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Puppet Pals task in a German primary school

Description

In this task, the learners created a short animated scene using the Puppet Pals App to describe a funny monster. In the pre-task phase, the teacher played a series of games with the learners, helping them recall the vocabulary related to numbers, colours and body parts (Heads Down, Simon Says, What’s Missing, and so on). The teacher then introduced the main task: to draw a monster and then make it talk. In order to perform the task of making their monsters talk, the students needed to draw a monster and use the Camera app to take pictures of it. In the core-task phase, in pairs the learners created a short dialogue describing the characteristics of their monsters and recorded it in the Puppet Pals App. In the post-task phase, the final versions of the animated scenes were displayed on the IWB.

Clips

I liked the part when they started working on the monster at the beginning. And you chose exactly the same one. Because his pronunciation is not really good but they are trying very hard and then you see how motivating it is to show each other. They are not using the language so much in this part, but: “Look how I drew the ears!” They throw the dice; they say it and draw it. Well, it was a part of how they create the monsters. If you just let them draw, there is no language production. So, if you say: “Draw a monster,” they draw and silently. In this way, they are still drawing which is motivating but they have to use the language. They have to throw the regular dice, and the colour dice, and then they say: “Draw TWO YELLOW...” and then they pick a card, and it's an arm and then “Draw two yellow ARMS”. So they produce the language and the other one, the recipient, has to understand it.
This sequence shows the pre-task phase of the lesson. The learners are working on creating their own funny monster: the dice determines the number of the body part and a card the colour. Whenever the monster gets a new feature, it has to be added to the drawing.
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Details

Pedagog Rich linguistic input;Collaborative learning (collaboration);Real-world outcome
Target Language English
Learn Language German
Technology iPads/Tablets IWB
Area Grammar Listening / Viewing Oral Interaction Oral Presentation Vocabulary
Age 7-11
Level A1 Beginner
Education Sector Primary

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