Select Page

I bought this book at a car boot sale in France a couple of years ago, and what a find!
Language of text: French
Type of text: picture book
Author or source: Michel Van Zeveren
Intended age of students: Key Stage 1/2
Source reference: 9782211095945
Approaches:
This is the story of animals, in the jungle, fighting over an egg… with many twists!!
As it starts off with a line from a song, “Dans la jungle, terrible jungle…” we can use it as an excuse to sing that line… then later on the original song! (see links at the end)
As soon as the 1st reading, children can join in with “c’est à moi, ça!” and will enjoy doing so. On second reading they can also join in with the onomatopoeia. Later on they will probably want to perform the story in small groups (inc a narrator) as the language is simple.
Rationale:
This story will lead to singing and discussions (one could be about animal that can come out of eggs and reminds me of a Barbapapa story called “l’oeuf”) as well as being a lot of fun to share and exploit with the children.
Outcomes:
The children could be challenged to think of adjectives in English to describe how the different animals are feeling at different stages; then they can develop their dictionary skills by looking up those adjectives in French and writing sentences like “la grenouille est contente”.
The children could also write their own ending of the story eg le crocodile mange la grenouille.
Topics or themes:
jungle animals; onomatopoeia; sharing
Grammar:
possessive pronouns; -er verbs; punctuation in French (have they seen those inverted commas before?)
How much time required:
1-2 lessons

To sing the original song, here is a version of it with subtitles then here is a karaoke version.

There are resources to help you exploit this story here and on the l’école des loisirs site here as well as a very cute animation of the story by children here.
You can find out more about the author and other books he has written here.