Working up to a 150 word essay.

I love a lesson that comes together easily.  So far on this topic....

We have learned how to talk about festivals and what we like in the present tense. 

Completed lots of activities using this vocabulary such as this listening:

Learnt how to use the perfect infinitive with sentences such as the following which they had to translate:

Après avoir passé le Réveillon chez mon père, je suis allé voir mes amis.

we then consolidated this with some hidden phrases. 

All very structured stuff but still demanding and requiring students to think and manipulate language. We've done a few little activities such as verb drills that require them to use present, future and perfect tenses and we have spent time learning the imperfect. I tend to expose them to lots of examples before getting into the nitty gritty workings of the language.  Gap-fill examples focus on the topic we are studying to ensure they are working with language they know.  

We have completed a 90 word essay (for AQA board) which again was structured up to a certain extent as I provided starters and examples.  

So, we've covered a lot of content in different ways, repeating and repeating language so that they have had opportunities to build vocabulary including coping with expressing themselves in different tenses.  For this next lesson I want to bring everything together and get them ready for the 150 word essay. 

Here's my year 10 lesson which comes at the end of a series of lessons on festivals.  

Step 1

A quick Quizlet on key vocab we've covered in imperfect tense.

Step 2

Some translating requiring students to move between perfect and imperfect. 

1. When I was younger, I used to go to my grandparents every day but now I don't like it.

2. Yesterday, I went to the cinema and it was fantastic.

3. When I was 10 years old, I used to like being with my family, I was very happy.

Step 3

A lovely essay that I have put into textivate with the English script too.  Students will have plenty of time for this.  I find it is really useful for them to focus on a good model for some time.

Step 4

Take your textivate essay and create a narrow translation out of it.

Obviously, a narrow translation requires students to focus in on detail and all the time they are reading through a good example of a 150 word essay.  The great thing is how easy it is to create the next narrow translation.  Simply take the text on the right and make that your original text.  Get students to change the English text to match the French text.  As a teacher, this takes seconds to do but it will still provide a great challenge for your students.