Night and day - noche y día

As a teacher, a starting point can make all the difference to getting a lesson moving. I use a tri-lingual approach wherever I can to make sure in any lesson I'm covering something with movement (I use Australian sign language AUSLAN), and find ways to drop in some Spanish and English. You'll be surprised how doing this allows for a student or group of students to open up their own background or travel experiences.

Lately my "cross-curricular" part of my teaching has been creating opportunities to bring in a little ICT and Science to my language teaching. For example, using world time and looking at how the earth movement can be done with a torch and a world globe in class. But you can also support your lesson with this neat online map that shows the current position of the Sun and the Moon. It shows which areas of the Earth are in daylight and which are in night.

So you can now use the word "day" in Auslan and "night" that you can access using the Auslan sign bank https://www.auslan.org.au, combine this with Spanish (or a language of your choice) and have a great starting point to your lesson.

Why not add a day and night video?

Those of you teaching Primary Science can go to quality resources like the Primary Connections - Linking Science with Literacy page for the Night and Day Year 3 - Earth and Space section.

A little searching and you'll find so many avenues and resources:

• Scootle resource you can use in the IWB for your classroom
• Simple video song for kinder/early childhood

Now at this point you may be thinking what next? Well if you're doing language education, you could look at the days of the week.

Cultural ideas always come to mind, with Mexican culture having a moon and sun, you can find articles to explore the culture of the sun.

You can do some creative art work or even dare to write your own song. But for now you get the idea. You need a starting point and that's why doing a little searching with a purpose helps.

You've come this far, I'd love to hear from you what ideas or things have come to mind from reading this. You don't have to be a teacher to stop by and say hi/hola. It might be a starting point for your own learning and linking all the different elements in your own life.