Le cycle de l'eau

As you know in Spring 1 all year groups were learning about environment and sustainability.
The topic for year 6 was rivers, so in French we learnt about the water cycle.

We started the topic with an authentic clip. The children had to guess the learning objective of the lesson. The voice in the video has not been slowed down, but the images correspond to the water cycle and the key vocabulary is displayed.

Then, children learnt the scientific names of the states of matter in French and did a writing activity on the change of state.

We also read an animated text from a the Belgian website la récrée where each of the stages were explained. Children had to use their decoding skills to understand the text. Then, they had to show they understood the text by putting some cards together in order to create sentences for each stage of the water cycle. 

At the end of the unit, children made their own posters of the water cycle. They labelled the stages, the state of matter and explained the process writing sentences and using time connectives.

The pupils enjoyed the unit thoroughly and demonstrated enthusiasm and a lot of interest in learning a science topic in French. They even said that learning the water cycle in French helped them to understand it better in English :)

These are some of the activities that we have done in class:

L'eau dans tous les états

Stages of the water cycle

Le cycle de l'eau en séquences

Parcours de l'eau minérale

Léo et l'eau

5 aventures de Lola et Lolo

A case study on teaching about the water cycle through the medium of French, the resources of the full unit and a video lesson will be published by the University of Westminster.