And you think you haven't heard of them, because you haven't heard the word Tarsia before, but you'll totally recognise them the minute you see one! (I think I had a Care Bears one when I was small.)
Here's one:
These things are great for learning vocabulary, and they can be made using English and the Target Language, or English and pictures. Personally, I prefer pictures, as it takes half the reading out of the exercise and levels they playing field a bit for students with specific learning difficulties. It's also a closer experience to the way we use our first language.
There are two ways you can use Tarsia puzzles in the classroom.
1. Give out blank templates and topics. Each student makes a tarsia puzzle using their template, and vocabulary from their designated topic. You should stress the importance of filling in all the puzzle pieces BEFORE cutting the triangles up. (otherwise nothing will match and it will be impossible!) Once everyone has made a puzzle you have a whole bunch of revision puzzles for the class to challenge each other with.
2. Make puzzles using this fantastic free software
The program allows you to create puzzles in any of these shapes:
and there are other features of this software, which I'll look at another time, that are also really great for the MFL classroom too.
It's designed for maths teachers so I haven't found a way, so far, to use pictures instead of words within the Tarsia Maker software, but it can be done with a little fiddling around and converting to PDF
Here's the Los Colores Tarsia Puzzle from the picture above, but in a printable format, so that your triangles are nice and big. I'm going to recommend printing on light card or laminating (you know how I feel about laminating!)
If you make any good tarsia puzzles that you'd like to share, that would be awesome. Pop a comment below, with a link to Drive or Dropbox!
No comments:
Post a Comment