Story Books in French

 People are asking on Twitter for ideas for the final term of Year 9 when some pupils are and some pupils are not continuing with languages. I am not against the idea of just continuing to teach them as normal right until the end! But here is one project we have done with them with great results.

We get them to work on producing story books in French for local Primary Schools. This works best when they send a form to the Primary class, asking what sort of book they would like, and to specify characters, style of drawing or a theme. In this way, when the completed forms come back, the Primary pupils are commissioning our Year 9s to produce something, and they feel the value of the project.

Before we start, we look at a selection of children's books in French. We look for language we can understand, consider the relationship between text and pictures, and we look for books that use repetition from page to page. Some of these are books they are familiar with translated in to French. Others are original French books. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a great example of a book built around repetition, using the days of the week and different foods.

Here is an example of a Year 9's book, which uses repetition over several pages, with a surprise at the end. This format makes for a very effective story technique; it works well for the Primary pupils being able to read it; and it works well for our pupils being able to write it in the first place.

You can see this example uses language that our pupils will have at their disposal, and they are quite able to write this story for themselves.

The value of the project is that they are realising what French they have learned and that they can use it creatively.

Another pupil's book uses the Four Friends story. It uses the "inviting people out" language that pupils will have studied. Florian suggests going somewhere. Josef and Claude agree it sounds great (Chouette!). Jean-Luc makes an excuse or disagrees. Then Josef and Claude in turn suggest somewhere to go. Each time it is Jean-Luc who says it's "boring". Finally, Jean-Luc says he is going home. The others say, "Chouette" (etc) and go off and have a lovely time without him.

In this post, I wrote about a story on the topic of likes and dislikes in food, with a girl and a hungry monster.

It is possible to take any idea that a pupil comes up with, repeat it through different encounters with different characters, and then put a surprise or a twist at the end.

You can see that we move from working on the French, to spending time creating beautiful books. More recently we have worked on computers to also produce powerpoint stories, including with sound.

We do also use the unit to look at literature, for example exerpts from Le Petit Prince and Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (links to resource on ALL Connect Literature wiki). And also some stories we have created ourselves. It also fits in well with our work on tenses for narration. This one on the right is an example of making a crazy chain of what was happening and what happened next. It was sent to me by a pupil in Year 11 who said it was the exact lesson in Year 9 when the different tenses made sense.

I do have another project in the pipeline. We have ordered a class set of "La rivière à l'envers" by Jean-Claude Mourlevat. It is a novel often set for pupils in France to read over the summer before starting secondary school. In fact, it is two novels, Tomek and Hannah, which both tell the same story but from the point of view of the two characters. Tomek is in 3rd person and in the past historic. Hannah is in the first person and in the perfect. There is also a version in BD. It is set in an imaginary world, but it's a French imaginary world, with references to areas of France and Francophone countries.

My idea is to record myself talking through a passage (example here from a different book). Then I can ask the pupils to to read silently all the pages we've looked at, or read while listening to the audio book, or try to read ahead. There is also the possibility of once we have read an episode from Tomek, asking them to read the same events from Hannah's point of view. I have tried out a couple of pages already with a Year 8 class, and it's a lovely story, written with humour and warmth.

I am glad I've got this post to sit next to the one from yesterday, wondering if our KS3 curriculum has to change. A much better start to the weekend. Hope it's made you feel the same!