Display the Presentation: Class commands to remind the children of the command vocabulary that they learnt in the previous lesson, French, Year 3, In a French classroom, Lesson 1: Follow the French teacher.

Presentation: Class commands

Talking in pairs, ask the children to see how many instructions they can recall in one minute.

Play the Pupil video: French phonics: un. Invite the children to practise the sound, watching their partner’s mouth shape and listening to make sure it matches what they can see and hear on the video.

Display slide 1 of the Presentation: Classroom objects to introduce the new vocabulary for this lesson, saying or playing the audio for each item and repeating carefully several times.

Presentation: Classroom objects

Encourage the children to notice how the spelling and sound varies between the words un and une, and explain that these words can be used to indicate the gender of the noun (see Teacher knowledge).

Rehearse the new vocabulary many times over, pointing and repeating from the presentation or using the Resource: Pencil case flashcards.

Practise by playing the following games: noun gender sort, feely bag game, schoolbag race.

For the noun gender sort, move on to slide 2 and encourage volunteers to say one of the items and drag the picture to the masculine or feminine side of the board. Check answers together.

Next, put a feely bag on each table and tell the children these are filled with a selection of items they have just learnt about. Working in their table groups, ask the children to feel the contents of their bag and guess (in French) what they are. Once everyone had a turn, go through the contents of the bags as a class and name each of the items. Give the children some time to repeat the activity, feel what is inside and name the item in French.

For the next activity, the schoolbag race, divide the class into teams and give each team an empty feely bag. Have a selection of the same items from the key vocabulary list on each table. Call out a list of items to be packed. The teams race to find the items, put them in their bag and take their bag up to the front for inspection.  For example, call out:

Dans mon sac, j’ai un crayon, un stylo et une gomme – In my bag, I have a  pencil, a pen and a rubber.

Repeat a few times, making sure that at each inspection, the group can name the item, including whether it needs article un or une.

Divide the class into two teams to play ‘Win, lose or draw’. Invite one player from each team to stand at the front of the class and whisper an item (or show the word on the flash card instead to make it easier).

These players then have to draw the item on a whiteboard and as soon as their teammates recognise it, they put their hand up to name the item in French. The first team to both identify the item and name it in French correctly scores a point. Then, pick new players to do the next drawing.

Keep the cards from the Resource: Pencil case flashcards for the next lesson.

Activity

• Make (or encourage the children to design) labels for different classroom equipment. Do this with other home languages within the class/school, too.
• Use a class French-English dictionary to find other items the children might have in their bags and decide whether they would go in the ‘masculine’ bag or the ‘feminine’ bag.
• Get the children to name items as they use them or put them away at the end of a lesson.
• Use the Pupil videos: Phonemes – Mouth Mechanics accompanying this lesson to practise phonics pronunciation with the children.