Look at the tshirts awarded in the Tour de France - explain that the tshirts are awarded for the fastest cyclist up a mountain, the fastest on the road, the person who wins the most races during the tour etc.

Discuss in English what the "most" really tellls us- it means that on this tour no one can do better in that particular race or on the whole tour.

Share le maillot jaune with the class

Take a look at how to form the superlative in the target language!

It's a good activity at the end of Year 5 or Yerar 6 and would work well in KS3 Year 7 too.

Search for characteristics

Ask the class to help you to find adjectives in the bilingual dictionary that describe "positive " qualities in a person (e.g helpful, kind, funny, friendly, supportive,organised, tidy, sporty etc)

Take vote

Give out card yellow tshirts as voting cards - one per child.

Ask the class to take a vote on the most important characteristic they have found in the list of adjectives you have compiled if ..... they needed help learning something / wanted to be cheered up / wanted someone to keep them company etc

Now take a vote on which four characteristics have been most important in your class this week/ this half term/ this term/ this year?

Who is the most .....?

Practise with the children creating the superlative of the adjective. for "the most organised boy" / " the most organised girl" ,"the most creative boy " "the most creative girl etc - the tidiest , the most helpful, the kindest.

Can the children spot the changes when we are describing a boy and when we are describing a girl?

Design your class tshirts

Ask the class to design a tshirt to award to their partner to say what the best quality of this person is.

They must design the tshirt and add the superlative phrase

Our class reward tshirts

Now can your class help you to design reward t-shirts for the duration of the Tour de France?

These can be awarded on a daily basis for the “superlative” people in your class during the Tour de France!

Display the t-shirts with their superlative labels for all to see and add the faces of the children who win these t-shirts one by one.

We can create a class performance poem that shares the flavour and the events of the Tour de France.

(As my Spanish and German teaching colleagues point out there is no reason why this should not be an international focus as some many cyclists participate from across French , Spanish, German and English speaking countries).

First select your poster . For the Tour de France I love the posters from the Crayonfire website of the

Tour de France

I have selected this evocative poster of the Tour de France from this website capturing the moment when the tour passes through Paris

You need to look carefully at the poster you select and decide which themes you can identify in the poster that you have already practised with your pupils. The children must be able to create full sentences - noun, verb, adjective or adverb -to describe what they see and feel in the poster.

In the poster above our Year 5 and Year 6 children will be able to create sentences about the city , the weather, the cyclists' personalities and characteristics , the parts of the body and the cyclists as they race through the city.

Divide the poster into focus areas . Below you can see that I have been able to divide this poster in to four focus areas : weather / city and the famous buildings / cyclists / cyclists,parts of the body and the race.

Gathering the language for our Poster Power Poems Performances

Look carefully at the complete poster with your class and brainstorm the key target language they can think of to describe what they can see.
Record this for the class on a flip chart piece of paper which is laid out as four empty areas as in the poster above.Record the language the children think of in the correct area of the poster.
Working as differentiated ability groups allocate one focus area to each group in the class.
Ask each group to work as team to create a sequence of sentences - one per child in the group- to describe what they can see.Give the group a formula to work with:

NOUN/ VERB/ ADJECTIVE or ADVERB

Creating our Poster Poem Performance Sentences

Working in the groups, ask the children to check that they have used the three components in their sentences (noun, verb, adjective or adverb)
Can they now order the sentences they have created so that they create a powerful description of their part of the picture.
Each child should select a sentence to which they need to add actions and voice (e.g. calm, fast , powerful, cheering, loud, mechanical,tired). You may at this point want to bring the class back together to explore this idea with a sample sentence from each group or a sentence that you have created.
Each group must now order their sentences in to a verse of the class poem

Poster Power Performances

Make sure all the children can see the original poster . Ask them in the syle of the poster to add rhythm and beat to their poem verses that they have created.Each child is responsible for adding this agreed rhythm and beat to his/her sentence.
Now your class can perform their poem together as one whole poem about the Tour de France.

Bring our "Poster Power Poem" to life for a grand finale!

Record each group's poem and performance.
Play the performances to the class in a sequence agreed and organised by the class.

Superlative Tshirts!

Poster Power Poems Tour de France