'Juggling' with colours

Our theme this year, for European Day of Languages, was:

 ‘ A grand day out’: Let’s go on a trip to France, to Paris…..What might we see? What might we do?

The idea was to join in the street acts/performers we might come across when visiting Paris such as mimes, jugglers, music, etc.  It was our way of celebrating learning French and learning about France. You can read more about it on Janet’s blog.

An activity that went down really well was ‘juggling’ with colours  - it required hardly any preparation and did capture children’s imagination.

Jayne (@DewsnipJayne) – a fellow JLN Associate French/Spanish teacher – suggested introducing the colours as ‘blobs’ of colour to make them look like juggling balls. Here is my take on her idea!  

First, I asked the children to juggle with pretend balls.

Whilst juggling I introduced the colours (‘the balls’) one by one: rouge….bleu…vert…

After introducing all the colours we spend a couple of minutes reviewing pronunciation, checking we understood all the colours, etc.

Then we started juggling again, we choose 2 colours : bleu/vert – and started juggling with the 2 colours, slowly then faster, we added a 3^rd colour and continued in the same manner. We repeated this with other colours adding more and more until we had all the colours.

Finally, in pairs, the children had a go at choosing which colours to juggle with and in which order, doing ‘tricks’, fast or slow, etc.  

It went down really well with Y2, Y3 and Y4, whether new to this vocabulary or as a revisiting activity.

Et voila!  Another way to introduce/revise colours in your lessons ! What do you think?