Robert , one of my colleagues, shared with me yesterday the chatterboxes he made with the children after a busy morning of Christmas activities. Not only is this a great idea pre-Xmas activity but it got me thinking about what a useful device this is to use the first lesson back after Xmas and to set some learning challenges for your primary language learners. See it as a sort of language learning New Year’s resolutions’ lesson.
These are my suggestions:
First practise several greetings and New Year’s wishes.These will be the final reveal sentences in your chatterboxes. Practise air writing these greetings.
Ask the children just like you can see in the pictures to create chatterboxes,remembering,using and recalling the spelling of some very simple familiar language (numbers ,colours, days of week etcetera). Final reveal sentences are your greetings and New Year’s wishes.
Ask the children to reflect on how easy they found the words to remember from prior learning and to check spelling with a list of accurately spelled target language on the board. Do they want to set themselves a spelling target for their primary language learning? Do they want to set themselves a retrieval skills target to focus on improving their memory and recall skills?
Illustrations on the chatterboxes should be done at the end of the next game. More importantly we want to get the children engaged in the pair game and reading aloud.
In pairs play the chatterbox games. Both children should take it in turns to be the revealer and speaker.The speaker needs to read aloud the words they can see on the chatterboxes and read aloud the final greetings phrases or sentence. The revealer’s role is to be the listener and observer and to feed back at the end two stars and a wish .Two things that were good about the speaker’s reading aloud in the target language and one thing that the speaker could set as a personal language learning focus or resolution for the half term.
Swap roles and play the game again.
Ask the children to share with each other their own personal language learning resolutions they have identified both reading aloud, improving accuracy in both pronunciation, spelling and retrieval of language.
Now it’s time to illustrate the chatterboxes and write the personal targets in their books .
Happy New Year !
