Sample Lesson 2
La cuisine - The Kitchen
OBJECTIVES:
To correctly identify items in the kitchen.
RESOURCES:
Skoldo French Book Two
La cuisine (PowerPoint) Download La cuisine (PowerPoint) | La cuisine page 01 | École Alouette (YouTube) Links to an external site.
VOCABULARY:
le frigo - the fridge
le micro-ondes - the microwave
le four - the oven
la porte - the door
la machine à laver - the washing machine
la fenêtre - the window
Où est … ? - Where is … ?
Warm Up
Look at the La cuisine PowerPoint. On slide 3, you will see six images and six words. There are a number of things to discuss with your student;
Recognise that ALL words have the article in front - le / la, even though in English we wouldn’t always say ‘the fridge’, in French they do. Next, talk about why some nouns have le in blue and some have la in red (this is because all nouns in French are either masculine or feminine, this is nothing to do with what they mean, it is just a category we put them into and it is essential to know the categories of all nouns if we are going to speak French correctly).
Encourage your student to guess which words are which - there are three which they should be able to guess (le frigo, le micro-ondes and la machine à laver) and three which are harder. Encourage them to talk about how they guessed, this is an essential skill for language learning. Reveal all the answers in the PowerPoint and now talk about the ones they didn’t know, come up with ways you could remember them (a port that a ship comes into is a bit like a door for a boat, there are ‘four’ rings on most cookers - it doesn’t matter what the ways are, it is just important to realise we have to think of ways to remember them).
Think about how to remember if they are masculine or feminine. Here all the feminine words end in ‘e’ (machine, not laver). This is often (but not always!) the case in French.
Main Activity
Identify if you have any of the words around your own kitchen, your student can pretend to be an estate agent, showing you around the kitchen using the word Voici … - Here is ... e.g. Voici le four et voici le frigo etc.
Begin work in Skoldo French Book Two. First write your name, age and the name of your school on page (i). Because this is a Canadian series, at the bottom students are supposed to circle what Level they are in - Level 3 is the equivalent of CM1. Answers to Skoldo Book Two can be found in General Resources.
Show your student the reference pages for colours and letters (les couleurs and l'alphabet français) and have a quick look at the contents page but then move on to page 1. Every page has a title and then a space to write in the date (Nous sommes le - we are the … or today it is … ) so write in the date here. The title page of your PowerPoint has automatically updated French dates so you can copy from there, or, as we learn days and dates, get your child to fill it in.
Go through the language boxes at the top of the page with the vocabulary we have just met. The grammar box shows the articles - le / la / l’ / les - which all mean ‘the’ in English (l’ is used when the noun begins with a vowel, whether it is masculine or feminine).
Watch the La cuisine video and listen to the pronunciation of the word we have learnt, make sure you say them out loud to practise how to say them correctly.
WATCH - La cuisine page 01 | École Alouette (YouTube)
Complete Exercises 1 to 3.
Exercise 4 introduces a new question word - Où ? - Where? Listen to the questions and how they are answered and see if you can work out what they mean - we will be looking at these in future lessons.
Make text cards with all of the words we have learnt today, remembering to include the articles - le / la / l’ / les. Make sure you identify in some way that the word is masculine or feminine. Use blue-tack to stick them to the actual item in your kitchen.
Follow-on Activity
Make sure your student practises the new words every time they use each item in the kitchen, saying it out loud.
Once they are remembering the words well, remove the cards and introduce the question Où est le frigo ? and they respond by pointing to it and saying Voici le frigo. If possible, they can move on to asking you the question.