Longest Sentence or Bust!

 My normal approach to Open Evening is to showcase examples of creative and communicative outcomes in our curriculum like the Year 7 French Art Exhibition. This year, on Monday lesson 2 I was told I needed a more exciting activity for Open Evening on Thursday. By the time the International Leaders met at lunchtime, I'd made one: World's Longest French Sentence or Bust!

These are not dice. They only have four faces with French on, not six. And you don't roll them. You spin them. Skillfully between two index fingers. The International Leaders stand in a row as a human fruit machine. And they invite the Year 6 pupils to make the World's Longest French Sentence. With the warning that if you carry on too long, it will say something nonsensical and you will be out!

The boxes are always spun in order. So you can see the sides facing the punter currently say, I don't like to visit a castle with my family but... And the sentence will always be grammatically correct. The Year 6 pupils say when they want each International Leader in turn to stop spinning.

The conjunction on the end sends you back to the first box to go round again. So you could end up with, I don't like to visit a castle with my family but I love to swim in the sea in France and I like to eat snails in a hotel but I prefer to take photos in Paris...

As you build the sentence, the International Leaders read it to you in their beautiful French. And translate it into English. And another International Leader writes it up on the whiteboard in their beautiful handwriting. Before each spin they give you the chance to decide whether to stick or twist. Because you might up saying, I like to take photos on the beach with my family but I don't like to take photos on the beach with my family. The most common way of going Bust was ...and I like to swim in the sea in Paris. I must say the International Leaders were very strict about what they considered an incoherent sentence. Even so, the record was a 40 word sentence.

There were others who managed more than 40 words but at around the 45 word mark they went bust and were erased from the board. Sadly I didn't get a photo of the winning sentence so you will have to imagine it in all its beauty. If you were going to do this activity for your own Open Evening, you could issue little cards to say, "I took part in..." and take away a little certificate with your score.

It was fun to take part in, fun to watch and simple to run. Having said that, I don't think it would have been any of those things had we not had an excellent team of International Leaders making it fun and professionally run. Parents liked the way you could produce something impressive from simple building blocks. I was impressed with the Year 9s' fluent pronunciation, confident translation and tidy board writing. The element of competition and jeopardy was also an attraction. By comparison, nobody went on the gimkit game on the board all evening!

Would I use it in class? Yes, but not with these boxes for spinners. We already do a lot of work that starts with creating randomised grammatically correct sentences. This post talks about how randomisation is one step in getting pupils to confidently produce longer answers in French. And then moving on to the task of curating meaning and coherence. This is an important message in our curriculum: saying things in French isn't hard. What we work on is making what we say more coherent, developed, personal, expressive.

So instead of sets of spinning boxes, you could play the same stick, twist or bust game with a Keep Talking sheet or a Dice Game sheet. I would probably also get pupils to write down their answers in felt tip on the table - you want them to write quickly without worrying about neatness, without the writing getting in the way of the speedy generation of multiple sentences. And erasing any that go wrong. You could ask them to do the activity without writing the words down. But then the job of remembering 40+ word sentences and assessing them for internal consistency becomes a task in itself!