Tag Archives: French

Reading Activity – Menu

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.

 

Immigration

In my school, there were a few children who had recently moved to the area from abroad.  Specifically, in the the CE2 class I was working in there were two young boys who had recently moved to France from countries in North Africa.  The teacher of the class explained to me that both these boys had a very poor level of French when they had first arrived and this was a challenge for both the children and the teachers when they had to communicate with one another.

Due to the pupils’ ages, as upper school pupils, when their classmates studied French Literacy and Grammar, these two boys would work from textbooks aimed at the earlier stages.  This level of differentiation seemed quite difficult for the teacher to manage as the boys needed a lot of her attention.  I also wondered whether this language barrier ever made the boys feel secluded from the rest of the class.  However, due to the teacher’s inability to split her time between her and the class the whole day, the boys took part in other lessons with the whole class in other curricular subjects.  This meant that even over the short period that I was in the class, I noticed how much more they had integrated into the classroom environment and were now managing to communicate with their classmates much more confidently.

Immigration is becoming more of a recurring them across Europe and so I feel as though witnessing firsthand how children from other countries with language difficulties are accommodated for was valuable for me in the future.  It was also nice to see how the current political climate regarding immigration in France, which is met with some hostility, did not seem to filter into the school and that these children were not hindered by their cultural differences.

Further Learning

Throughout my time on placement, I have learnt a lot about language teaching, specifically teaching a foreign language.  Whilst observing lessons, the teachers advocated using only English in their English lessons, which required some degree of self confidence from them in their abilities.  I think that self confidence is the key limitation for me when I speak French, as I lack the confidence to practice my speaking skills aloud.  Continuing with my own self-study of French using different resources and building on my vocabulary will help me develop more confidence so that I can execute some of the teaching techniques I observed from the teachers on placement.  I am also taking part in the Modern Languages module next year, which when partnered with further reading, will help me develop a more academic and theoretical knowledge of the techniques I saw.

From a personal and professional perspective, I also feel as though this placement has helped me to become more communicative, as the language barrier between me and the teachers meant that I received little guidance from them regarding lesson plans, resources, assessment etc and work a lot harder to express myself and my ideas.  This was very different from the one on one support I received from my teacher in first year and so I had trust in my own teaching ability a lot more, relying a lot less on constant reassurance.  I think this was an important step for me to have taken, as by the end of my placement, I was communicating with all the staff and sharing my ideas with them rather than waiting for them to approach me.  I would like to continue to develop, as I think it will make me a more valuable and integrated member of a team when in school.  During lectures, I am often a person who lacks the confidence to share their thoughts and ideas with the group, therefore, if I work on being a more contributive member in a group of my peers, it will help me build upon the skills and traits I have began to engage with during this placement.

Week 6

Monday

This morning, I spent time observing in the CE1 class, which was my first time in this classroom. In terms of the layout of the classroom and structure of the timetable on a Monday morning, it is very similar to the other classes in the school; they have the same whiteboard and projector system at the front of the class where the teacher conducts most of her lessons from, they have desk layout of pairs and rows and they have small areas, such as a library and a sink. They also focus a large majority of the morning on French and Maths. However, there was one new activity that I picked up on in the class, which I thought was a nice addition to the day. In the back corner of the room, there is a small table with a box and pieces of coloured card on it. In the box, the pupils can put in any thoughts and ideas they have that they want to be heard by the whole class. The teacher then takes the box to her desk daily and reads out these cards, which are colour coded by content, to the rest of the class for evaluation.

I think that this is a nice addition to the daily routine of the class, and the children have now become accustomed to the protocol and now know that the teacher expects them to share their opinions to then be discussed democratically as a class, rather than shouting out their thoughts when they feel like it. It is important that a teacher sets clear expectations for the children so that they learn to behave in such a manner from the beginning and that they behave in this way consistently. Stronge (2018) points out that effective teachers are those who know how important a role each child plays in the classroom, and therefore involves them in setting the expectations for the classroom. I feel as though this teacher has achieved this through her methods and it is certainly a method of behaviour and classroom management that I will try in the future.

Tuesday

This week, the weather is meant to improve significantly, and so I am curious to see whether the teachers will incorporate the outdoors into any of their lessons. Today, I took part in a sports session, which was outdoors at the local sports centre. I was working with the CE1 class, their teacher and a support teacher on some parachute and ball games. I had heard from the teacher that this class was quite challenging in terms of their behaviour, which is something I did pick up on whilst I was with them as they were very easily distracted from the task, which would quickly escalate to disruptions. This happened more and more as the tasks set by the teacher became increasingly more difficult, which the teacher was also aware of. Though, she had ways of dealing with this, one method was for her to remove a particularly disruptive child from the activity completely for a short period of time, then allowing them to return after they had settled again. When the whole class was beginning to lose focus, the teacher would have them drop everything they were doing, run to one side of the field and back again. This short burst of energy released seemed to refocus many of the children and they were ready to listen again. This session was, therefore, valuable for me pedagogically, as controlling a class in large open space is something that I have been worried about before, and so being able to observe different ways that the teacher was able to command the space was very useful for my professional development.

For the games, the teacher had a booklet that she worked from, many of which were simple games, but some required quite a bit of explaining and demonstration. The teacher had clearly planned these activities in advance, but, because I joined the class for the session today, she quickly adapted the activities to incorporate some English. For example, one of the activities required the children to roll a ball around the edge of the parachute, and then when I said a colour they had to work together to get the ball to stop on that colour. It was nice to see how easy it was to incorporate some English into a sports session, which made me consider some games that I could play in Scotland that incorporate basic French, so that the vocabulary is becoming a part of the children’s daily routine.

Wednesday

Today, I was out of school because we had a group meeting with Nina to mark our placement coming to an end. This was a 45-minute session in her office, where we reflected upon and evaluated our time in our schools over the past six weeks. We mainly discussed what we had learned from our experience, which led to the realisation that school in France is quite different to school in Scotland. One thing we all agreed on was that behaviour management is a lot sterner in France than in Scotland, which seems to have advantages, as the children are very respectful towards the teacher and other staff in the school, including me.

Nina was also keen to hear whether we had enjoyed the experience, which I had, though I did share with her that I was disappointed that I had not had more opportunities to teach the children, as there are some classes that I had not taught in the school and there were a lot of days where I could not participate because the teacher was not teaching English that day. I told her honestly that I felt as though my low level of French had held me back at that particular school because I had struggled to negotiate plans and teaching time with the teachers. She took this feedback from me on board and explained how this surprised her because I was there to teach English and that my expertise as a native English teacher should have been exploited more. However, I cannot argue that I have not learnt a lot about teaching styles, language and pedagogy during my six weeks, all of which is valuable knowledge for my future career that I am delighted to have gained.

Lastly, Nina finished the session by suggesting that in the future, if we ever wanted to make a connection between our current school and a school in France for educational purposes that we shouldn’t hesitate to connect her in the future. Having a connection like this is amazing and will be of great value when I teach in the future, and it would not have been possible if I had not taken this big step out of my comfort zone and come to France for my Learning from Life Placement.

After the meeting had finished, we visited the local bookshop in the centre of town, which had

French Stories

lots of children’s books in French. After being asked to read, “The Three Bears” in the CP/CE1 class last week, I was inspired to buy a French book that I could use when teaching French in a Scottish school. After spending some time searching the shelves, I found three great books. One of the books was specifically about colour and so could be used in the early years as an introduction to the topic. The other two were classic stories that the children would know in English, which were, “The Gruffalo” and “Little Red Riding Hood”. The language in the last two books is slightly more advanced, but the children will know the stories well and so should be able to follow them, similar to the children in my class last week with the book I read. Plus, I will need to read these books to my class, and so this is a personal goal for me to practice my French so that I am able to read the book aloud in the future.

Thursday

Today, I did a follow up lesson with CP/CE1 on school uniform and clothes. This was a 30-minute lesson consisting of four main activities. I began the lesson by revisiting the PowerPoint from before, which had all the items of clothing and the name of it in French and English. As I was going through the PowerPoint, I followed the same protocol as before and said the word first then asked them to repeat, with the children showing me that they remembered a lot of the vocabulary as we got nearer the end because they wanted to say it before I said it. Taking on board what the teacher said about extending my time spent on vocabulary, I often asked the children to repeat some of the items of clothing twice or three times, as there are a few words they continually struggle with pronouncing, such as, “trousers” and “shoes”.

Once I was happy that they had recalled the vocabulary from the previous lesson, I moved on to an activity using the flashcards. This activity was, “What is missing?”, where I had each picture flashcard placed on the whiteboard picture-side up, then asked the children to look at the board before closing their eyes, at which point, I would remove one of the flashcards from the board and they had to tell me which one was missing. After a few rounds of this game, I then asked some of the children to come up to the whiteboard and remove a flashcard. After this whole class activity, I had the children work on an individual task using a worksheet I had produced on the school uniform. The worksheet has the outline of the clothes in the school uniform that need coloured in (see Appendix 1).

Completed Worksheet

The aim of this task was for the children to listen to me as I told them what colour to use when colouring in each item of clothing, for example, I would say, “colour in the trousers red”. From this, I was able to see which children had understood what each item was because they would have a sheet filled with clothing items of the correct colours. Equally, the children had the opportunity to practice their knowledge of the colours in English, and some of them even picked up that I had read the colours out in order of the rainbow from the song they had learnt, which was very perceptive. I think that an activity like this was a good assessment method for the class as I received some of the sheets back from the children and they had all managed to follow the instructions. Before doing the lesson, I had considered adding blank captions for each item and then had the children fill these in so that they had a resource sheet with the pictures and the words in their jotter. However, I now realise that this would have been too difficult for this year group as they are just in the earlier stages of writing French and would therefore struggle to spell English words, so I am glad I removed this element and kept the lesson purely focused on listening and talking.

Lastly, I finished the lesson by reading the book the teacher gave me to the class. The book was great because it incorporated all the items of clothing I had previously taught them, as well as including a few extras, which the children could guess from the corresponding pictures. The book was written in short phrases that rhymed, so it was easy for me to read and would have been pleasing for the children to listen to. They also recognised and got excited by the pictures of the animals despite it all being in English, which was great to see.

As a whole, I think the lesson was good, as the children participated in a variety of activities to keep them engaged and occupied for the full lesson. One thing I would criticise is my transitioning between activities as these were quite clumsy and the children became restless. I think this may be partly down to the language barrier, as in Scotland, I would fill the time between handing out sheets with speaking but this is difficult when the children only understand basic English and I do not speak lots of French. As well, the lesson ran slightly longer than I had expected and so if my transitions between activities had been sharper, I would have avoided this issue.

Despite this minor setback, I did think that the lesson was successful and I received good feedback from the teacher regarding my resources and the delivery of the lesson, which I was happy with. Even the children expressed how much they liked my lesson, which was great to hear. I think that this lesson has shown how far I have come over this placement as I was much more confident throughout the lesson and I think this showed in my delivery of the lesson.

Friday

It is the final day of my six-week placement at école Bel-Air and I have returned to the CE2 class. Before the day began, I received my completed “End of Placement Review” from my teacher, which she had filled out. She briefly discussed her answers with me, which I mostly agreed with. I was glad that she thought my lessons were interesting and that she expressed how much the children had enjoyed having me around, as I feel I have bonded with quite a few of the pupils over the past few weeks. The learning points the teacher has provided for me are very helpful and I feel as though I have learnt this and more from observing and practicing teaching. It is a shame to hear that she wouldn’t want to take a student next year as the school is a great school with lovely children, but I do agree that they do not have the time to incorporate a student into their timetable as I struggled to obtain opportunities to teach and I feel as though I have not progressed as much as I would have liked to because of this, but I was glad to hear that they were pleased with what I did do and the issue was not my ability.

To finish off my time at the school, I had the opportunity to teach one last lesson to the CE2 class, which was a continuation of the body parts, which I had done with them the previous week. The opportunity was quite spontaneous as the teacher had planed to do the lesson herself but offered it to me, so I had to quickly review the resources and the plan for the lesson. Luckily, I had thought of this idea before for teaching body parts if I was ever asked to do a follow up lesson, which meant I could jump straight into the lesson. The activity was a worksheet with a circle in the centre. From this, the children had to listen to my instructions in order to create a drawing of a monster. For example, I would say, “draw three heads”, and the pupils had to draw these onto the body outline and this continued until I had said each body part.

As part of this activity, the children were practicing both numbers and body parts in English and, because they are nearing cycle 3 in their learning, I wrote the instructions on the board so that they could see the spelling of the word. The children seemed to manage this task quite well, however, they sometimes struggled with understanding the body part as I was saying the plural of the word, which can sometimes be quite different from the singular, such as feet. Apart from this, the children were showing signs that they were solid on body parts. Having the opportunity to finish my time here by teaching was a nice way to end; especially when I could see how engaged the children were with the lesson.

Reference

Stronge, J.  (2018) Qualities of Effective Teachers.  3rd edn.  Alexandria: ASCD.

Appendix 1 – School Uniform Colour Sheet

Week 5

Monday

As part of a community event, CE2, CM1 and CM2 participated in a race on the grounds of the local sports centre. Each year group had different time slots and competed against other students their age from neighbouring schools. The class I was accompanying, CE2, had their slot at 9:30 or 9:50 depending on which colour category they fell into. In preparation for the race, each class had been participating in practice runs in the school grounds under the coaching of their teachers. The CE2’s, for example, would have to run 1500m on the day, and so the teacher had them practice running this distance in the school grounds so they could work on the time it took them to finish. The practice sessions in school provided many teaching opportunities, a few in particular that I witnessed included: the importance of warming up the body before running and the importance of pace and stamina when running longer distances.

In the days leading up to the race, the children began to record their final times, which were then used to determine whether they would run as a yellow, a blue or a red. When we arrived that the location of the race, the children were directed around the course by the organiser of the event so that they were aware of the course and its boundaries. They then proceeded to pin their running badge identifying their name, school and colour to their shirts in preparation for the race. The yellow group were first to run then the red and blue group.

The whole experience was really good for me. I got to learn more about the responsibilities of a teacher as I was tasked with stopping the traffic to allow the children to cross the road, then later, I was asked to watch over the group who was not running at the time to make sure none of them wandered off etc. These are quite large responsibilities and I was happy to be given these opportunities by the teacher. It was also nice to see how passionate the children were about the race and to see the progress they had made over the past 4 weeks I had been with them.

Tuesday

Today, I asked the CP/CE1 teacher if I could join her in her class today, as I felt that I had been spending a lot of time over the past few weeks in the upper half of the school and I had not observed the earlier stages since the first week, or had the opportunity to teach them yet.

After spending the morning observing French and Maths, I began to recognise some of the differences between the priorities of the teachers at each stage. Particularly in French, this teacher focused a large portion of the time on sounds and phonetics as opposed to grammar, which is heavily pursued in the upper stages. This is quite similar to the norm in Scotland, as, children require a solid foundation in spoken language before moving on to written language.

The teacher explained to me that often children find it difficult to learn to read French, (recent literacy scores) because there is sometimes several ways to write one phonetic sound. For example, “an” and “en” when used in words both sound the same. For this reason, the teacher tends to avoid giving her CPs in the class any texts to read until they are stronger with their phonics. Even the CE1s in the class find reading and writing quite difficult and it is a recurring theme that I have witnessed throughout the school. This perhaps explains why French is given such a large portion of the school curriculum.

In the afternoon, the teacher taught a Maths lesson on right angles where the children had to complete drawing exercises in their workbooks using certain equipment, such as a ruler or a square. The teacher asked me if I could help them with these exercises as they struggle to use the equipment properly. I was able to help some of the children by showing them how to hold the square properly to check for right angles or how to hold the ruler so that their drawings had straight lines. I also explained to one child how all the sides of a square are equal, which prompted her to correct one of her answers. It was nice to have the opportunity to help the children in something other than English and it highlighted to me how Maths is a subject that is universal as I was able to use my knowledge to help these children despite knowing very little French because I could understand the work through the use of shapes and numbers.

After the short break in the afternoon, I was then asked to lead an English lesson on the topic of family. First of all, the teacher had the children sing some English songs that they had learnt to me. The songs were short and catchy, but more importantly, they were repetitive and so the children knew the words very well because they were continually repeating them. The teacher explained to me that because the children are young, she does not let them see the written lyrics before they the words completely off by heart as this can confuse their pronunciation of the words. I like the use of songs for teaching language because they are interactive and engaging for the children. As a teacher of younger pupils, she strongly advocates making language learning a fun experience by using songs, games and stories to teach vocabulary.

For this lesson, the teacher already had a rough plan for the execution and so she provided me with the resources I needed, which included flashcards on family and the bears book, and she also suggested a few games I could play with the flashcards. Out of her suggestions, I decided to play “Tic Tac Toe” with them, where I split the class in half and had them compete against each other as noughts and crosses. The competitive element turned out to be quite successful as the children were focused and engaged in the game because they wanted their team to win. Before beginning the game, I spent a couple of minutes simply revising the different cards by showing the children the picture and asking them what it was. Once the game had started, I invited up team captains to the board to act on behave of their team and listen to which card they wanted them to choose. This helped me see if they understood which card corresponded to the chosen family member.

Afterwards, I read the English storybook the teacher had given me on the three bears. As I was reading the story, I was aware that the children would not fully understand every word, but, like how I have been learning French over the past 4 weeks, they were able to use the context of the pictures to aid their understanding. This is why I would emphasise to them each picture, as well as mimicking the voices of the characters in the book to indicate certain descriptive aspects of their character, such as age and gender.

Overall, today has given me a lot of ideas to consider for when I teach a foreign language in Scotland for future lessons as I can use a lot of what I have learnt. The ideas will be particularly useful for my early years placement next year, and one idea that I really liked was reading a storybook in a foreign language. Therefore, before I leave France, I plan to buy a storybook written in French, which I can use to teach French in the future.

Wednesday

On Wednesdays, I do not often see English being taught at the school because it is only a half day and the teachers like to make sure the focus is on French and Maths in this shorter time frame. This morning, in the CE2 class, the time was roughly split in half between both subjects, making each session about an hour and 20 minutes long. In my opinion, this is quite a long time to focus on just one subject; however, the children today practiced several elements of each subject during this time. In French, they spent a short amount of time writing imaginatively before moving onto reading a text, then finally, deconstructing this text in an effort to improve their spelling and grammar. In Maths, it was similar; the children began with some mental maths, before moving onto written algorithms and finishing with a problem solving worksheet, all of which incorporated addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Thursday

Traces by Florence Hinckel

In preparation for a famous author visiting, the CM2s spent much of today working on their class project. As a class, they have been reading a science fiction novel called, “Traces”, written by Florence Hinckel, which is the story of a young boy who is blamed for a crime that has not yet happened by a computer programme designed to identify future criminals. The class have been working on this novel for several weeks, beginning by reading each chapter and then identifying the key moments of those chapters. Now, the teacher has had them reproduce the book themselves in the form of a comic.

I have observed that an A4 sheet of paper represents each chapter, and so, as a class, they would have practiced their summarising and prioritising skills, as well as practising elements of language throughout, such as speech. Another aspect of the comic is the illustrations to represent the scenes and characters, which is another great teaching point in language about different texts. This type of project is therefore a very well rounded example of the children’s literacy skills.

Friday

In the morning, I taught the CE2 class the parts of the body in English. I began the lesson with a quick warm up activity about the weather, as it was the beginning of the day. I then moved onto the parts of the body. I had been asked to do this lesson in advance by the teacher and so she had provided me with the resources she wanted me to use. She informed me that the children had been introduced to the parts of the body yesterday and had a reference sheet already glued into their jotters. So, today, she wanted me to complete a crossword activity with them where they would use this knowledge.

I began by using the PowerPoint she provided me, which had the different parts of the body on it. I would ask the children, “what is this?” for each picture and then pick a child with their hand up to tell me the answer. After eachpicture had been identified, I had the children repeat the name of the body part after me. Once we had completed all the body parts, I asked the children to stand up and follow my instructions in a similar fashion to “Simon Says”. I then proceeded to ask the class to touch different body parts on themselves, for example, “Can you touch your arm?” As they had just began looking at the English for body parts, they found this a bit more difficult cause there was no picture to help them, and so, after asking each question, I would demonstrate the action as well to ensure they understood.

Next, I moved onto the crossword activity and allowed the class around 5 to 10 minutes to complete it on their own, after I had explained the task using a mixture of French and English. As they were completing the activity, I made my way around the classroom to observe their progress and ended up helping a few children. One child, in particular, was rather confused between the hand and the finger. Helping the child was a bit more difficult as I had to use more French than I am confident in, but I was able to establish that he understood what the body part was in French and so I directed him to his previous sheet of the body to help him realise his mistake.

I concluded the lesson by going over the sheet with the whole class on the whiteboard and filling in the correct answers for them. Most of the children seemed to be getting most if not all the answers correct, which was a good indicator that they understood the vocabulary well. The next step for them would be more revision and repetition of the new vocabulary so that, eventually, they are not relying on worksheets and wall displays to help them remember.

In the afternoon, I continued to teach a different class about school in Scotland. The class I was teaching was the CP/CE1 class that I had done family with earlier in the week, though this was my first time teaching this class my own content and so I had to adapt my resources for their age and stage (see Appendix 1). The teacher had already told me that she aims for shorter lessons that are less content heavy when she teaches English because they are young. I, therefore, took this comment from her into account when planning for today and decided that I should just focus on one aspect of School in Scotland, the school uniform. I also took some inspiration from the resources I was given and the lesson that I did on Tuesday by producing my own flashcards of the vocabulary for this topic.

When teaching the lesson, I approached it in a similar way to before by using my PowerPoint I had produced to go through each item of clothing, explaining what it is and asking the children to repeat the word after me. After the children had repeated the vocabulary several times and I was happy with their progress, I decided to do something similar to the activity I did this morning. I asked the children, “raise your hand if you are wearing…?” This was quite ambitious considering the difficulty I had faced executing this task this morning, however, I felt as though the lesson required something more interactive and I have observed over the past week that this class is very good at picking up new content fast. The task was met with some difficulty, especially for the CPs, however, the repetitive nature of the activity meant that the children began to catch on towards the end.

School Uniform Flashcards

I then decided to conclude the session with a game using the clothing flashcards I had made. It was a memory game that the teacher had suggested to me as she had used it before, where the children would turn over two of the overturned flashcards on the whiteboard at a time in an attempt to find a pair of a word and its picture. The game was much easier to explain because the children had a prior knowledge of the format and aim of the game, however, one thing they did struggle with was if they turned over a card with a word on it rather than a picture, they struggled to the read the word despite having a knowledge of the word and not struggling to identify the item of clothing if it was a card with a picture. This highlighted to me how much easier the children do find listening and talking inEnglish as opposed to reading and writing, as they knew all the names of the clothing, but because of their age, they lacked the skills and confidence to read English.

Though, overall, the lesson worked well, the children were engaged and I was confident that they had understood and took on board the new vocabulary I had introduced to them. Now, they just have to continually practice saying these words on a regular basis. I have plans to go back to the class next week fora follow up lesson, where I will revisit the vocabulary and play another game with them. This teacherwas particularly good at giving me feedback as she suggested to me that next time I could perhaps spend even more time simply practicing the vocabulary before moving onto the games. I plan to take this feedback on board and play 

 

Hippo Has A Hat by Julia Donaldson and Nick Sharratt

around with the vocabulary more as a whole class using the larger pictures on the PowerPoint. She also gave me an English book she had on clothing to look at over the weekend, which was very helpful.

 

 

I feel that this week, having the opportunity to teach two lessons in one day has been great for improving my organisational skills, which were what I identified at the beginning of placement as something that I wanted to gain more of. Having the opportunity to produce and use my own resources is also aiding these skills as producing these resources requires a lot of thought and preparation in advance.

Appendix 1 – School Uniform

Week 4

Tuesday

This week, Tuesday was the first day of the school week as yesterday was a public holiday for Easter Monday. I spent the day in the CE2/CM1 class, where I observed lessons in French, Maths and History. For French, they had to do dictation exercise, which I have noticed is quite common in France for teaching grammar and language rules.

As I was observing the Maths lesson, I noticed that the teacher was teaching two different lessons using two separate whiteboards to a class split completely down the middle. I assume that this was due to the two different age groups present in the classroom, however, this is the first sign of differentiated learning I have seen in this school. As I observed the lesson, I noticed that there were a few pupils struggling to keep up with the pace of the lesson and a few racing ahead in their understanding.

When the lesson had finished, I asked the teacher about something I had noticed on the board: letters on the corner of each board resembling initials. She informed me that this told the children what jotter they should be using to do their work; for example, the board had the letters “CB” on it, which stands for Cahier de Brouillon. When I looked up the English for this in my dictionary, I discovered that it meant, “rough workbook/jotter”, and so this specific jotter, which I have seen before in other classrooms is used for different subjects, such as Maths or French, and it encourages the children to show how they have worked something out without constricting them to be neat and tidy.

After lunch, I witnessed a good example of behaviour management from the teacher following an incident in the playground. Although I was not fully able to understand what the incident entailed, I did understand how the teacher dealt with the issue, as she used similar protocol I had read about in theory. First, she heard the story of what had happened from one child’s perspective and then again but from another child’s perspective. The technique used by the teacher here could be categorised as conflict mediation, where the teacher, as a third party, guides the two children in conflict towards a resolution. Gartrell (2013, p351) describes the teacher’s role, as, “making sure both parties are equal contributors to a peaceful settlement”, which, in this instance, she did by allowing each child an equal opportunity to voice their opinion. Through this, the classroom atmosphere feels more democratic and fair for all, which is a key value I have witnessed throughout this school.

Wednesday

As part of a community initiative, the police visited the school today to teach some of the older pupils how to ride a bike safely in the street. Their safety course included breaking responsively, using their arms to signal which direction they wanted to turn and weaving the bike in and out of the cones. Not only does this opportunity highlight the place of the school as a member of the wider “La Chapelle St Mesmin” community, it also highlights a clear cultural difference between France and Scotland. In Scotland, children are often spoken to by the emergency services about issues of public safety, such as crossing the road or the dangers of fire, but learning to ride a bike safely is not something that is consolidated upon in school.

Thursday

Today, I was given the opportunity to do a follow up lesson with CE2 about School in Scotland. Last time, I did not have the opportunity to hand out my worksheets to the children and so this time we filled them out together. I thought this way of doing it was better than giving them the sheets first time round as it meant that more attention could be put to completing the sheets properly. Plus, it was good from an assessment perspective to see how much the children had remembered from the previous lesson, which was quite a lot. I began with the timetable sheet, which I mirrored on the whiteboard using the answers provided to me by the children.

Next, I moved onto the school uniform sheet and went through the vocabulary for this again through asking, “what is this?” then receiving an answer and finally asking the children to repeat the word after me to practice the correct pronunciation. As this sheet was more of a revision sheet than a worksheet, I tasked the children with working in pairs to test each other on the vocabulary, where one showed the other a picture of the clothing and the other had to successfully name that piece of clothing without looking at the caption. Throughout this, I walked around the classroom and encouraged them to use their whiteboards to try and write down their answers. As I was making my way around the classroom, I noticed one girl was sitting alone and did not have a partner for the task so I became her partner and tested her on the items of clothing. This highlighted to me how important it is to continually observe your class throughout the lesson, as, if I had stayed at the front of the class I would have missed this, as well as not being able to hear what was being said by the children in case it was wrong.

Friday

Today, I had another opportunity to accompany the CE2 class on a school trip. This time, they were going to a cinema to see a series of short animation films by one director. The cinema that we visited is called, “Cinema Les Carmes” and is situated in the centre of Orléans, so we had to take a tram to get there. Taking the tram was a new experience for me and I found it interesting how the school used public transport when they were going places, the whole experience felt very relaxed and the teacher did not seem phased by taking such a large group of children out of the school to use public transport. The teacher explained to me that the cinema we were going to often hosted events like this one exclusively for school children and many of the films they show have an educational element to them. This is a great resource for the school to have and film and theatre seems to be a large part of the school’s culture as they classes often visit film screenings and plays.

Accompanying us on the trip was a parent of one of the pupils, who was very friendly and took an interest in my role in the school and why I was there. It was great to have this opportunity to speak with another adult and gain more of an insight into the class from her perspective, as she has known many of the children from a young age. I was also grateful that she was so accepting of my presence as I have been worried about how I am perceived by the parents because I don’t speak a lot of French, but I could tell she appreciated my attempts to communicate with her.

Reference

Gartrell, D.  (2013) A Guidance Approach for the Encouraging Classroom.  Boston: Cengage Learning.

Week 1

Tuesday

When I first arrived at my school, école Bel-Air, I was greeted by the “directeur”, who is the equivalent of the Scottish head-teacher. She informed me that for the first week I would be given the opportunity to observe in different classrooms at different levels. The first classroom I visited was “cours préparatoire” or “CP”, which is the equivalent of Primary 1 in Scotland, where the children were 6 years old. The CP classroom was very different from what I expected and very different from an early years classroom in Scotland.

The layout of the classroom was very basic as the children sat in pairs and had their own individual desks that faced the front. I think this is helpful for the children as their desks have a shelf underneath (see images below) containing all their books, jotters and writing materials, which created the sense of an individualised place they are responsible for. Also, the children hardly ever had to leave their desks to retrieve anything as all the resources they needed were in front of them. From an organisational point of view, this is a good set up as it helps to make transitioning periods much smoother. However, as I observed throughout the day, this layout does not facilitate effective paired and group discussions, something which is valued and encouraged in the Scottish classroom, but is lacking here.

A view of a desk, which seats an individual child.

View of the shelf under the desk containing a child’s resources.

Also apparent was the lack of shared spaces in the classroom; the only area present was the library, though this was not set up in a way which encouraged children to go and read, it was merely a display of the books on offer. In Scotland, a lot of emphasis is placed upon play and experience to facilitate learning, but in French classrooms there are no areas for explorative play, no toys present and no carpet area for soft play. The classrooms in this particular school are quite limited for space and I feel as though teachers in Scotland work harder to ensure they are maximising their space and designing their classrooms to fit the contours of the room.

Wednesday

The structure of the school day is very different from the school day in Scotland and this is largely due to the cultural differences between these two countries. For example, the school day is much longer, beginning at half past 8 and ending at half past 4. These longer days mean that the children receive two 15-minute long breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, then lunch, which lasts two hours, beginning at 11:30. In France, Lunch is a very important part of the day, with French sociologist Thibaut de Saint Pol (cited in Ditton, 2016), describing lunch as “an important social time” and “family identity, work teams or friends are built around these moments”. This is a concept that I am struggling to become accustomed to as, in Scotland, lunch is very much viewed as a refuelling step between breakfast and lunch and so, we eat fast and with convenience. As a result, lunch for me feels very long and causes the day to drag. However, one aspect of the French school day I actually prefer is that Wednesdays are a half-day and school finishes at 11:30, the first time I experienced this, which made the lessons that morning more concise. I thought finishing early midweek broke up the week nicely and it was nice to have time after school to be able to do things.

Today was also my first opportunity to talk to the children about themselves and their work. I did find this difficult to do, as my current level of French is quite minimal and vice versa with the children and their level of English. However, I managed to pick out key words and phrases to respond to some of their questions and the children were also very imaginative in their ways of communicating with me, as they drew pictures or pointed at books to express to me what they meant. One thing I loved seeing was the children’s clear curiosity for language, as they were showing me pictures from books and asking me to say what they were in English. By the end of the day, they were attempting to use English to communicate with me. This love of language is something that, as I teacher, I want to foster in my future classroom by introducing foreign languages early on and partnering them with social or picture cues to excite the children.

Thursday

Today, I observed and aided in an English lesson given to the CM1/CM2 class. At the beginning of the day, the children were given the instruction to ask me questions in English. These questions ranged from “What is your name?” and “How old are you?” to “What is your favourite movie?” and “Where do you live?” I knew that what was important was that the children were hearing how I pronounced specific words, and so I made sure to repeat the stem of their question in my answer, for example, if I was asked, “What is your favourite colour?” I would answer, “My favourite colour is…”. This will also help the children to form sentences rather than one-word answers, which was something that the teacher was keen for them to do.

One thing that is very different about teaching a foreign language in France than in Scotland is that in France, the teacher tries to conduct the whole lesson in that foreign language, i.e. English, therefore the instructions are in English as well as the disciplining. I found this was a good way to teach the children as they were fully immersed in the language and they seemed able to follow and understand what the teacher had said with minimal clarification. As instructions are often common phrases in many lessons, the children are constantly exposed to these phrases and the repetition will continually improve their overall understanding. Another important aspect of learning a language is relying on context, which I have found has improved my French over this week.

Most of their lessons throughout the day were very short sessions of French language/literature and Mathematics. I found out today that a large portion of the timetable consists of French and Maths, as children receive French lessons twice a day, a total of 10 hours per week, and they study Maths at least once a day, totalling of 5 hours a week. Other aspects of the school curriculum include a lot of focus on English and Sports. This particular school provides a variety of opportunities for the children to take part in sports taught by specialised instructors, as I accompanied the CP/CM1 class today to the local swimming pool for a swimming lesson.

Another interesting aspect of observation I did today was looking through the different jotters of the pupils. They had several jotters for different subjects; however, one jotter that peaked my interest was a jotter entitled, “Discovering the World”. The jotter was divided into five sections (see picture below), and seemed to equate with Environmental Studies/Social Subjects, which we teach in Scotland, as well as incorporating elements of Maths and Science. The last section, “vivre ensemble”, presented work done on society and ethics, which was the first example I had seen of Religious Education’s replacement in the French curriculum. 

Contents page of the jotter, “Discovering the World”.

An example of work on the French Presidential Elections.

Friday

 As Friday was St Patrick’s Day, I observed the teacher of the CM1/CM2 class teach a lesson on the day and it’s history. The teacher provided a worksheet for the pupils to read, which had passages of text in both French and English. The teacher asked me to read out the English for the children so that they could listen to my pronunciation. She then picked out some of the key vocabulary from the text to form a list in their jotters for future reference. This teacher informed me that because these children are the stage before high school, the teachers at the high school had requested that the children gain more experience of reading and writing in English. This highlighted to me that the rate of progression expected in children learning a foreign language in France is very fast, as when children first begin school, a lot of emphasis is placed on hearing the words not reading the words.

Before this lesson, I hadn’t really witnessed a lot of learning outside of French and Maths, and so this lesson began to feel more similar to the style of teaching practiced in Scotland, specifically the cross-curricular potential, which the teacher fully exploited. Throughout the lesson, the pupils were receiving an immersive experience regarding St Patrick’s Day; they were looking at pictures and they were watching videos, whilst also reading and listening to text in both French and English.

After lunch, I then visited the CE1/CE2 class. This class has two teachers, one of whom is also the head-teacher of the school. With this class, I visited the local sports centre, where they were learning how to fence. To get to the sports centre, we took a short bus journey, which gave me the opportunity to speak with some of the children, mostly them wanting to practice their English on me.

Overall, I have observed a large majority of the classes in the school during this first week and although I would have liked to have observed a bit more English and have been more involved in the lessons, I am hoping that this is something that will happen over the coming weeks.

References

Ditton, H. (2016)  ‘Why do the French take such long lunch breaks?’, The Local (France edn), 28 April.  Available at: https://www.thelocal.fr/20160428/why-do-the-french-take-such-long-lunch-breaks  (Accessed: 14 March 2018).