J'attendrai le suivant - lesson idea for exploiting a short film

This was the lesson I did this morning with Year 12.

I wanted to do something a little out of the ordinary.

It's the end of term, after all.

The first thing we did was watch the short film, J'attendrai le suivant.



If you'd prefer a subtitled version, there are two on youtube here:
English  subtitles
French subtitles

Then I gave the students a copy of the script and we did a series of exercises to exploit the text.

We've been doing a lot of grammar revision recently, so the first task was to identify verb tenses and highlight them in different colours. There are some good examples of past, present, future, the odd conditional, and even a nice, juicy subjunctive!

Then we did some translation from French to English, paying particular attention to some lovely phrases, like pour se faire poser des lapins

Next we did some translation from English into French (looking at tenses again).

Then we watched the film a second time, creating a timeline of emotions which the woman experiences.
A good excuse to revise adjective agreement.

The penultimate task was to write a short paragraph about how the woman might be feeling, using time phrases and the phrases we've learned to structure an essay.

The final task was for the students to give their opinions about the film and how it made them feel.
To do this, they used the kinds of phrases they've been using to describe the characters in the Maupassant short stories we've studied this year and it also acts as a nice introduction to the film (Les 400 Coups) they'll be studying in Year 13.

Not bad for an hour's work...

Poetry - teaching yourself the past tense.

A while ago, I was asked to plan and deliver an after school French session for some Year 7AGT (Able, Gifted, and Talented) students.

The brief was to get them to do something they wouldn't do in class and something which would be really challenging. 

I had an hour.

I decided to do some poetry. 

Specifically, Jacques Prevert's Déjeuner Du Matin.

So what did I do? 

The first task I gave them was a Tarsia puzzle of the poem. (See Clare Seccombe's Tarsia blogpost here.)

The students had to put the puzzle together. (They had never met the passé composé before.)

The second task was to  explain how to form the passé composé in French.

They had to produce a list of rules. (They did this quite well.)

The third task was "to build" the poem.

The students had never met this poem before. 

They were given the lines of the poem on strips of paper and they had to organise them in the order they thought the lines would appear in the poem.

They then watched Stuart Gorse's Hugo clip to see how close they were:

The final task was to try to work out when the poem was written and what it was about.

They worked really hard and enjoyed themselves.

What more could you want?