Andrea Price, Leighton Primary School Crewe,
Cheshire
Year 3 pupils at Leighton Primary had been
studying Unit 6 of the QCA Schemes of
Work Es wächst! (Growing things). An opportunity
arose to enter a tallest sunflower competition and I decided that
planting the sunflowers would be an excellent medium for
a cross curricular project in German.
Children used prior knowledge to think of a
name for their sunflower and to label their pot. (Literacy
3.3) They were asked to think of topics that we had covered
such as colours, animals and family members and create an original
name.(LLS applying prior knowledge).
They really enjoyed playing with language and
using simple bilingual dictionaries. (LLS dictionary skills).
Examples included Sonnenschwester, Blumasaurus, Gelbe
Schönheit, GoldenerTiger and Benjamin
Blümchen.
We then recorded the children introducing
their plant, Meine Sonnenblume heisst gelber Porsche
and played it back to the class. This focused them to concentrate
on their pronunciation and presentation skills. (Oracy 3.3)
Before the planting we had a session exploring
and analysing the language that we would need to carry out the task
in German. We had a brainstorm of the nouns and verbs that we would
need so that the children could fully participate in the
lesson.
The children recalled vocabulary and simple
sentences from the life cycle of a plant and the story of ‘Jack and
the Beanstalk’ from unit 6 such as Hier ist ein Samen,
die Blume, es wächst. Simple specific language was then
introduced: pflanzen, das Wasser, die Erde, brauchen.
(LLS: Planning, analysing and evaluating ways of learning.)
Involving the children in the planning of the
lesson made it more effective as I could tailor my questions and
instructions to include vocabulary that they felt confident
with.
On the day of planting all instruction was
given in German. Questions were kept very simple, Was brauchen
wir um die Sonnenblume zu pflanzen? and instructions were
modelled in German with gesture and mime to check that children had
understood
Die Erde braucht jetzt
Wasser. Pupils were given different tasks such as
giving out sunflower seeds, carrying the soil or putting water in
and encouraged to interact using simple phrases such as
danke schön, bitte schön , ja, and hast du…? (LLS
Communicating: understanding and being understood).
The children felt really proud of themselves
for speaking and listening to German for the whole session and were
amazed at how well they could participate (Oracy 4.2). We are
trying other cross curricular projects as this was a
great success.
In the words of one Year 3 pupil, it
was, "Prima-Super-Sonnig Sonnenblume gut!”