Christmas with the Snowman

The beautifully animated film ‘The Snowman‘ formed the basis of several groups’ final Christmas and Winter themed lessons. We firstly learnt some warm winter clothing nouns, then we had fun either trying them on or winter dressing a live ‘snowman’.

We then watched the film, in full or in part, naming things and animals as we went along. Our next step was to create snowmen for ourselves, so out came our scissors, glue and colours. 🙂

However, what is a winter without Christmas? So, over the final lessons we played with Christmas words, outlined Santa’s tasks, and sang Christmas songs. And to top it off we created funny old Father Christmases of our very own.

A Week of Numbers

Now that Halloween is over, I have decided to bring the children back to reality by looking at numbers. Numbers offer the possibility of dry and boring lessons, but I have attempted to avoid this, as much as possible. 🙂

So while we have been using explanatory worksheets in various forms depending on the class, I have also tried to inject a little active enjoyment with games of Bingo,with or without number restrictions, and by crafting and playing number wheel games and countdown rocketships.

Number learning can, and should, be fun. 🙂

A Colourful Witch

Here is a witch and her black cauldron. Her skin is pink and her long hair is ginger. She is wearing a tall black hat and short black boots. Her black cloak has a yellow and green cloak pin. Her shirt is red, and under her purple skirt she is wearing grey tights.

This is yet another activity from the current Halloween project. It is fun to see that as the 31st of October draws nearer and nearer the kids are getting more and more excited. 🙂

This exercise works on the children’s knowledge of colours and clothing,  with older pupils mastery questions, using both the present simple and present continuous, are also used.

Getting to know a certain red dragon. :-)

As a part of our Halloween book project a number of classes this week are exploring the features of a red dragon which stars in our Halloween book choice.

This little dragon has big yellow eyes and sharp white horns. He has red scaly skin, but his wings are pink and his belly is white.

There are two versions of the worksheet, one for my younger learners, which includes labels for cutting and sticking, and one for slightly older children, which includes a number of ‘mastery questions’.

I hope that somebody else finds them useful.

Felix Baumgartner – Clothing and Body Parts Worksheet

“Sometimes you have to get up really high to understand how small you are:”

I have created a quick body and clothing worksheet for some of my young classes. I hope somebody else out there will find it useful.

Felix Baumgartner clothing and body parts .doc

Room on the Broom

Earlier this week at the Finžgar primary school in Barcola we began to explore Halloween. We embarked on the topic with a multimedia board enhanced reading of Julia Donaldson‘s Room on the Broom.

I love it when publishers provide different ways of reading and interacting with their literature, and more importantly the children love it too.

So, we read and spoke about the book, its words and images, and then we begun with our first Halloween worksheet entitled ‘Witchy Words‘.  The younger class cut, stuck and coloured this worksheet, while the older class wrote and coloured this one.

Looking into my tea leaves, I predict that this is going to be a great Halloween. 🙂

Prehistoric Children in Barcola

Yesterday the older classes at Barcola’s primary school  started an English exploration into prehistoric life. Our forthcoming English lessons will not be entirely devoted to this project, but there will be time dedicated to it during each of our sessions together.

We started of the project with Life began in the sea, which we read, digested and answered questions on.  The children really enjoyed this animation which shows trilobites in motion.

Peter and Jane: Play with us

Our ‘Creatively English’ course in Barcola began with the primary school’s second and third class. We started by reading the first book in the classic ladybird Peter and Jane series.

The children enjoyed reading this on the big screen, along with the frequent reading pauses in which we talked about what was on the page and about their own likes and play habits.

After reading the book together, we looked at the alphabet and sang the alphabet song.

We ended our time with teams racing to spell words with letter tiles.

Prehistoric Fiction: Tiny-rannosaurus

Our after school English club at Barcola started marvellously yesterday.  The fourth and fifth classes began their ‘Curiosity English’ course with a reading of ‘Tiny-rannosaurs’ by Nick Ward.

It was a great a read and the kids really enjoyed it. While reading the book on the interactive board, we used adhesive word labels to identify certain characters and features.

We then started exploring the story and its words a little deeper with the aid  of a few book inspired worksheets that I had created for the occasion.  We finished off our time with the children working in teams to spell Tiny-rannosaurus words with letter tiles.

There will be more Tiny-rannosaurus exploration next week, as well as starting a project looking at real prehistoric life.

Where the wild things are – The Fifth and Final Day

We started our fifth and final day by eating apples and muffins, and reading ‘This is London‘, which was brought along by one of the children. We sat, ate, read, and spoke about London, and all was well.

When we got inside the classroom, with paper and scissors, we began by distinguishing between wild animals and tame animals. This was a nice exercise and it got the children thinking and laughing.

The laughing continued with Dajana as the children made monstrous masks. Back outside again, the game changed once more: ‘What’s the time, Mr Werewolf?’. 🙂

Once inside, we compiled a list of seven laws which the children would enforce if they were kings and queens.

• You must play.
• You must not go to school.
• You must study English with Michael and Dajana.
• You must sometimes swim in larva.
• You must not look at goldfish.
• You must not drive a car.
• You must ride a horse or shark.

Thus having put their kingdom in order they ‘let the wild rumpus start‘ by creating a ‘Wild Rumpus‘ mind map. It included such activities as drumming, tree climbing and water fighting. What a great party! 🙂

The final art activity of the week had the children rapidly sketching Dajana and I performing ‘Wild Scenarios‘ which saw us being monsters, playing drums, shooting guns and having Dajana effectively transforming herself into a human cat.

And so with the children running and singing and shouting outside in a final rumpus, we brought this astounding week to an end.

I hope our wild things had something hot waiting for them when they got home. 🙂