The start of 2022 has been busy. It has been wonderful meeting pupils from Form 3 all the way to Form 8 as well as meeting their parents!
In the last few weeks, Form 7 has been working on the topic of French towns. They have enjoyed going round the school writing directions for their peers and following each other’s in order to find various posters showing a specific place that could be found in a French town.
Once they had found their poster, pupils had to look at different types of information which was collected from French websites. Pupils used their previous knowledge of French as well as grammatical clues to answer a set of questions.
Form 3 finished off a topic which they had started in the Autumn term and we ended with speaking practice. We worked on how to describe our outfits and pupils also made puppets. They then choose a variety of items of clothing, that we had worked on during our lessons, whilst making sentences using connectives. Videos were shared on Seesaw if you would like to have a quick look at your child putting this into practice.
I was really impressed with Form 4’s quick grasp of masculine and feminine whilst working on the topic of shopping . This clearly demonstrated a thirst for learning a language! We started looking at adjective agreements with colours so that they can make more complex sentences when pretending to go shopping for food and clothes. I can’t wait for pupils to put all this into practice and share this with you all on Seesaw.
French club also started in January. This is currently for Form 7 and 8 pupils at lunch time and the aim is to create links with a secondary school in France which we would love to visit one day! We will also be looking at and discussing French culture; including films, music, art and trying some French food occasionally! I am aiming to start a Spanish club in the Summer Term whilst continuing the French club and will let pupils know when these will be taking place.
Finally, last Thursday was World Book Day and I took the opportunity to show pupils a few French books during our lessons. We talked about Tintin and Asterix which were originally written in French but we also looked at English stories that children were all familiar with and that had been translated into French such as Julia Donaldson’s many books (La baleine et l’escargote, Monsieur bout de bois, Zébulon le dragon). We looked at how some of the titles and characters’ names changed when translated from a language to another.
Forms 3 and 4 had both worked on food so we listened to the Hungry Caterpillar in French (La chenille qui fait des trous). Pupils had the opportunity to listen for words from our topic but in a different context which was lovely.
Form 5 looked at a different book called We are Bilingual and Form 6 were given the opportunity to tell me all about their favourite book in French, writing a short review and looking up the book titles in French. Pupils realised that sometimes these remained in English but many wanted to have a go at translating them into French anyway. They took them all home to add a few finishing touches and draw the book cover. I am looking forward to seeing the finished results!
