Every year in French language classes in KS2, especially in UKS2, network schools focus on Armistice and Remembrance in the week of and around the 11 November.
Here are some creative and reflective ways you could spend a lesson focusing both on the target language and events, linking the focus across the curriculum with simple Drama, Art, French and Music activities.
A field of emotions.
Talk with the children about France and their knowledge of where the battlefields of WW1 are situated in the country.
Take a journey by Google Earth to the area of Normandie and Picardie, the forests, fields and cities such as Amiens.
Play part of the video clip below and ask the children to think about what it must have been like at the time to be a child, a mother, a soldier (etcetera), in the cities and countryside of this part of France. What types of emotions must these people have felt? Allow the children to discuss how the soldiers and families from all the countries in WW1 would have had similar emotions You could make the link with the emotions people feel nowadays in wars that are taking place around the world.
Ask the children to write down nouns and adjectives to describe the emotions that they think the people they have just imagined might have felt (e.g. fear, sadness, love, bravery etcetera).
In pairs or groups allow the children time to look up words in bilingual dictionaries in French and to write these down next to the English words.
Create four lists on the board at the front of nouns and adjectives the class has collected: linked to fear, words linked to sadness and words linked to courage, words linked to love and kindness.
Point to individual words and ask the children to create the expression and a silent action that they feel conveys the particular noun or adjective. Create a mime gallery of emotions, with children performing the actions and attempting to read aloud the nouns and adjectives.
Play the clip below and ask the children to listen to the evocative music and to observe closely the field of poppies in the video.
La valse des coquelicots is a music and picture clip of fields of poppies. We celebrate with poppies (les coquelicots) and the blue cornflowers (les bleuets) are also a symbol of remembrance in France.
As a class create a field of emotions using the nouns and adjectives that your class has collected. The field should be created in the colours - green, red and blue - to represent the green fields, the red poppies and the blue cornflowers. The words should be written in the shape of the emotion or feeling the nouns and adjectives evoke and the colour the children associate with this too.
