I bought this book in the summer of 2021 – I am a big fan of Matthieu Maudet’s work, so if you like this book, do click here to check out others that I have written blogs on!
Language of text: French
Type of text: picture book
Author or source: Matthieu Maudet, published by l’école des loisirs
Intended age of students: Key Stage 1/2
Source reference: 9782211313179
Approaches:
It is a 1st for me: I pre-teach some vocabulary before I read this book! Unless you feel confident that your children know the words “éléphant, parapluie, vélo, oiseau, poule, renard, chaise, crocodile, caillou, ambulance, gâteau au chocolat”… you will need to do the same, or the story will not work so well. A presentation to teach those words is available by clicking here: dans ta tete presentation.
You can then ask the children to try to guess what the story is going to be about, possibly in pairs, and to get some of them to share their ideas. This can be done in English or in French. Will any of them get close to getting it right?
Once the children are confident with recognising the key vocabulary, you can start reading the story and watching their reactions. Basically the author of the book tells us NOT to think of certain things… so of course we end up thinking of them! That’s not all, but you will have to buy the book to find out the different twists and turns. It is such fun!
Once you have enjoyed the story a handful of times, with the children taking part… then they can come up with their own key words in French (maybe again some nouns and a handful of verbs) and start writing their own stories!
Rationale:
I bought this book because it made me smile so much, and I know it will make your children smile too. It is one of those that can be read over and over and over again! It is also simple enough to use with children of different ages. With younger children, you can just learn the nouns from the presentation and enjoy the fun of the story. With older children you can give them the challenge of spotting greetings and other common words (like “merci”) that they should recognise. You can also have great fun with the many onomatopoeia in the text!
Outcomes:
The children will learn from the story being repeated, because they will enjoy it so much.
Older children will be able to practise their dictionary skills as they work on writing their own stilly story in the same format (an animal, an object, an object, an animal, 2 animals, an object, an animal, something that will create an twist, something to celebrate at the end).
Topics or themes:
animals
Grammar:
introduction of the indefinite determiners “un” & “une”, the masculine and the feminine genders
How much time required:
1-2 lessons
You can buy the book on Amazon.co.uk by clicking here.
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Nathalie