What went well last week #5

Bonjour, 

These are a few activities that worked really well for me last week. 

This is for me to remember in my practice what games, songs, etc. work and also to share ideas with you. 

Most of the ideas below are really simple, they are tried and tested in various schools and they work!

New greeting songs

• Alphabet song – I don’t normally teach the alphabet but this is a great song to do just that, it is also useful to learn some key sounds in French: ‘A’; ‘I’, ‘U’ , for example.
  

• Salut salut salut – repetitive song and catchy tune, great for starting off the lesson and putting children in the ‘mood’ for French.

In year 4 we’ve just started to look at family through the story of the 'alien family' from the Janet Lloyd Network  – which is always a hit! We added actions and silly voices and acted out the story. We played some cards games to help us remember the names:

• Memory/pairs – with 2 sets of pictures - facing down, can you find the matching pairs as well as saying who it is.

• Montrez moi (Show me) – with 2 sets of picture (facing up) between 3 children, call out a family member and ask the children to show you the correct picture (there are only 2 correct pictures and 3 children so it can get messy!)

In year 5 we are looking at fruits and vegetables and describing them using adjectives: c’est rond, c’est long, c’est gros/moyen/petit. Qu’est ce que c’est? 

We’ve been making up riddles, and making lift the flap games to slowly reveal the fruit or vegetable, here is an example :  

Finally, we've been talking a lot about the importance of pronunciation and using word association or pictures to help us learn new words.Children were having problems with the word 'poisson', pronouncing it 'croissant', also the 'oi' sound (as in poire/pear) was a bit difficult for some of the children when we looked at fruits and vegetables, and in year 4 we were thinking about strategies for remembering family members. 

So, I've made some posters which I'm going to share with my classes this week, hopefully this will help them to start thinking along these lines. 

And you ? What worked well for you recently ?