Good starter to get them speaking aloud.

Give the kiddos a foam dice (Amazon, cheap as chips and don’t clatter on the table), roll three times and make silly sentences on whatever topic you’re doing – bonus points if you include Donald Trump/ your head teachers name if you’re a Year 7-8 boy this makes it hilarious apparently…

see if you can guess the tune to sing it to! Even better if you have a toy quacking duck that sings this song when you press its wing you could chuck round the room while singing…

I made these and got them laminated as bookmark sized rainbow strips for more able Year 9 and all GCSE classes. We also have them in our classrooms – I love avocado mnemonic. Also love the students using “si on me demandait mon avis, je dirais que..” in their writing and speaking – it’s an easy way to get more marks for complexity and every possible topic requires an opinion of course.

Sharing the marking codes we use as a department to mark pupils’ books – pupils then green pen the corrections. I find this list is short but enough to cover most mistakes.

I make sure all my Year 9 onwards know their FREE JAM verbs off by heart – first week homework learn the Free Jam mnemonic and what each infinitive verb means. Then they learn the past, present and future in the je form for each one. We use mini whiteboards to test the verbs over and over. Then I set a 40/90/150 word task which I know would use each of the verbs in the 3 tenses – eg – what do you do in your free time, your favourite tv programme, film you saw recently, your future plans.

This is a pronunciation game- I call it Rhubarb because my dad always used to say “rhubarb rhubarb” whenever someone was mumbling. Anyway… you put a text up on the board or printed on a sheet. Put kids in two teams and they have to read aloud a line or two each – perfect pronunciation gets 1pt – if they make a pronunciation mistake the opposite team call out Rhubarb and have to say what they got wrong. All the pupils then record the pronunciation mistakes in the back of their books for reference. For example – this text the key sounds they would get wrong would probably be “sain – san” “jus – joo”

There are some nice resources on describing a painting at the back of studio 1 which I have integrated into our SOW for lower ability Year 8. Doing a odd one out to introduce key vocab, some “deep”listening (more about this later) followed by a See Think Wonder task really helped my Year 8 describe the paintings. See think wonder can be used for any picture and is great for the GCSE photo card prep too, lots my Year 11 said “je me demande si…” in their final exam too! I’ve got lots of French paintings laminated for the kiddos to describe in This way.

So… I bought a set called “Boozy Beer Pong” for £1.99 from Bm Bargains and cut up these little role play prompts and placed in the beer pong cups with a sweetie or three. We then played non boozy beer pong where they had to read out and translate a role play prompt for the other team to answer. Year 11 loved it, but now say they then played real Beer pong as a result … not so good, but they coped really well with the Higher role play, hopefully non boozy beer pong helped!