Poster Power Poems Tour de France

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 

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Working as differentiated ability groups allocate one focus area to each  group  in  the class. 
4. 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

1. Working in the groups, ask the children to check that they have used the three components in their sentences (noun, verb, adjective or adverb)
2. Can they now order the sentences they have created so that they create a powerful description of their part of the picture.
3. 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.
4. Each group must now order their sentences in to a verse of the class  poem  

Poster Power Performances 

1. 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.
2. 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! 

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