Sock it to me!

Sock puppets are a brilliant enjoyable way of encouraging primary children to speak in another language for real purposes. Children will have enormous fun using the puppets to develop their speaking, listening and communicative skills.

Ask the class to make a puppet from an old sock either in class or at home and you will be delighted with the finished result of a colourful and varied group of imaginative figures for the class to see and use. Each puppet can be given a special name.

The puppets can then be used to create imaginative dialogues using language and structures with which the children are familiar. The puppets then (with the help of the children) can take part in dialogues with each other in which they use, for example:

- Greetings and asking how you are
- Names
- Speaking about birthdays and ages
- Family, pets and where they live
- Hobbies

A real highlight can be when children are asked to perform a song with their puppets in their new language. Sock puppets represent an exciting, yet enormously valid, approach to primary languages as they are inexpensive, colourful and provide an opportunity for children to explore their creativity and imagination. They are ideal to use in assemblies or presentations because they are visually attractive and can be used in a number of ways. Examples include role-play or songs as well as pair and group-work activities. It is even possible to use them to develop home-school partnerships as parents and families can help make the puppets and be invited in to see the dialogues that are then created.

Perhaps most significantly for young children and language learners, they offer children who are somewhat timid a persona behind which they feel they can begin to gain self-confidence when speaking to a group or before the whole class.

So, next time you find an odd sock …