Open and reveal four corners puzzles

This is the simplest of games to play with all language learners! 
Everybody likes a guessing game and here we are linking games , fun and grammar!
It could be created on the IWB quite easily too but part of the fun is when the children make their own.

Tomorrow I will share this with Primary PGCE ITTs at Manchester University.

It's a very simple way of revisiting key language the learners already know , recalling and revisiting  families of nouns  and developing a new learning focus from this .In this case we are revisiting animal nouns and listening for indefinite articles.

All it is , is a picture like this of any object . Here I am focusing on animals.....

1. .Now you fold in the corners of the paper that the mouse picture has been printed on . You would have a range of animal pictures that you were using ,all printed out and all folded in on themselves with familiar language recall prompts  written on each corner-one on each folded in corner -  like this .......

to perhaps revisit numbers like this .....:

or perhaps to revisit colours like this ......

or perhaps key sounds and phonemes in the target language animal nouns like this....:

2. One by one you invite children to name a corner of the folded picture - a number / a colour / a sound and if they say this correctly you can unfold the corner ..... how long does it take for the learners to recall and say the correct animal . They can make a guess after each corner is unfolded and a bit of the picture becomes clear .My mouse picture is hidden behind symbols for the question "how are you feeling?" and three simple responses . The children   would have to say what they see before that specific corner can be unfolded  .

3. Now it's time to consider the focus of our learning . In this instance we would be trying to listen in French for the indefinite article and for when we say "C'est un ....." and when we say "C'est une .....". 

Once all the animals are revealed we can add our written indefinite labels which help us to  categorise the animals into masculine and feminine indefinite article animals ! The "un " and the "une " family . 

4.Each child in the class can then make two or three open and reveal corner puzzles of their own- why not encourage the more able to investigate new names of animals by using reference material such as a bi-lingual dictionary . They must in this instance select objects that they can recognise as masculine or feminine in gender and therefore help their friends to explore when we say "un" and when we say "une "! 

5. Made into a working wall - with the open and reveal puzzles made by the class with labels made by the children, we have a point of reference for our work on nouns and the indefinite article .

The aim of the activity is to make the learning fun , to revisit familiar language  and to build on known language and make progress in our understanding of the target language !