FOCUS on CHILDREN & TEENS: DESCRIBING PICTURES with CHANTS to PRACTISE FLUENCY and learn NATURAL LANGUAGE in CONTEXT

17/10/2015

Many certifications, beginning with the Cambridge English: Young Learners STARTERS /MOVERS / FLYERS exams for primary school children, require students to describe pictures in varying detail depending on their level and to understand listening pieces in order to carry out tasks demonstrating their comprehension. Therefore practising these skills intensely together will give the students the confidence to face these exams from a very young age.

Cambridge English: STARTERS Word List PICTURE BOOK

I have tried describing these pictures with chants where I sing a piece and they repeat it like an echo. To make it more fun I have them search for what we are singing and see if they can find it before their friends. This makes them not only practise fluency but also verify their comprehension.

Subsequently – when the chant has been repeated numerous times over a period of time (a few days) – students can be asked to describe the picture with their own words. Inevitably they will use the right collocations and vocabulary.

For older students one might try making a gap-fill with the text to see if they remember the right prepositions or collocations. For this purpose I am also adding the Word document to modify as you feel necessary.

Children could, in groups, describe one aspect of another picture and then all the class puts the various sentences together into a chant to sing together.

All the materials and audio are provided below for you to download.

If you have any other ideas of how one could exploit the materials please comment below.

Hope you have fun using them!
Susan

yle-starters-word-list-picture-book_my_favourite_food_-_at_the_restaurant.pdf
File Size:	597 kb
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starters_picture_description_chant-_at_the_restaurant.mp3
File Size:	5093 kb
File Type:	mp3

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starters_picture_description_chant_-_at_the_restaurant_-_my_favourite_food.pdf
File Size:	751 kb
File Type:	pdf

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starters_picture_description_chant_-_at_the_restaurant_-_my_favourite_food.docx
File Size:	198 kb
File Type:	docx

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Author

My name is Susan Brodar, born in London into a multilingual family and brought up bilingual English / Italian.

I went to school in London until 15 when we moved to Germany where I finished my British education at Munich International School. I started teaching Italian at evening classes aged only 17 and studied Mass Communications and Journalism at Munich University.

I continued teaching parallel to interpreting at trade fairs and business meetings as well doing translations. After working at the Italian Institute for Foreign Trade for a year I married my Italian globetrotting companion in 1983 and we set up our home near Venice, Italy where we continue to live with our two teenaged children.

Having taken my British High School-leaving ‘A’ Level exams in English, Italian, French & German I am completely fluent in all four languages and am taking a DELE certification in Spanish to complement them.

ENGLISH (native)
ITALIAN (native)
GERMAN (C2)
FRENCH (C2)
SPANISH (B2)

Smarty

18/10/2015 12:18:44 am

WOW! Awesome! Your lines are so simple but very meaningful 'n easy to understand. How could u make it? How could u do that? I wanna b able to make such lines for other situations. Could u? Could I? How? Please tell me... Please let me know... Great thanks...