French Day

Last Wednesday we celebrated our second French Day at Sudbury.
Language days are a great way of promoting the foreign language and culture.

This year, Years 1 to 3 have created some artwork using the pointillism technique.

They learnt some facts about French history and the French flag and made these beautiful collages of la tricolore.

They also watched an episode of our favourite French cartoon with the donkey Trotro and they created their own Trotros 😊.

Finally, they enjoyed some storytelling in French! The Freshwater Theatre Company came to perform Goldilocks and the Three Bears and The Three Little Pigs. The children had a great time joining in and some of them even took part in the stories!

In the meantime, Years 4 to 6 invented their own French Pastry.

Then, they "painted with scissors" and made "The fall of Icarus" collage in the style of Henry Matisse.

They also learnt some facts about Paris landmarks and created their own Paris cut-out monuments, which they loved doing!

At the end of the day, they watched a French performance by the theatre company Onatti Productions. The play was so hilarious! The children really enjoyed watching it and performing some parts of the play.

The whole school had croissants in the morning and a French menu was served for lunch. 

The feedback from the children was really positive and they can't wait for the next year's French Day!

Les Amérindiens - Native Americans

Two years ago I found a beautiful book about a Native American in one of my travels to Lille.

I thought I could use it when Year 3s learn about the Americas and I couldn´t resist to buy it.

I hadn´t used the book yet, but last term, I finally planned some activities to teach a unit on Les Amérindiens.

We first located Les Amérindiens in the frise historique or time line, located them in the map and learnt about how they used to live.

We practised listening to the French words related to their way of life and customs while playing bingo.

We also learnt an authentic song about un petit indien called Nagawika. This is a song that French children learn at school!

un petit indien nagawika (officiel audio and... by dm_51a0a978942d1

Finally, we read Heyo and learnt some frequency verbs. The story has some repetition (Je suis Heyo, un Lakota; je suis un bon chasseur, je suis un bon cavalier; je suis un bon pisteur) so it works really well to introduce the form Je suis + adjective.

The children created beautiful minibooks about Heyo, we hope you like them!

Next year we will also learn the story of the Native American Pocahontas.

Activities around Japan

In Summer 1, the whole school topic was "Countries Project". Each year group focused on a continent and each of the classes studied a country on that continent.

This is one of my favourite topics, as you can be so creative with your planning. I also like "Countries project" because the last day of the half term we celebrate "Travelling week" at Sudbury and we get to go to different classrooms and learn about a lot of countries. There is a presentation, a performance, activities and crafts and even food!

Year 4 focused on Asia and I decided to plan a series of activities around Japan.

We listened to the song "Le petit japonais"and practise our listening skills indentifying some vocabulary.

Find the song in this book CD on Amazon

We also learnt some facts about Japan. I used a fantastic book that I found in Paris two years ago.

 

 

 

I planned a carrousel activity where the children, in groups, had to read a short paragraph in each station and use their language skills to understand information about the typical dish, sports, greetings, clothes etc. Some children even translated the text into English!

On the following lesson, we created minibooks with all the facts that we learnt about Japan.