Nice Lesson with Year 8 - Warning: Talking Dog

 I have written in another post about how in Year 8 we work on building fluency, starting with just being able to speak French, without caring too much about coherence or personal detail. What happens, of course, is pupils do want to be able to speak and write more and more coherently and be able to express what they want to say.

My Year 8 class can talk all day using this sheet. First of all, just producing long sentences without worrying about making sense, and then by picking just 3 or 4 verbs from the middle column, turning it into a more considered answer. And they don't need to use the sheet anymore.

"J'aime faire du sport parce que j'adore jouer au tennis avec mes amis surtout si je peux jouer dans le jardin. Mais je n'aime pas faire du sport au collège parce que je dois jouer au rugby et je déteste le rugby parce que je voudrais jouer au foot."

So this week, we have been using a very similar sheet with the same words in column one, but themed on the topic of going to the beach. We spent the lesson yesterday practising speaking, building coherent answers the same way we did with the simple Free Time sheet. And we started to use I was going to and I decided to as "cheats" to talk about the past tense.

"Quand je vais à la plage, j'adore jouer avec un ballon surtout s'il fait beau, mais s'il pleut je préfère jouer aux salles de jeux. Le week-end j'allais faire mes devoirs mais il faisait beau, alors Bob a dit, "Je voudrais aller à la plage." Alors j'ai décidé d'aller à Cromer". Je peux faire mes devoirs le week-end prochain s'il pleut."

Today we worked on translating a model answer. I put it on the board in French and the class translated it in their books into English. Several of them challenged themselves to do it without looking at the sheet from yesterday. Then I took the text off the board and asked them to translate it back into French. They were allowed to use the sheet as often as they needed. I just asked them to keep count of how many times they needed to look. Of course many challenged themselves to do it without looking at all.

When they finished, I asked them to cover up the French, look at the English, and try to say it to a partner in French. I wasn't expecting them to be particularly successful, but they exceeded expectations. So then I asked them to shut their books and tell the same story to their partner. I explained I wanted them to reconstruct it in their own words, not recite it from memory. This was even better, as they changed and embellished the story using things they remembered or could find on the sheet.

The basis of this is the phonics they did in Year 7. We use Rachel Hawkes' Francophoniques with key words and actions for each sound-spelling pattern. So when we move from a generic Free Time sheet to something more specific - here Going to the Beach - they can do it quickly and fluently without having to drill pronunciation. And then the other magic ingredients come from the class: they want to challenge themselves to be creative and coherent with what they say, and they challenge themselves to do more and more without using the sheet if they don't have to.

To have pupils telling the story in French without support, working from internalised French, each giving slightly different versions because they haven't rote-learned it, was a delight. And it's good to be able to tell them that this will see them a long way towards a good grade at GCSE.