Dear parent
Just to inform you I will be providing you with an individual report for your child at the end of the academic year 2006/7 as I did for 2005/6 in July 2006.
Some of you will have seen the progress made by your child when you came in to watch them at the end of the autumn term.
The new term always starts with some revision of material learnt during the preceding term as knowledge acquired can be easily forgotten with long gaps of little or no French language input. This revision encapsulated the following subjects: Fruit, vegetables, clothes, expressing feelings of heat, cold, thirst and hunger, how to say I'm wearing and looking at grammatical points such as genders/plurals (le, la, un, une, les & des) and adjectival endings linked to gender and number ...
This term was largely dedicated to learning about different animals in French - namely pets, farm, wild and sea animals...Most of the children are able to name the main animals in each of these four groups...As is customary, the learning process was underpinned through a variety of methods:-
* Worksheets (writing and reading in French)
* Loto games where the children had to name animals picked from a pack in order to place them on their individual cards
* Pictionary - choosing an animal picture for the rest of their team mates to name the animal in French that was being drawn
* How to say what their animal is called and how old it is.
* Song - Le Vieux Jo and Dans l'Océan (Old MacDonald & In the Ocean)
* Jeu du morpion (noughts & crosses) and le pendu (hangman). With the former, the children were given a pictorial noughts & crosses board then put into teams to name the animals accordingly in order to place their nought or cross strategically to win. During the latter, a child would search in his/her folder to find past work containing the written French word for an animal and remember it mentally. The rest of the group in their teams had to then guess the chosen animal using the letters board. This concentrated this children's mind on getting the correct spelling of the animal in French.
* French reading practice through animal stories - each child had the part of an animal and took it in turns to say their lines..
They also continued to increase their number knowledge and most are able to count comfortably to 50 - some to 69. Their numbers were consolidated through bingo games which they loved playing...Through these games children are now quite comfortable dealing with numbers out of sequence.
We started a new topic - la maison - towards the end of term and this will be continued when we return on 10 January.