Lisa Stevens, Primary Languages and International Coordinator, Whitehouse Common Primary School

Take one familiar book - Go away Big Green Monster! - and a class of Year 3 language learners. What happens? 

The use of stories in the primary languages classroom is a great idea for many reasons - and Go away Big Green Monster! ticks many boxes. It’s simple, repetitive, exciting, covers a variety of vocabulary and is suitable for use with a wide age range. And it’s available translated into French - Va-t’en Grand Monstre Vert and German - Hau ab, du großes grünes Monster and now it seems there is a Spanish version - Fuera de aquí, Horrible monstruo verde. 

In the story, a green monster appears, feature by feature and then each feature is sent away with the final instruction to ‘never ever come back again - well...’

When this series of lessons occurred, I had been unable to find a copy of the story in Spanish although I had seen it demonstrated in German. So, taking my inspiration from this, I set about using this story with two groups of pupils.

A kind person on the ELL-forum had sent me a PowerPoint that they had made of the story and I showed this to my Year 3 class as a plenary at the end of a lesson on parts of the face. 

Before the next lesson, I adapted the story using very simple language, even more simple than the original. Instead of ‘Go away....’ I used Hola and Adiós to reinforce greetings. Then using Smartboard notebook, I used the geometric shapes to make the face, slide by slide, first a round orange head, then two round blue eyes, a hexagonal purple nose and so on to make Señor Cabeza Naranja.

During the first read through, pupils were joining in with the Hola and Adiós, and by the second they were recalling the order of the features as well as some colours. This reinforced their understanding and knowledge of the features vocabulary, reminded them of colours and passively introduced adjectival agreement, and I was able to ask questions about the text. The more able were even trying to describe the geometrical shape of the features.

Next step was to let the pupils make up their own stories using Señor Cabeza Naranja as their model. I had envisaged using the 2D shapes from the numeracy drawer and sheets of paper but Year 3 were thinking bigger and acquired the funky cushions from their reading corner to serve as faces.  Armed with a digital camera, we took photos of our monsters as they were assembled then printed off two copies of each, before writing individual stories in pairs to create, along with the photos, a storyboard. (Original idea to do it as a slideshow were scuppered as the network couldn’t cope with that many photos at once!) And we made a class story using only the cushions.

Pupils were able to work on the same task at differing levels; some used a gapped text to insert just the name of the facial features; others added the colours, looking to make sure that they agreed with the noun in number if not gender; still others wanted to use further adjectives like hairy (peludo) or round (redondo). The final results were laminated and formed part of a very popular well-read display.

You can find the slideshare of Señor Cabeza Naranja here