give practice and embed them more fully. I've found it works really well to use cartoon strips, tongue twisters and newspaper headlines as starters. Not only are they great for pronunciation practice but can be good for comprehension too.
You can download Garfield, Calvin and Hobbs and other cartoon strips from go comics, I also really like the character of Mafalda and you can find video clips with her on too. You can also get the foreign language versions of Mr Men names & images which make good pronunciation fun, can be used to teach character adjectives, colours and provide inspiration for story-writing too. To save you time, here is a slideful of Spanish ones. Download MrMenSpanish
I have searched these and here are my favourites so far:
Download Garfield cartoons
Download Calvin & Hobbs cartoons
Download El Mago de Oz cartoons
Download Mafalda cartoons
Tongue twisters (trabalenguas)
These are also great for pronunciation obviously, though not so useful on the comprehension front always! There are a million different sites for these but i have 'harvested' from the following:
various languages , Spanish tongue twisters, Spanish tongue twisters 2, Spanish tongue twisters 3.
News headlines & current affairs
These are great if you exploit them as comprehension as well as pronunciation. Copy & paste a few headlines & matching photos, jumble them up, put them on one slide and the starter activity is to pronounce and match the headline to the picture. As learners can manage more and more text, using the first paragraph of a story, which usually contains the summary, and getting students used to answering the '5W and a H' questions (but in Spanish the '
¿Qué? ¿Dónde? ¿Por qué? ¿Quién? ¿Cómo?')
as they do when looking at journalistic genre in KS2 English.
One site I've found useful for is the El Pais one. Additionally there are several sites with humourous, quirky news stories that are great too:
2.
http://es.noticias.yahoo.com/insolitas.html
And This is my absolute favourite because of the pictures! 4.http://www.noticiaslocas.com/
I have also been linking Spanish art with our year 7 SOW as much as possible, as well as Geography, and I've put a page of links here that I've found useful for that, as well as some story-telling links that I found incidentally but haven't exploited yet!
Download Websites for curriculum development 1
Hope some of this may be of use!
All the best,
Rachel