Seeking sound patterns in French and exploring a poem about days of the week and colours.

The teachers that Emilie and I will be working with tomorrow are teachers who have basic skills in language learning and are looking to enhance their own knowledge of the language and ways to enhance the learning of the children.The activities below are about ...... and  the blog post is intended as notes to the teachers:  

• sound patterns
• looking for matching sound patterns
• encoding text
• reconstructing text
• reading aloud a text

I love this simple days of the week and colours poem that I found on pinterest

Step One 
What is the poem about?
Show the children this blanked out version of the poem:

By concealing any other language can the children identify that the poem is about days and colours? 
What colour do they think that Sunday must be? Take suggestions and reasons why.

Step Two  
Give out to pairs the cut up poem as below:

Can the  children reconstruct the poem in the correct order of the days of the week .Can they decide whether the line........ :

"C'est la joie des enfants" 

goes at the beginning or the end of the poem? 

(Suggest that the poem rhymes so that this will help the children to decide where the line should go).

Which children guessed the correct colour for Sunday?

Step Three

Ask the children to look for sound patterns in the poem:

Send them on an "I" sound hunt and find the words where the words where the identical letter and sound or a matching sound to the "i" sound can be found

Send them on a similar hunt for "ou" and for "an"

Step Four

Ask the children to help you to understand the meaning of the poem and appoint class members as the class dictionary detectives. Give lout five dictionaries to five class detectives and make this a speed game to locate key words and fond the meaning:

My key words in the poem would be : 

tout/clair/se reposer/ vient(venir)/tour/ suit (suivre )/ toujours/ la joie /enfants

Step Five 

Can the class help you to read the poem out building to a happy crescendo on a Sunday because this is "la joie des enfants!"