Instead of moving on (yet) to how the booklet introduces tenses, I want to spend a bit more time on one of the activities from the previous post from the early pages in the booklet.
Pupils look at this version of the Going to the Beach Keep Talking Sheet. It's on its way to building up to the full version, but without any reference to past events at this stage.
For the first activity, the pupils are concentrating on the middle column - activites / verbs in the infinitive. The teacher is going to read out 3 texts. For each one, the pupils listen for any of the activities mentioned and circle them in the middle column of their Keep Talking sheet.
Here's the first text to be read out:
You can see it has four infinitives: walk, look for shells, explore, return home.
The second text only has one infinitve: to play with a ball!
You can see that apart from the choice of infinitive, it is deploying very much the same repertoire of opinions, reasons and if sentences as text 1.
Text three has 8 activities:
Go to the beach, swim in the sea, make sand castles, draw elephants in the sand, go into town, drink something in a café, take photos, see my friends.
Once the pupils have done these as a listening, they turn to the page with the texts and again identify the activities/infinitives in the text. Then as a class they discuss what they think of the 3 different texts. Some of their ideas will be related to the content: whether they can identify with the person's experience. Of course, what I really want is a discussion about the writing: The last one has lots of detail and nice ideas; the second one is too repetitive; the first one is a bit boring; the second one shows what you can do with only one infinitive if you are stuck; the last one turns into a bit of a random list.
There is a "right" answer. The right answer is to carefully choose a limited number of infinitives which go well together to make a coherent paragraph. Like Text 1.
This kind of focus is key to how we teach languages. Our mantra is that it's NOT always about learning more and more French. It is vital to work on how well you can USE the French that you have. There's a strong literacy/oracy imperative here - working on pupils' ability to develop ideas. And it's also central to language-learning. It gives the rationale for re-working the same language. It means everything pupils learn is added to their repertoire with anything new fitting in, and with nothing getting left behind. And it helps create that idea that they have a growing body of language that they can deploy.
So here's the next activity:
Pupils write 3 texts of their own. One with a carefully selected number of infinitives. One with just one infinitive. One with a random list of infinitives. In each case they recycle the same repertoire of language. And what they are working on is thinking ahead, choosing ideas that link well, and developing the coherence of their writing.
This gives us a glimpse into what's to come in the second half of the booklet when we start to introduce tenses. If you have these infinitives, can you see how the answer is going to develop?
go to a theme park go on the roller-coasters eat sweets drink fizzy pop vomit
From focusing on the coherence of answers based on opinions, reasons and if sentences, we are going to move into story telling in a combination of tenses...
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