It's great to actually visit the target language countries and cultures of the languages we try to share with our young language learners and last week I was lucky enough to be able to do just that!
I spent part of the week in Basque France and Basque Spain. This next half term with Year 5 our focus is the seaside .We have looked at the seaside before with our younger learners and so I am always looking for more sophisticated approaches to the theme of seaside.
Well here staring straight back at me was a sophisticated seaside and geography focus!

It's so simple!

Take a look at the map. Last week I visited Biarritz and then later in the week San Sebastian!
Here we have an ideal describe,compare and contrast series of activities .
These seaside resorts are so near to each other!
The activities can be completed in French or Spanish and will engage our learners in sentence structrure, use of common verbs and the use of conjunctions to make comparisons......

Step One - the country,the resorts and language investigation!

Share the map with the class.Ask them to look at the seaside and coast.Can the class identify the border between two countries? (You may want to explain too about the basque country and their own language- can the children think of similarities in the United Kingdom e.g English and Welsh/ the coast in NW England and North Wales etc)
Can the children investigate the map and find the three resorts.
Can they work out how far away the resorts are from each other?
Can they decide which languages are spoken in the three seaside towns? Can they write a simple present tense sentence using the verb " to speak" to explain the target language they think they would hear in each town - e.g "A San Sebastian on parle espagnol" and "A Biarritz on parle français
Can they now add a conjunction and create an extended sentence with the two sentences they have written? Give the children a choice of conjunctions - which do they prefer to use e.g et/ mais/pourtant ?

Step Two - the weather report

Ask the children to investigate the weather with you in Biarritz and in San Sebastian during one specific week.All you need to do is google the weather for the two places and find the weather forecast for that week. Can they write a weather report for the two towns using conjunctions e.g "Le lundi à Biarritz il fait beau mais à San Sebastian il pleut"?

Step Three - the resorts and the food

Let's investigate the food.Can the children find out what food they would eat if they had "tapas" in San Sebastian or ordered cakes in a "salon de thé" in Biarritz?
Can the children help you to make a list of foods that they could eat in these two places...."On peut manger ............ à Biarritz, on peut manger ............à Saint Jean de Luz et on peut manger ........... à San Sebastian"
Can they now add their own preferences from the lists of food using the conjunction "pourtant"?

Step Four- the places and the activities

It's here that the children will see that the seaside resorts may have different foods, sometimes share or have different weather but that the resorts share similar geography and seaside activities!

All we need to do is:

San Sebastian

Biarritz

Give out two pictures of the beach- one of San Sebastian and one of Biarritz- to pairs of children (same pictures for each pair).
Can the children make a list in the target language of the geographical features and the buildings they can see in the pictures?
How similar are their lists for San Sebastian and Biarritz?
Can the children investigate the pictures and make a list of verbs as infinitives to describe the activities they think they can see on the beach in each picture?
Can they now make a list using "you can ..." e.g in French "on peut..." of the activities and explain that the same activities take place in Biarritz and in San Sebastian?

Step Five -Writing a description

Can the children now write a descriptive text comparing the seaside in San Sebastian and Biarritz?

What have they found out?

What are the similarities and differences between the two resorts?

This afternoon was a wonderful afternoon and to be truthful it always is! I am meet with the language teachers who work with me in 31 schools on a regular all year weekly basis. It's our half termly training session. They bring their news and success stories and we discuss ways to develop and enhance the next half term's work over KS1 and KS2!

Today the planning focus was the final half term during this Summer term 2014 and the language learning that will take place.

What a final Summer half term 2014 with

the World Cup, the Tour de France and the Commonwealth Games

already offering us wonderful ways to celebrate the diversity of languages and the sense of a global community through sport !

We also want to encourage the children to think about the diversity in local languages as we live so near to Wales, Ireland, the Isle of Man and only a couple of hours from Scotland. Some of the resources sourced for the

Commonwealth Games

will allow the teachers the opportunity to listen to and practise languages that are spoken a matter of miles from where we live (15 miles to be exact from Warrington is the Welsh border) and one of the colleagues who attends the training today speaks Welsh! Indeed as we sat and discussed languages from quite near to us (and explained to our target language native speakers what we meant by "Manx"), it dawned on us that as many of us are local north-western people, our heritage and ancestry is tied up with these local languages! Many of our children and families will be able to trace their roots too in this way ... so what a great way to track all the children's family trees of languages too!

I think it’s also important that we look not just at the World Cup as a sporting occasion but as a chance to throw the spotlight on Brazil itself and celebrate culture and the environment in the target languages. We deliver currently French, German and Spanish.

So let's open the doors on Brazil !

Set the scene with music !

The sound and traditional children’s music of Brazi!

Here are short beautifully sung sound files which you could use to introduce the flavour of Brazil to your classes. Just to listen to and enjoy and maybe to vote on which is the class favourite!

musique-bresilienne-enfants

Listen and join in with the French versions of the Brazilian children’s songs that you can hear first in Portugese on the wonderful Mama Lisa site

Take a look at the geography and climate of the continent !

Learn some facts from Enchanted Learning Brasil page

Find out too from them about the Rainforest habitat and vegetation

Let the children read along with you this wonderful French story where they can investigate and learn about the animals from Brazil in this wonderful repetitive story based on a toucan finding out who else is awake in the jungle

Below is a clip in French, created for children in France to give them a taste of the tropical rain forests of the continent . The French is far too hard for young children but the ambience it creates – to just watch and see visual clues with the French commentary , adds a certain je ne sais quoi!

In Year 4 Summer 1 with JLN SOW we become jungle explorers...

So, here is a chance to revisit those jungle explorer rhymes and to create a Rainforest display filled with target language animal caligrams and shape sentences to describe the animals!

Learn some basic Brazilian Portugese !

Don't forget to learn a little language on the way! This

Brazilian Portugese Omniglot webpage may help!

Daily life for children in Brazil

Using this marvellous site 24heures vie de enfant we can explore with the children the everyday life of a young child in Brazil through pictures and puzzling out of facts. Take a look

here

Let's celebrate, samba style!

Finally when we think of Brazil we think of carnival and sambas , dancing and music and here I have found on the website Momes ,a Brazilian crown headdress which will leads us very nicely into the world Cup itself!

My suggestion is that we find out the names of the countries that will be participating in the World Cup in the target language studied and select 12 feathers for our headdress.Each of the feathers created as “paper feathers “ are made up of the flag and the name of participating country in the target language we are learning.Here are the French instructions on how to make a

Brazilian crown

Now we are ready for own samba style crown parade!

The dance class here for children could help your class to do this dance with proper

samba style