Fun with Cheese and Chunks. (Not Pineapple. It's not 1976!)

 As promised, back to nice things today. With a look back to a special experiment with chunks from 2011. For some reason I took up the challenge of having a group of six Year 9 boys who were not enjoying French, and doing 3 compulsory after school sessions with them!

The idea was to re-engage them with French and help them understand that it was a subject where very practical knowledge could be used to create things they could be proud of.

In the first part of the first session, we played with lego. Well, one pair did. Another pair had meccano, and the 3rd pair had a basic model glider kit. Out of this came lots of discussion of how easy or how fiddly things were to put together, whether you could make just one thing, and what you could do with the thing you had made.

At this point, the Deputy Head arrived with cheese, to check we were getting on OK and because one of the conditions of them showing up was that cheese would be provided (at their request).

We then moved the discussion on to talking about how to build things out of French. We talked about blocks fitting together, fiddly bits that need tweaking, being able to recall set sentences and being able to create your own. Then we spent the rest of the session working with chunks of French to see what we could build - the picture will give you an idea of the sort of things we were working with.

It was important for them to realise that writing in French isn't something that some people could magically do and others couldn't. And that the same skills of building something out of blocks and making something of your own, also applied to French in the same way they applied to lego or meccano.

In the second session (before the cheese) we customised pictures of cars. This is my car, the Deputy Head's car and the Head's car. They have been personalised. And this time the discussion moved on to talking about personalising the French, adding things that worked, and things that wouldn't work. There were also some rather forced references on my part to futuristic adaptations and retro features in an attempt to bring in the idea of tenses.

After the cheese, we set about doing a similar process in French. We called the activity Pimp My French after the car customisation TV show. Each pair had a selection of extra features they could add to the kit from the previous week. We concentrated on personalisation, adding variety and features - customising the French.

The third evening we made a machine for making French. We assembled the machine, sourced the French parts and proceeded to put together amusingly long sentences. The pictures below are not from the after school detentions (sorry, re-engagement sessions) but the design of the machine is the same. It works as a shape sorter on a conveyor belt. The first chunk is selected and placed in the correct shape hole on the template over the conveyor belt. This will be a verb which can be followed by an infinitive. So "j'aime" or "je peux", for example. This is followed in the correct order by an infinitive or a phrase beginning with an infinitive such as "jouer du piano". Then comes a statement of where, when or whith whom. And finally a conjunction, before the conveyor belt is moved on into position for the next 4 chunks. So it produced "sentences" such as, "I love to play tennis with my girlfriend because I can't go swimming with my brother but I prefer to eat chips at the seaside especially if I can ride my bike at the park so I would like to go to Norwich at the weekend."

Of course the "sentence" is random. Although it could have been much more random if they hadn't started to select the words they chose. This was the point of the exercise: to realise that French is built out of components that you select, and that you put together to make something you want to make. It was a metaphor made concrete.

We use other metaphors, often linked to technology - for example the food tech metaphor of making some tasty French out of the ingredients you have. The whole experience was a fun experiment, re-engaging (through cheese) with a group of pupils, helping rethink their attitude to French, and something to share with other teachers about how we can explore the language-learning process with pupils. I am sure the lego versus meccano debate is also relevant to the chunks and manipulation of language debate. You will have to make up your own mind about that...