Creating Characters and being Junior Judges on Strictly!

I love Strictly! We have used Stictly before in our network - a couple of schools created dance routines with directons, counting and commands.It worked really well.

Joanne, my associate colleague set up a Stictly Come Dancing Judges panel with numbers and personal info introductions too!

This year I am certain that children would love to become target language "Junior Judges"- just like the ones on the real programme.Watching "Strictly It Takes Two" I realised how we couod easily use this idea with children talking in the target language.

We will practise the verb "to be" and nouns.Add interesting adjectives and we could make similes too!
It's a simple but topical way of creating descriptive sentences, practising the verb to be and looking up and using nouns too and writimg,reading and saying out loud sentences in the target language!Oh and don't forget the children in the class will have to listen to each other too!

The tools we will need to be junior judges!

• We need to consider which parts of the paradigm we will need to describe pictures of dancers.  
• Firstly we need to practise the verb "to be" and selecting and placing the correct parts of the paradigm of the verb "to be" under dancers pictures "he...."/"she......"/ "they (male)......" they (female)....." and "they (male and female).......
• Secondly we need to investigate nouns we may like to use to describe dancers and the characters they are portraying.Let's collect useful nouns  from our bilingual dictionaries: ( pirate/ princess/ fairy/wizard/cyclist/penguin/bear/gentleman/ lady/ fruit seller etc).I would show the children some clips of the dancing from Strictly come Dancing or you could show picures on screen of soke of the dancers in outfits etc- Movie night or Halloween night would be two good themes.There are plenty of pictures out there on the internet too to use...... 
• Now let's play Simon says with the nouns and add actions and freeze frames

Judge the dancers!

• Why not show the children a couple of the dancers and the dances and let the children write out a descriptive sentences about the characters in the dances e.g "He is like a pirate" or "They are like monsters" etc
• Why not additionally or alternatively make it a guessing game.One person reads out the sentences he/she has written and the  rest of the class must guess who the sentences desctribes from the people in the show.

People Pillar Poems

You could always finish off the activity by creating some of my People Pillar Poems- using the characters from the dances....as both a writing and 3D display activity.Thanks to Clare Seccombe for the template!

Take a look here 

People Pillar Poems and template