In French this half-term, Year 1 have been reading the story of ‘Monsieur Pépin et le Moulin’ (‘Mr Pépin and the Windmill.’) This is an ‘authentic’ text, in that it is written for ‘real’ French children, not foreign learners. First Year 1 learned the key vocabulary along with actions (here the children are doing lots of the actions). The children also started learning a traditional French nursery rhyme, ‘Meunier, tu dors,’ about a miller who is asleep when he should be stopping his windmill from going too quickly!
Then the children were introduced to simple sentences by putting ‘Voici’ in front of each word (parents, ask your children what this means if you don’t know!) This challenges the children to think of two ideas together. Finally they were read the story from a powerpoint, and they joined in with reading the text too. The children saw that French has a lot of silent letters!
After half-term Year 1 will be preparing to read a new story.
