Pimp My French and Ready Steady French

 Two great activities named after TV shows. And both possibly in search of new names. Pimp my French because Pimp My Ride isn't well known anymore. And is Ready Steady Cook still around? I heard it was making a comeback but news of it hasn't reached this part of the country yet...

Pimp my French did get a mention in an earlier post about changing (a small group of) boys' attitudes to French. In lockdown, it was also an excellent activity for side-stepping Google Translate, because it requires pupils to take a part a text and re-build it using their tool kit of French.

Here you can see an example. The text at the top is repetitive. The sentences are short. It is disorganised. It lacks cultural detail. The customer has brought it in for you to overhaul. Just as in the TV show doing up cars, they do want their original piece of French back. But with a serious upgrade.

Underneath you can see the tool kit of French I want pupils to use. This is not just a good activity to help pupils work on what makes a good piece of French. It is also a powerful metaphor about how to think about your approach to French. Click here for a previous post on metaphors and metacognition.

I give the pupils a "budget" of a certain number of words. I tell them they mustn't go over budget, but the customer will feel short-changed if they are under. Unfortunately in the example below, I think I set the budget too high. They started with 40 words and had to produce 96. So instead of just swapping some parts (j'adore, je peux, to replace the over-use of j'aime), they had to contribute more of their own ideas.

And this is the sort of thing my Year 8 produced:

I like the way they brought in "regarder la lune" - lune is one of our phonics keywords back in Year 7.

Bringing in your own words (as you will have guessed if you know the show) is a key part of Ready Steady French. Pupils have all the normal store cupboard words (very similar to the toolkit above for Pimp My French). And then they have 5 minutes with a dictionary to choose 6 random extra words. I will specify how many verbs, nouns there need to be. Sometimes I get them to then "cook" using their own words. Or sometimes they give the bag of French ingredients to another pupil to use. And they have to make some tasty French out of what they have been given.

I haven't done it since the days of Ainsley Harriott, so I don't know if pupils are familiar with the format. I will give it a try and let you know!