We spent quite a few weeks on this topic as there is a lot of vocab to cover and the girls really enjoyed spending time making their little books. Here’s the outline of what we learned:
- The different rooms in the house
- The furniture and items you’d find in each room
- We had a look at “hay…..” and prepositions so we could describe where things were in a room.
Rooms in the house
We used the CGP Study Book to look at the different rooms in Spanish and followed it up with this worksheet from Twinkl. We then wrote a few paragraphs describing our own house.
Once we felt comfortable with the room names, we then had a go at this Twinkl worksheet which was all in Spanish. The aim was to read the description of the house and then draw it.
Furniture and items in a room
There is so much vocab here so we used these Twinkl word mats and took each room in turn.
The girls then each made a mini-pocket book using the word mats as their guide. I found this idea after listening to Clare Seccombe on a language training course. We already use Clare’s website Lightbulb Languages but this is on her personal blog Changing Phase. She’s got free instructions on how to make lots of different types of minibooks. In our case, the girls had a page per room and then made little cards for the furniture and other objects. They drew a picture and put the Spanish underneath and then put the English translation on the reverse. The girls absolutely loved making these for this topic; I’m sure we’ll be making many more to create our own Spanish library! Thank you so much Clare for sharing these with everyone.
After emptying all the pockets of the little cards, the girls then swapped books and put all the furniture back in the correct rooms again. These books are going to be perfect revision tools for later in the year.
Spot the Difference
Using the new vocab we’d learned, we then had a go at playing spot the difference in Spanish. I found these on Twinkl:
- Outside of the house – My House Spot The Differences Game Spanish (twinkl.co.uk)
- My bedroom – My Bedroom Spot The Differences Game – Spanish Speaking Practice (twinkl.co.uk)
- The lounge – My Living Room Spot The Differences Game – Spanish Speaking Practice, living (twinkl.co.uk)
We followed the structure: “In picture 2 there is a book on the sofa but in picture one there is no book.”
Spot the translation error
I love these worksheets by Lightbulb Languages. I think it’s great for the girls to realise they don’t have to know what every word means to understand what the Spanish is saying.
We worked through this worksheet where you had to find the errors in the English translation. It’s usually easier to find errors than to translate it yourself so this is a confidence-booster exercise for the girls to make them realise just how much they do actually know.
After reading through these examples, we then wrote a few sentences about each room in our own house. The above helped them with the structure and with some of the vocab.
Trip to IKEA
Armed with our minibooks, we went for a walk round IKEA describing the displays we came across and giving our Spanish colours and numbers a good practice too.
Crossword all in Spanish
We then finished this topic off with a crossword off Twinkl. We did this all together as there were lots of words in the questions we didn’t know but we managed to work them all out using context as our guide. The girls were amazed at what they could work out themselves.
