Seeking sound patterns in French and exploring a poem about days of the week and colours.

The teachers that Emilie and I will be working with tomorrow are teachers who have basic skills in language learning and are looking to enhance their own knowledge of the language and ways to enhance the learning of the children.The activities below are about ...... and  the blog post is intended as notes to the teachers:  

• sound patterns
• looking for matching sound patterns
• encoding text
• reconstructing text
• reading aloud a text

I love this simple days of the week and colours poem that I found on pinterest

Step One 
What is the poem about?
Show the children this blanked out version of the poem:

By concealing any other language can the children identify that the poem is about days and colours? 
What colour do they think that Sunday must be? Take suggestions and reasons why.

Step Two  
Give out to pairs the cut up poem as below:

Can the  children reconstruct the poem in the correct order of the days of the week .Can they decide whether the line........ :

"C'est la joie des enfants" 

goes at the beginning or the end of the poem? 

(Suggest that the poem rhymes so that this will help the children to decide where the line should go).

Which children guessed the correct colour for Sunday?

Step Three

Ask the children to look for sound patterns in the poem:

Send them on an "I" sound hunt and find the words where the words where the identical letter and sound or a matching sound to the "i" sound can be found

Send them on a similar hunt for "ou" and for "an"

Step Four

Ask the children to help you to understand the meaning of the poem and appoint class members as the class dictionary detectives. Give lout five dictionaries to five class detectives and make this a speed game to locate key words and fond the meaning:

My key words in the poem would be : 

tout/clair/se reposer/ vient(venir)/tour/ suit (suivre )/ toujours/ la joie /enfants

Step Five 

Can the class help you to read the poem out building to a happy crescendo on a Sunday because this is "la joie des enfants!"

I Spy Nouns!

Tomorrow Emilie and I deliver our first session of intermediate French for teachers keen to know more about nouns, adjectives and verbs .
Here is a game that we are going to play with the teachers ,based on this poster I found on pinterest a while back!
It's a game that I think the teachers can then play back in school with the children they teach who are moving on in their language learning and becoming more independent in their use of bilingual dictionaries to find their own key language such as nouns.The game is simple and could be used in KS2 and then again in Y7 KS3 to ensure that children can and do access bilingual dictionaries appropriately and effectively.

This is the game "I Spy Nouns":

First a little warm up and revisiting activity ......

1. Children to work in pairs.
2. Each pair requires an "I Spy sheet".
3. Children require either a piece of rough paper and pen or a mini-whiteboard between them.
4. Each pair requires access to a bilingual dictionary - best if there is one between two.
5. Ask the children in pairs to look for pictures of nouns they think they may already be able to say and write in the target language e.g cat/ fish, elephant.
6. Ask the pairs to write down up to five of these nouns in the target language on the mini -white board.
7. You could ask more advanced learners to try to remember if they have used the nouns  from step 6 before with "un/le" or une/ la".Ask them to write this next to the noun on the whiteboard
8. Now ask them to find the target language nouns they have written down on their mini-whiteboards in their bilingual dictionary and ask them to check the spelling.If they have thought about the definite/indefinite article and also to verify if they selected the correct choice between either "un/le" or "une/la"
9. Is there anything they need to change in the target language that they have already written on the mini-white board ?

Now they are ready for their I Spy Noun Explorers pair game

To play this game the children will need to create a two column simple chart for French and Spanish to record the nouns they find as masculine /feminine (and for German a three column chart with the additional column for neuter nouns)

1. Ask the children to take it in turns to look at the pictures on the sheet and to take it in turns to find one of the items they can see in the bilingual dictionary.
2. The child looking for the target language  noun must look it up in the English section of the dictionary and then write it out clearly for their partner on their mini-whiteboard.
3. Now the other partner must read what has been written on the mini white board and then find the noun in the target language section of the dictionary.
4. Once the child has found the English meaning and he/she must locate the item on the picture.
5. Ask the two children together to investigate whether the noun is masculine / feminine or as well in German neuter using the clues in the dictionary written next to the noun.
6. Ask the children to then write the noun down on their noun table under the correct category of masculine / feminine or neuter nouns.   
7. The children swap roles and play the game again.
8. Why not give children categories for example on this picture there are nouns to do with meal times, a season, weather, clothes, animals?

Sentence and Calligram Suitcases for the Summer holidays

Take a look at this wonderful Summertime calligram based on a sun hat!It's from the wonderful  site www.ac.-nancy-metz.fr. This activity works in any language - you just need to create your own calligram example of the sun hat in the other languages before starting the activities .

We are getting very Summery in our schools at the moment and are beginning to look for calm and sunshine filled activities to take us through to the end of the year.This calligram has made me think of how we can fill our sentence suitcases ready for the Summer holidays

In Year 5 we pack our beach bags for the beach project so the children know words in target languages for sunglasses,flip flops,sun hats,swimming costumes, sun cream, beach ball. We have also practised earlier in the year clothes items  so again we can recall items of clothing for a sunny Summer holiday .

I have added a grammar focus too but if your children are not yet competent with grammar identification of nouns, adjectives and verbs , you could limit the grammar colour coding or omit this altogether. A lot of our Year 5 children can do this or can identify some nouns,adjectives and verbs though.

Step One 

Let's make our holiday list of suitcase nouns. What do we need to pack?

Step Two 

Let's add an adjective to describe each item 

Step Three

Let's take a closer look at the calligram above and colour it in! How?

Each colour should represent a different component of the hat:

• Red for the indefinite article
• Green for any adjectives
• Blue for the nouns
• Yellow for the verbs

Step Four

Let's zoom in on the reason for packing the item by looking for this information written in the example sun hat calligram.

"pour nous cacher du soleil! 

Let's create reasons for the items we are packing.Why are we packing......? (The first two items below follow a similar pattern and use the same phrase as the sun hat - so that's easy,Can the children help you to identify a pattern and create the reasons why we are taking our flip flops , beach ball and swimming costume? :

• sunglasses
• sun cream
• flip flops
• beach ball
• swimming costume

You could reduce the challenge here and et the children match items with reasons,which have been written already on cards (or even add a symbol too to help with comprehension of the reason)

Step Five

Now all we need to do is pack those sentence/calligram suitcases.

• Create card folder suitcases with the children or create a large display suitcase for all the written work the children produce.
• Ask the children to write clear sentences  about each of the items above or to select two or three of the items they really want to take with them.
• Now ask them to colour code their sentences too and add summer time colour to their suitcase sentence packing.
• Can they now create their own calligrams of the items following the example of the hat above... and don't forget the summertime colour too!

They can now pack their own calligram suitcases! Maybe they can add an item of their own (e.g a book, a CD, a camera ....) 

Circus ! An independent project for early target language learners

Summer time and all across Europe you will find  the circus is coming to town!
Last year I sat down with a local teacher to plan and consider how we could link the target language  learning of her Year 5 and 6 to the language and context of the circus and the culture of circuses at the seaside in France and Spain.Circus was the focus of the UKS2 children and the school was trying to encourage independent learning at the end of the school year, looking back at what they had learned throughout the year

We set out to be the facilitators of the Summer focus and give the children the time to explore the language skills and knowledge of the language they had acquired during the year.

The children were at the stage in language learning where they could understand ,say,read and write simple spoken and written sentences using nouns, verbs and adjectives in the present tense.

The important points were that we wanted to 

1. to allow the children the opportunity to explore the language of the circus by independent access to text be it written or spoken
2. to allow the children to create their own final product - an advertisement for a Summer circus in the target language in either spoken or written form.

• The task

The children were asked to work in groups of four - differentiated ability- and to include in their project:

1. A poster (dates, times, venue,cost,participants). 
2. A simple description of the circus  ( simple present tense description of a circus using there is/are and third person singular of the verb (to be and to have). 
3. A rhyme, song or poem about the circus ( simple "advertisement jingle" style poem/ song/rhyme describing the circus and giving simple opinions e.g it's good/fantastic/ fun etc).

The expectation was that the children would use their prior knowledge of language and the skills required to access key language to generate the three components mentioned above.

• Core language gathering 

We let the children explore the language of the circus through simple authentic text.In groups we asked the children to explore an authentic text (here a French book or a Spanish video) and to find the key words for acrobat, trapeze artists, magician , the circus clowns etc, giving them access to bi-lingual dictionaries to check the language.

We found a brilliant book about in French about the circus









And this great simple video clip in Spanish introducing the key nouns associated with the circus. We gave the children the hyper-link for the clip on their chrome books

• Let the children explore how to create their own circus posters 

Using posters of the circus coming to town we decided to ask the children to use these as information banks they could  access to find and see how to use  target language in their own posters. The important thing was that the children should access the posters to find out for themselves for example how to describe the action , how to write the date and times etc.

Care was taken to select posters that had sufficient examples of key information so that the children had a text from which they could find examples for their own posters.

• Generating your own advertisement jingle 

We understood that these would need to be simple as the children had limited language but we wanted also to consider how added a flavour of the circus to their advertisements 

We watched with them video clips  and asked them to discuss how they could make sure their jingles had a circus flavour. We added the hyper- links to their chrome books so they could watch again for inspiration!

Here is a Spanish example 

Here is a French example 

• Over to the groups 

Then it was over to the groups to create a package that sold their circus to the class!

We found that the children really enjoyed the feeling of independence when using the target language and having to think of ways of accessing and checking language.The children valued the material that each group.

The  project worked because the challenges were not beyond the limits of the language but the project allowed the Year 5 and 6 children to feel the responsibility we often bestow upon them in other subject areas to organise, access and generate their own materials and outcomes! 

A great end of year project !