Animals Galore! (part2)

Dear Zoo in KS2 

Games - In KS2 (Year4), we played some of the games as for KS1 with the nouns and then focussed on gender by playing the Pompom/Duster game, inspired by Erzsi's blogpost.  No pompoms for us so we did it with strips of pink/blue paper as a class with me calling out the article + noun and children waving their strip of paper.  Next, with the pictures on a board, 2 children stood an equal distance from it, each armed with a pink and a blue duster (recycled pyjamas legs in my case).  The game was harder this time as I called out the noun MINUS the un/une, and the first person to get to the board and touch the correct picture with the pink or blue duster as appropriate, was the winner.  A new person took over from the loser and we kept a tally of how many right answers our champion got.

Reading -  I then read Dear Zoo, doing actions throughout to help them understand as much of the story as possible, with the children filling in the missing words in my 'gapped' reading.

Adjective Focus -   We began with a discussion about what adjectives were and the children then shared with their partner any French adjectives they already knew - colours and some size adjectives.  We talked about possible characteristics of the animals and I then asked them which of these might have been in the story, reminding them to think about the actions I had used.  Next, the adjectives were displayed on the board and, working with their partner, and looking for cognates, they decided which French adjective matched with the English adjectives we'd just agreed upon .  We then played pronunciation games – Doucement and Heads Down.  

Sentence Level - I demonstrated some simple sentences using an animal and an adjective, then ‘mimed’ some for the children to ‘translate’, before asking them to work in pairs on a similar activity.  We took this a step further by looking at and reading sentences on the Powerpoint (a resource I found on the West Sussex site) and I was pleased to note that some children noticed the change of spelling for the feminine adjectives without any prompting.

Mini-books -  We ran out of time at this point so we didn't get to make our simple animal/adjective sentences mini-book (via Clare Seccombe.)

So what did the lesson achieve? There were links with Literacy, the children made progress at word and sentence level, and also gained some knowledge about how French works (KAL.)