Healthy eating

Year 5 have been learning about food this term.
Our French buddy Toto, told them about some typical French food. Have you tried any of this food?
Qu'est-ce que tu aimes manger? 
Qu'est-ce que tu n'aimes pas?

We looked at some items of food and decided if they were healthy or unhealthy. Then, we extended our sentences saying why.

We also looked at the food pyramid and learnt the names of the different groups of food in French.

The children read an authentic advert and answered some questions in English. They were encouraged to look at context clues to understand the text.

Finally, we created our own healthy meal including some fromage et crudités!

Body parts

Year 4 have learnt body parts in French, remembering also the masculine, feminine and the plural
articles.

The children learnt an authentic French song, Jean Petit qui danse. They loved singing the song and dancing with Jean Petit! Can you sing along and dance with Jean Petit?

                                          

We also read a French story about un monstre effrayant but we are not scared about the monster anymore - Tu ne me fais pas peur! So... go away! Va-t'en grand monstre vert!

In grammar, we looked at the position of the adjective and the adjectival agreement in French.
We learnt that we need to look at the article to know the gender and number of a noun and that the adjective agrees with the noun in gender and in number. It's a bit tricky but Year 4 mastered it and wrote amazing sentences about their own monsters!

Tu aimes le sport?

Year 5 have been giving their opinion about sports and talking about their favourite and least favourite sports.

We first learnt the names of the sports with choral repetition and some flashcards games featuring our French buddy Toto.

The Framework for Languages states that in Year 5, children should understand and express likes and dislikes and join in a simple conversation using good pronunciation. So we decided to take a class survey on the most and the least favourite sport in French.

In the following lesson, Y5 extended their sentences by justifying their opinions. First, we did human sentences to reinforce the word order and then the children wrote their own sentences.

Listen to these super long and amazing sentences! What a fantastic pronunciation Year 5!

Homme de Couleur

Today Year 6 have read the poem "Homme de couleur" by Léopold Sédar Senghor.

We read a brief biography and understand why Léopold Sédar Senghor is an important writer and politician in the history of Sénégal and why we were going to read one of his poems to celebrate
Black History Month.

Before reading the poem, we looked at the different verbs we use in French in expressions like "I am cold, I am hungry, I am scared".

Then, the students had to listen to the story and put the sentences of the poem in the correct order.

We checked our work and read aloud the sentences in French, then, translated them in English.

The children loved the story and demonstrated great reading strategies by looking at pictures, decoding unknown words and trying to understand the meaning of the sentences even if they didn´t know all the vocabulary or verbs.

They also looked at the different verb tenses in the poem and inferred which verbs where in past, present or future tense. In addition, they noticed the different endings for the je form and the tu form. In year 6 we are learning a lot about conjugation!

It was a fun lesson and Year 6 loved the poem and understood the message straight away.

We hope you like the poem too!

Quel est ton caractère?

This term, Year 6 have been doing some description activities.
The National curriculum for KS2 Languages states that children should understand feminine and masculine forms and the conjugation of high-frequency verbs. In addition, children should know how to apply the basic grammar they have learnt to build sentences.

We first looked at the different forms of the adjectives for masculine and feminine and learn how to build sentences using Je suis and Je ne suis pas looking at our negative sandwich structure.

Then, the children wrote these fantastic descriptions of theirselves using Clare Seccombe's pillar portrait template. 

But Year 6 not only know the 1st person singular of the verb être! They applied understanding of the term conjugation to the verb in the 2nd and 3rd person singular. They wrote some famous people descriptions and read them to the class, who had to guess who the famous person was!

Vive la rentrée!

Welcome back to our blog!

We hope you had a lovely Summer and that you are enjoying your first weeks at school.

We have been busy this rentrée des classes at Sudbury. We have watched some videos to recap on our French vocabulary. Some year groups learnt about French school routines and phrases related to school life. Here is the video with Papo the Parrot.

The older pupils have watched Let me introduce myself, where a British student, Ben, meets some children from Marseille. They revised some expressions to greet and introduce themselves and they looked at the streets and the buildings in Marseille, comparing them to the ones in London.

Finally, we have been practising our French classroom expressions so that we keep on speaking French in class!

Have a look at the activities we did for la rentrée last year.

More about speaking in the target language.

Les orteils n'ont pas de nom

Last month most of the students in Year 6 went on their residential trip and we had one French lesson with the few children that didn´t go on the trip.

I planned a lesson around the book "Les orteils n'ont pas de nom", a really funny story where the toes want to decide their own names.

The vocabulary in the book is simple and there is some repetition in each page, so other year groups will be able to understand the story too. You can work on the vocabulary about numbers, fruits, musical notes, letters and colours.

After reading the story, the pupils had to come up with new names for each toe. They could use their imagination to create abstract names, they could use the bilingual dictionary or name them with words that they already know and then, they had to draw and illustrate one foot with the names they had chosen for each toe.

You can adapt the level of this activity easily, as your students can even introduce each toe and include all the structures and vocabulary that they know.

I hope you and your students enjoy this story as much as we did!

Check Natta Lingo´s blog to get more ideas and resources to work with this and many other stories.