Writing about a celebrity

Keep it simple. The idea is that pupils should be able to do this.

Accents online french.typeit.org

Third person singular (he/she)

il/elle s'appelle

il est grand /elle est grande

il/elle a 30 ans

il/ elle a 2 enfants

il/elle travaille comme

il/ elle aime

il/elle joue

il/ elle habite

son mari her husband

sa femme his wife

ses enfants his/her children

Third person plural (they)

ils s'appellent

ils sont mariés

ils ont 2 enfants

ils habitent

ils aiment

leur maison their house

leurs enfants their children

David Beckham est un footballeur anglais. Il joue pour l'équipe américaine LA Galaxy et il habite aux Etats Unis. Actuellement il joue pour l'AC Milan pour deux mois prêté par le LA Galaxy. Son anniversaire est le deux mai et il a trente-trois ans. Il a les cheveux blonds et les yeux noisette. Il mesure 1.83 m. Il est marié avec Victoria depuis presque dix ans et ils ont trois fils qui s'appellent Brooklyn, Romeo et Cruz. Sa femme est chanteuse. Les Beckham sont très célèbres et riches.

Claire's piece
George est un acteur américain. Il a des maisons en Italie est aux Etats Unis. Il a quarante-sept ans et son anniversaire est le six mai. Il est né à Kentucky aux Etats Unis. Il a une sœur. C’est le fils de Nick Clooney, un célèbre présentateur de télé. Il est devenu célèbre grâce à son rôle du docteur Doug Ross dans la série Urgences puis par une carrière au cinéma. George Clooney est "l'homme vivant le plus sexy". Il est grand et il a les cheveux bruns et gris, les yeux marron et il est très beau.
George a joué dans les films ‘Trois Rois’, Océans 11, 12 et 13 et Burn after Reading. En 2005 il a gagné un Oscar pour le meilleur acteur dans un second rôle dans ‘Syriana’.

24 février - mardi gras, songs

Quelle horreur - pas de courant!

Was surprised to find the car park almost empty. Reason: no power due to generator failing (the candle went out?) and building closed sice 11am - nice of them to let me know. As I was leaving thought to phone Roselyne and we were able to use St John's. Sorry I just missed Lesley. Tried to find you but you had escaped on foot, I believe! St John's was fine but no scones!

We were a bit embarrassed to sing within hearing of other staff but we soon drove them away!

I did Dans mon pays d'Espagne and have uploaded text and pictures files to Shared folder. Working on the audio file!

Rhona had investigated the karaoke site with help of her 10 year old son! He liked ma révolution, roc and caravane.

Lynda went for 10 petites fleurs

listen for pronunciation of six and dix before consonant

Tracy went traditional with sur le pont d'Avignon. There is a nice version on the Early Learning Centre CD French fun £5 in store.

Helen and Vivien chose songs from a pack called Singing French

I liked them a lot!

Ann has prepared a dance which we will do next week!

Homework: write some simple sentences in the third person about a famous person. I will post some examples soon.

Il y a un verre de vin qui m'attend! A plus

CPD for your colleagues

Roselyne has asked me to do further CPD for South Ayrshire. There will be 4 free standing sessions on Thursday in March in St John's at 4- 6pm

5th ICT for ML teachers

12th blogging - the why and the how

19th active learning

26th French pronunciation

They are on the online CPD. No charge.

Pass the word!

mardi dix février

We read our love poems. We played the question game from R Tallaron.  We practised team game language and played fisherman's net (H/O p7) and listen and do number colour team game. En rouge, écrivez le numéro dix etc. Easy to mark! 

We then did some dictionary work looking up English words and talked about the skills needed. KAL -  is it a noun or verb? eg water (plants) What does it really mean? eg love-15 Read all the dictionary entries. Check by cross referencing in French - English 

Here's the link to the millionaire game. You can edit it or start from scratch.

Homework for 2 weeks' time:

Choose a song and teach us it. Suggestions here on my songs site 

and notes on possible strategies in this post 

Remember to post your love poems!

Bonnes vacances!

Get a Stopwatch like this or make your own! At: Online Stopwatch

la Chandeleur

information on Candlemas and a nice illustrated recipe for crêpes here

and in English from Alice Ayel's blog

la Saint Valentin

Poème d'amour
Le quatorze février, c est la Saint Valentin, la fête des amoureux. Pour fêter ce jour on va composer des poèmes d'amour selon cette rubrique - 

Sans toi, je suis un jardin sans fleurs

Sans toi, je suis un lac sans eau

sans = without and it can be followed by a noun with no article eg sans fleurs

you could put comme = like after je suis but I think it sounds better without!

A vous maintenant - postez vos vers en cliquant sur Comments

plus d'infos sur cette fête ici

Joyeuse Saint Valentin - Happy Valentine's Day

Je t'aime - I love you

mardi trois février

We started with traditional song lundi matin

Olivia did the register. Helen can you do next week? Merci à vous

We played Claire and David 's ingenious board game!

I prepared a handout on activities for MLPS and we worked our way through that. This is a work in progress and you can add to the lists roughly divided into Listening and Talking, Reading and Writing. In practice most activities cover at least 2 of the skills.

I also suggested the site journal des enfants and looked at the article on the Obama children
Here is their article on the recent plane crash into the Hudson river
All of these web pages are real, interesting, relevant and not contrived or condescending. They are of course challenging and pupils are not expected to understand everything but gain satisfaction from what they can decipher. I think of it as a puzzle and like detective work.

A site to help you read foreign language pages is lingro. First you copy the url of the web page and then launch lingro, paste it in and select French- English.

Click on any word you don't know and a dictionary pops up with suggestions. Brilliant! Here is what the lion page from africanimo looks like in lingro

Another site I like but we couldn't get into is mon jt quotidien meaning my daily newsreel (jt- journal télévisé). This is a bit like newsround with several short video clips changed every weekday. This is a listening only exercise so is harder - good for you though! There are often quirky stories under the tab insolite
Here are a couple of interesting ones
the parrot
the car that crashed into a church roof

Vokis: If you have emailed me a voki it as not arrived ( I suspect it has been automatically deleted as spam). Can you try resending to my home email kmcmeekin@me.com?

I have uploaded the walking dictation and the chain questions to My Teaching Files in a folder called Shared Work. Some other stuff too in appleworks (mac) only at the moment till I get around to converting it.

Wordle at the last moment we had a quick look at wordle.net (Your browser needs to have Java enabled) You can easily create attractive word displays by simply typing words or pasting in a large amount of text. The most frequently used words appear larger - a bit like a tag cloud. You can play about with the layout and colour scheme. It is free, you don't need to log in. You can save your work to the public gallery. Give it a memorable and unusual title so you can search for it again or you can print it (don't have a black background!) or save as pdf

Here are some examples

another way to say good
to illustrate the "ent" sound

I gave out a sheet on organising team games at the very end. There is a sound file in My teaching files Modules> Audio>jeuxdequipe.mp3 to accompany this if you would like to hear the pronunciation by Laure.
Homework - practise these commands and be prepared to use them next week.
Have a play about in wordle if you want and think of ways you and your pupils could use this. Print your best effort!

A la semaine prochaine!