What are the signs of autumn? This question was at the heart of the autumn lessons in class B1. The pupils looked for answers by playing with the gifts of autumn and solving autumn crosswords and puzzles – and discovered that learning like this can be great fun. Some of the exercises were done on worksheets and some on the interactive whiteboard, where together they solved, among other things, an autumn word search.
Keeping in step with autumn, the class also learnt its first digraph – ‘rz’. A digraph is a pair of letters that together stand for a single sound; Polish has seven of them: ‘ch’, ‘cz’, ‘dz’, ‘dź’, ‘dż’, ‘rz’ and ‘sz’. Because ‘rz’ sounds exactly the same as ‘ż’, its spelling has to be learnt – one thing that helps is swapping ‘rz’ for ‘r’ in related words (morze – morski, góra – na górze). Autumn lends itself to such exercises, as many words connected with it contain ‘rz’: wrzesień (September), grzyby (mushrooms), drzewa (trees) and orzechy (nuts).
The digraph also appeared in the pupils’ artwork. Using the gifts of autumn – colourful leaves – the pupils made their own pictures of animals, and the word ‘zwierzęta’ (animals) itself turned out to be another example of a word with ‘rz’. Combining spelling with observing nature and art work helps children remember new words by doing.
How did it go? The best way to find out is to look at the photos in the gallery.
