From Kate
Bonjour à toutes et à tous! A good day to all!
First we say BRAVO to the grade 6 students who participated in the concours Alliance française at the end of second term. Each bravely recited a French poem to two listeners. Eleven schools sent representatives and Raban’s recitation was considered the best so he received a book at the presentation evening and Henry and Nicholas will receive mention honorable certificates.
Meanwhile, lucky Harry and Sophie are enjoying being in Paris where they are using their French, especially to buy icecreams. Now how can the rest of us practise our French? We have some more bilingual books in our library to share at home or you can ask to borrow some of my books with a pretty s’il vous plaît. There are more and more resources online that are useful, including languages online activities organised by the Victorian Education Department. Then there are Youtube clips, which may need to be checked out by an adult first but there are many episodes of children’s programmes from France available, some with subtitles. Look for characters such as Tchoupi, Trotro l’âne, Petit ours brun or Barbapapa.
There are lots of fun songs that practise the basics like days of the week and colours and one of my favourite performers is Alain le Lait. Many of the Biggies can sing along with substantial parts of the songs of the French group Kids United and for younger students Skye drew my attention to ABC iview’s gorgeous series of folk songs in French, called “My little songs”, complètement adorable!
Now, wearing my other hat...
Last term, having covered many different forms of verse, I asked students to invent a form of their own: to develop a set of guidelines to follow and to give it a title. As usual I tried this myself and it is not at all as straightforward as it sounds, my Katiesept still needs tweaking.
One of the most successful forms was a “Loom string” created by Akira. Her rules are:
- first line: adjective
- second line: adjective verb
- third line: adjective noun verb
- last line: anything anything
- and no word may be repeated.
So this term we have looked at examples of loom strings and each tried to write one, although Gabi was inspired to string several together. Some examples are in the sidebar.
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