This French video introduces teachers to a lesson where children begin to explore comparison language, linking directly with their scientific knowledge of the solar system. The session builds on prior work with nouns, articles, and adjectives, focusing on how adjectives agree in gender and number.
year: Year 5
Teacher video: Le Système solaire
This French video introduces teachers to a lesson that links directly with science, using the theme of the solar system. The aim is to encourage children to use their language detective skills by predicting context and making connections with prior knowledge before working with longer texts.
Teacher video: How many? How much?
This French video introduces teachers to a lesson on quantity words and grammar, focusing on the different ways of saying some in French. Building on the previous story, children are encouraged to notice how phrases such as du poulet or de la soupe appear naturally in context before analysing how they work.
Teacher video: Beware the dragon!
This French video introduces teachers to the first unit of Year 5, focusing on developing pupils’ detective skills for tackling unknown vocabulary. Rather than translating word for word, children explore a non-fiction text, identifying features such as cognates, visual clues, and text type to help them infer meaning.
Teacher video: Cause and consequence
This History scheme of work video supports teachers in introducing and developing pupils’ understanding of the concepts of cause and consequence. It explains that causes are the reasons leading up to an event — which may be people, events, or conditions — and that consequences are the direct results of that event. Examples, such as the melting of an ice cream on a hot day, are used to make the concepts accessible and relatable for pupils.
The video outlines the difference between short-term and long-term causes, as well as the need to avoid assuming that just because something happened before an event, it caused it. Similarly, consequences can be short or long term, can trigger further events, and may have a wide-ranging impact on people and places. Teachers are encouraged to ensure pupils have secure knowledge of the event itself — including its name, timing, and key details before analysing causes and consequences. Strategies for developing analytical thinking are shared, such as arranging and categorising causes, evaluating responsibility, and using diagrams like Venn diagrams to sort and compare factors.
Teacher video: Body parts
This French video introduces teachers to using Carroll diagrams as a way to sort and identify nouns by gender and number. Pupils begin with a phonics starter to connect sound and spelling patterns, then move on to spotting masculine, feminine, and plural forms using articles and word endings as clues.
Teacher video: Monster mash-up
This French video introduces teachers to a creative sentence-building activity inspired by Spike Milligan’s playful poetry. Pupils combine animal nouns and body parts to invent fantastical creatures, applying prior learning on gender, liaison, and sentence structure.
Teacher video: About a beast
This French video introduces teachers to a dynamic, movement-based approach for teaching adjectival agreement. Pupils explore how adjectives change according to the gender and number of the nouns they describe, starting with a sorting task to group adjectives into “families” and spot patterns in endings.
Teacher video: Fantastic French beasts
This French video introduces teachers to the final stage of the “Fantastic Beasts” unit, where pupils bring together all the grammatical elements they’ve learned to produce a longer, original text in French. The focus is on modelling from familiar sentence structures rather than encouraging guesswork or over-reliance on dictionaries.
