Numbers and activities to get all staff on board

Getting on board with primary languages can seem really challenging and especially when you want everyone on the staff to grow in confidence. This week Emilie, Ana and I are out and about ,delivering staff CPD to every member of staff within a school,practising language and encouraging staff to try out some transferable activities using simple language.

Remember these are start up activities and they will also become favourite activities that can be played for five minutes when teachers have time outside of the language learning allotted time.

Below are some short activities which can help to build staff confidence and also engage young learners using target language numbers.

Numbers 
We love this song and its clip as a way of practising numbers.
It exists in French,Spanish and German. 

• You can sing it in correct order 1-10 and in reverse order 10-1 . 
• You can pause and ask the children the next number
• You can ask children only to sing odd numbers or even numbers 
• You can use the four clips on European Languages Day to look for similarities and differences in the sound of numbers 1-10 in five languages and include English of course!
• You can play a game of Lotto (Bingo) or a version of the circle maths game "elevenses" but if the teacher doesn't know eleven in the target language then why not make it "nineses" and just play to nine. You don't want to have to say the number nine or you are out!

Now the class and the teacher can 

• count items, 
• perform a number song for assembly ,
• link numbers and colours (have a look here at colours and ways to practise simple colours)- where a colour is called and the children have to remember which number they have seen in the colour, 
• play Splat with two teams and numbers.