Resource

Class

This resource could be used with Primary 3 for a reading activity as the vocabulary is fairly simple and there is no need for knowledge of complex grammar required when deciphering full sentences.

Questions

These are some key questions a teacher could ask the ask the class to determine their level of understanding regarding the general meaning and then the specific details of the text:

1. Do you know what this is?
2. Discuss the layout of this text?
3. How do the numbers help you understand what this is?
4. Do you recognise any of these words?
5. Could you use your knowledge of English to predict what some of these words might mean?

Potential Difficulties and Differentiation

1. There are no pictures in this text and so children are unable to associate the vocabulary to an image, which often helps with the memorisation process.  Adding some images to this text would differentiate it to make it slightly easier.
2. The nouns in the text are accompanied by an article, which is necessary in French, but may be difficult for the children to comprehend.  Before this text is introduced, the children must have the grammatical knowledge about articles in French and be aware of genders in French and so I would differentiate by scaffolding.
3. This is quite a lot of new vocabulary introduced in this one text.  The desirable amount of vocabulary to introduce at one time is around seven new words, therefore, some learners may require the text to be reduced in size so they can focus on learning new vocabulary effectively.  This text is structured in a way that one section could be the focus of one lesson.

Activities

Comprehension Questions:  These questions would be posed in English and would assess the level of understanding about the new vocabulary.  The questions would be centred on the numbers in the text (e.g How much is the fish? Which two items add up to £4?) which is also incorporating elements of Mathematics as well as encouraging the use of problem solving skills.

Create a French Menu:  The learners would use this particular text as a model to create their own menu.  They could follow a specific design brief when creating the menu, such as, the menu is for a healthy eating restaurant, which has potential cross-curricular links to Health and Wellbeing.  More advanced learners may be curious to learn more foods for their menu, which could be facilitated by encouraging dictionary work to complete the activity.