Lights, camera, action!

For the last few years, I have been running an after-school Spanish Club. Whilst the core group of attendees usually remains the same, a small number of pupils come and go each half term. This means that I try to take a more project-based approach to teaching so that everybody, no matter how much Spanish they know, can access the sessions.

Inspired by a project that the ever-creative Angela Smith ran with her school’s Language Ambassadors and presented at a recent meeting of the Association for Language Learning’s Leicester Primary Hub, we worked together as a group to learn the poem Araña, arañita. The poem, which I found on Mama Lisa’ s World, was simple enough to learn whilst also including sufficient action for the children to animate. We spent a bit of time around the translation and discussed the rule for adding ita onto the end of a noun to make it diminutive as well as adjective noun order in the section about un sapo gordo. Then we recited it together, exploring the way that the use of accents remind the reader to place stress on different syllables. The children particularly enjoyed joining in with the onomatopoeic ¡Pum!

After a chance to do some story-boarding, I set out a load of cardboard and art materials and left the children to unleash their creativity on making the sets, backgrounds and characters, being on hand to guide them with some of the material choices and the trickier aspects of the construction. Some got so into it that they went off and made elements of the set and characters at home to bring in. The children worked so hard, seeming to relish the freedom of the project, and used the materials in some really innovative ways.

The set-making was a fairly lengthy process as they all wanted to build them from scratch and spent a long time cutting, sticking painting and assembling. Some of the sets turned out to be very impressive and were a great opportunity for the children to develop and showcase their D&T skills. Once the backgrounds were completed, I showed the children this lovely, short stop-motion animation and we discussed the process for making our clips. Then, it was time to get started on the technical side, using iMovie on the iPads to photograph each movement of the characters. This took lots of experimentation but once the children were happy with the stills they had taken and had played around with the transitions and durations, it was time to add the narration. We had practised the poem many times so most of the children were pretty confident with the pronunciation, but narrating in time with the animation was challenging for some.

The children were very proud of their completed animations and I was so impressed with the creativity on show. The biggest bonus was that, by the end of the project, they had all memorised every word to the poem! Below are a few examples of the finished results.