What's behind a book title?

Yesterday I explained how I had been sorting a book shelf and found some non- fiction books in French and considered how I could use these to develop reading and writing in the target language with young learners and make links across the curriculum. Here's the blog post non fiction in the target language and it wonderful links across the curriculum

Well I also found  a whole host of fiction books too that my friend had given me - far too detailed in most instances for  young beginner language learners , but again well loved authentic  story books in the target language.
So I decided that there had to be a way to use these books to inspire our young learners and hence I came upon the idea of "What's behind a book title?"

We will trial this with UKS2 language learners who are Stage 3 or Stage 4 learners (so have been learning languages for a least 2 years or a little more). It will give us chance to encourage them to use bi-lingual dictionaries to independently access languages . 

It will give us chance: 

• to reinforce nouns and the use of definite and indefinite articles when they then write their own sentences with the nouns they find. 
• to allow the children the chance to practise and use adjectives after nouns
• to begin to write full sentences in a short text using verbs in the present  tense .

We will be focusing on using the tiles as stimulus to create descriptions of the key characters or objects mentioned in the titles.I have selected from the group of books I found on my bookshelf - three books that we can use to create descriptions in the first or third person plural or singular.The children will be encourage to use the picture on the title page as visual stimulus  for their preparatory work .

These are the books I am going to use:

This story book's title page will fit in well Autumn term Year 5 or Year 6 and writing a description of a character who is frightened by other monsters.What is the baby minster like? What are the monsters like that he is frightened of ? We will ask the children to write the short text for a Year 4 audience as the texts the year five children write,can then be read with Year 4 ,when Year 4 create their own class  monsters or aliens.To take this full circle ,Year 4 can then look forward  to writing their own descriptions of a frightened monster.

This story's title page fits in well when we look at "all about me " in Year 6 . We can use this to look at characteristics and adjectives to describe types of people. We can create the alter-egos of these two children and  create a two verse poem or rhyme about two naughty characters and two well behaved characters.These poems can then be acted out for a younger KS2  audience before the end of the Summer term.We will be able to look at verbs in the third person plural and there is the potential to use negatives with verbs too. 

This story book title will be a stimulus for a description of exactly what it says on the the page "le plus bel oeuf du monde".When can I see us creating this bullet point list or requirements to be "le plus bel"? ....Just before  Easter in Year 5 as a class display of wanted posters for- yes you guessed it..... "le plus bel oeuf du monde" for the King! There is potential here too for a simple performance as a dialogue between the King and a servant looking for "le plus bel oeuf" ,using questions word phrases such as "where is ...?" "what is ...?"  and giving simple responses with nouns and adjectives.

A framework to work with and support the children for all the books above 

How can we support the children to access and achieve the sentences required to create these outcomes . Well it's simple.

• Provide the children in groups of three or four with the picture of the title page.  
• Glue this to the centre of a piece of paper with four thought bubbles around the outside. 
• Give the children time to collect and record the relevant information in the target language either recalling familiar language or looking up required nouns , adjectives and verbs.
• Ask the children to work together to compose their own short texts, poems, posters etc as  required for the creative learning outcome!