The Year 7 French Art Exhibition

 I spent an hour this afternoon wandering through a virtual Art Gallery created by our Year 7 French pupils. Normally it is held in a local Windmill, a community arts space with a nice café and
beautiful crocuses when I turn up each March with the Exhibition in a huge portfolio folder. Finding this newspaper article about the 2014 Exhibition made me realise that this would have been the 8th time we have done the Exhibition. This time it's online only. We are using the amazing Gallery slides from SlidesMania and sharing it with parents and carers as a virtual exhibition.

Every pupil in Year 7 creates an artwork and describes it in French. Then their work is put on display and members of the public pay good money to see it. The Year 9 International Leaders host a Vernissage event, and the local press get the chance to make headline puns in their school boy French. Top tip for parents and visitors: if you look at the picture, you can mostly make out what the French is saying!

We use this as one of the ways to handle transition from KS2 to KS3. We have pupils coming in from many different feeder schools, all with different experiences of studying languages. The exhibition is a way to cover important topics and grammar, with a different focus, avoiding going over old ground again. I have written in other posts about how our pupils work towards creative projects for real audiences and the impact this has on learning. The Windmill Exhibition is another example of this. The pupils know that their work will be appreciated by a real audience, and we have to equip them to be able to deliver an impressive piece of French.

Early in Year 7, once we have crunched the phonics, the Art Exhibition unit tackles: shapes, colours, word order, adjectival agreement, and prepositions. Pupils also demand a range of sentence structures to avoid repeating "there is..." Once pupils are changing their sentence from "There is a tree" to "The tree is in front of the moon," they also need to work on indefinite and definite articles. I suppose each individual description is quite simple, but it is the amount of language that we need to embed for each and every pupil to describe their own unique picture independently, that underlies the unit.

We also teach them to talk about the style and how the picture makes them feel. And they write a 3rd person biography of themselves as the artist. We look at videos in French from the Louvre education department and the Palais de Tokyo children's workshops. Some pupils can write independently, others need support from their resources. Similarly with speaking: some can read their description aloud, others can describe it from memory. Others can say something spontaneously about another picture they haven't prepared to talk about in advance.

This kind of project is great for engaging pupils and parents/carers, and driving a curriculum that means we have to equip pupils to meet the challenge of being creative. But it also means that we have a genuine answer to questions like, "What is your department's vision?" or "What do you do for Culture and Personal Development?" We don't have to wonder what to show at Open Evening or what to say if we have "Visitors" asking questions about our Curriculum. I am so pleased the Art Exhibition this year has survived lockdown. We have the Windmill booked for March next year, so long may it continue as part of our curriculum!