Had a foray into Poundland last week, as every language teacher does, and found these bags of colourful foam animals.
My first thought was to use them for adjectival agreement, and I will definitely be doing that, but then I had an idea about how I could use them to work on verbs so here are my thoughts.
The class will have to be familiar with some/all of the present tense of Avoir using some of the ideas in this post (although this post is about pronouns, the same techniques can be used for verbs.) Next, each person will get one of the foam animals. (No more than 3 different animal types per table, depending on the size of the group.) In this ‘passive’ stage of the lesson (although they don't sit still!), I will call out a sentence such as ‘J’ai un poisson’ and anyone who has that animal will get up. As each new one is called new people stand and the ‘old’ people sit. Next everyone stands and walks around and when I say ‘Il/Elle a …’ they have to point to suitable person. Sit down when finished. For ‘Nous avons...’ they need to stand and link up with at least one person with their animal. Continue as above with sitting back down again as others stand. And the final phase of this section is pointing to groups of people when ‘ils/elles ont …’ is heard.
For the ‘active’ part of the lesson, in their groups, everyone will start by saying what they have eg. 'J’ai une tortue.' Next in pairs, they will extend their answers by saying 'J’ai une tortue. Tu as un poisson,' moving around as they speak so that everyone speaks to everyone else. When this round is over, they will take it in turn to point to one group member and all say 'Il/Elle a …. '.
Next, those with similar animals get together for the 'nous' sentences, speaking in unison to the others; then they face each other in pairs for the 'vous' sentences before finally pointing to pairs for the 'ils/elles' sentences.I would not plan to do all of this in one lesson but would focus on some of the pronouns and verb forms orally before doing written work.
