| Gifted and Talented MFL day – 24th February 2009
Three other schools joined us to work together led by Béatrice Dalleau-White.
To begin with Beatrice presented the children with three versions of the same text and challenged them to decide which language they were each in, explaining the reasons for their choices. All children identified the text in French and the majority were also able to decide which text was in Spanish and which in Italian.
Activity 1
After identifying the languages the children were asked to discuss the content of the text, using all three to help understand the content and again to give the reasons for their decisions. The main aspects of the text were deciphered by the children working as teams and feeding back to the whole group. Beatrice asked them to identify what skills they had used to work out the text. (E.g. reading, scanning, concentrating, using things they already knew etc.)
Beatrice then gave each group the six English words and asked them to find the French, Spanish and Italian equivalents from the texts.
Finally the groups were presented with the English version of the text and challenged to look at all of the languages and decide on rules that could be applied to any or all of the languages.
The children came up with the following:
• In all three languages names of people, places and titles (of paintings) were written with a capital letter.
• In all languages except for English the adjectives came after the noun. In English they came before the noun.
• Spanish, French and Italian have masculine and feminine words whereas English doesn’t.
• In French, Spanish and English plural words usually ended in an s.
Activity 2
The children listened to a story in French and then ask to read it themselves, repeating the words and phrases Beatrice read. As they went through the story the second time Beatrice questioned the children about how pronunciation of the words was similar or different to the way they were written and what certain words might mean.
The children were able to identify that many end letters were silent, ll together sounded like an English y, th was pronounced t and eau was pronounced o.
From working out that Mamie meant grandma they were able to give Papi as the French word for grandpa.
Activity 3
The children were split into mixed school groups and each group was presented with 4 talking tins. They had to complete the following task:
1. Listen to the word on each tin and, using the sounds, find the written word from around the room to match.
2. Use a dictionary to find the meaning of each word.
3. Find the picture to match each word
Practise saying the word together to teach the rest of the class their four words.(from memory) and the children then collected all of the pictures together on a board and practised them with Beatrice. Finally they tried to recall as many of them as possible in their groups. Beatrice invited the children who thought they could recall the most words to come to the front and be challenged. The three children remembered 18-20 of the words just by looking at the pictures! (There were 20 words in total.)
Activity 4
The children finished the day by creating their own portraits using Archimboldo’s technique of using non-human images to represent features. The children had a selection of French sales leaflets from which to select their images and had to label the body part with the name of the object used to represent it. Some children wrote just the word of the image used in French whilst others wrote fuller descriptions (e.g. deux pommes de terres pours les yeux).
The children ensured that their name and the name of the school was included on their picture as Beatrice is intending to display them electronically.
The children from all of the schools had a thoroughly enjoyable day. They all involved themselves enthusiastically in all of the activities, came up with super responses to the challenges and co-operated well with pupils from their own and other schools. The behaviour of all of them was excellent. The whole day was very inspiring and showed how children can rise superbly to quite difficult challenges if given the opportunity.
Useful information:
www.museedefrance.com is a useful source of arts related resources
Archimboldo by Catherine de Duve ISBN 978-2-218-75330-5
Les tableaux rigolo de Archimboldo by Sylvie Gradet and Nestor Salas ISBN 2-7118-4761-6
www.almanach.free.fr is a site where calendars in French can be downloaded – each day in France has a saint ascribed to it and if you are named after the saint on any particular day others will which you “bonne fête”.
Book: “J’ai descendu dans mon jardin et j’ai cueilli …” by Nathalie Lété (published in Canada by Seuil Jeunesse) ISBN 2-02-041646-8
Pronunciation pointers (French compared to English)
Ll as in ville sounds like y as in day
Th is pronounced t
Eau is pronounced o (as in no)
N words beginning oi such as oignon the i isn’t really heard just the short o phoneme
The circumflex accent stretches out the time taken to say the letter without changing its sound – it’s as if the sound is dragged out
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