Halloween & mini pictures

Following on from last week’s post on numbers and Halloween sweets. I’ve put together a list of simple ideas – if you read my blog you know I like simple ideas – for activities using mini pictures. Mini pictures are one of my favourite tools because you can do so many things with them !

If you’re looking for some Halloween inspired ideas for this last week before half term then you might want to download these mini-pictures: 

Une araignée – a spider

Des bonbons – sweets

Une citrouille – a pumpkin

Un chat noir – a black cat

Un squelette – a skeleton

Un fantôme – a ghost

Below are a few of my favourite games to play with them.

At word level:

• Montrez moi ! (Show me!)

1 picture per person

Call out 1 item then 2 items, etc.

*variation with a 2 sets of cards between 3 : fastest person in each group to pick the pictures and wave it (2 pictures / 3 children > competition !)  

• Stand up bingo

• Quiz quiz swap : Qu’est ce que c’est? C’est…

• Categorising: le/la/les; colours; j’aime/je n’aime pas, etc. or let the children choose the categories

At sentence level:

• Same games with familiar structures such as:

C’est…

Voici…

J’ai…

Je voudrais

J’aime

Je n’aime pas

Pair/table games:

• All cards facing down, 1 player picks a card and hides it from his/her partner who has to guess what it is. If he/she guesses it right he/she takes the card, otherwise the other person keeps it. Swap over. 

• All cards facing down, children play together and take it in turns to say an item of vocab that they think the picture is (they take a guess). They turn the card over and check if they are right the card is then placed facing up, if not they leave it facing down, they continue until all cards are facing up.

Moving on with numbers : from 10 to 20.

 I am starting to look at ways to practice numbers to 20 with Year 2 at Culcheth Primary School. This particular class is now in its second year of learning French and have become very confortable with numbers to 10, so to keep them interested and making progress I’m going for ‘bigger numbers’.  I think that particular class is ready!

This is what I’ve done so far: 

• First, I’m not doing a whole 30 min lesson on numbers I’m treating it as a starter/ a warm up after singing our greeting song and personal information Q&As. So every week I’m doing about 5 minutes.

• Number song:

This song is already in my resources for Upper KS2 and children love it! 

As the children are getting more familiar with it,  I like to pause the song and ask the children what number comes next.

• Counting:

In KS1, we have a focus on ‘Harvest’ time in France and we have been talking about sunflowers and grapes and used it to practice counting, colours, etc.

One of the favourite activity of my classes is to count ‘things’ i.e sunflowers in a field, how many grapes on a bunch?

I ask the class how many we should count. They have to suggest a number in French between 0 and 20 and then they can come and count them out loud (with the class joining in) on the interactive whiteboard, marking them with the pen as they go along, then we continue until we counted all the sunflowers, grapes.

With Halloween coming up I thought we could count sweets, here is a PowerPoint of pictures of sweets you can use - if you like.

I like this approach of constantly revisiting things instead of ticking things off as done plus it means you can make your resources last longer – I’ve used the same picture of a sunflower field for the last 3 lessons!

I’d reckon by Christmas most of the children will be able to understand/ remember their numbers to 20.