Fireworks performance poem
Below are the core phrases to the Firework Performance Poem that we have been using in schools in Warrington with our "moving on" learners (so stage two) to explore a simple poem for grammar, to use reading comprehension skills and to develop a spoken performance and our own written poems.We can use it with beginners but then we explore less of the grammar and focus more on the performance.
We use colours, three key present tense verbs, and the phrase "there is" or "there are" with the noun for stars.the poem has two verses and repeats the three verbs and the phrase "there are a lot of stars".
Here is the French version of the poem.:
Bleu
rouge,
jaune,
vert.
Zoum, zoum!
Ils glissent
Ils montent
Ils descendent .
Il y a beaucoup d' étoiles!
Violet,
orange,
or,
argent.
Zoum, zoum!
Ils glissent
Ils montent
Ils descendent .
Il y a beaucoup d' étoiles!
So as you can see it's a very simple poem, but it leads to some interesting discussion:
-
use of colours as adjectives,but written alone and not next to a noun - however you can ask the children to see what happens when they place them with a noun in the target language - especially of you introduce both a masculine and a feminine noun to describe with a colour.
-
colours that look like the english word but sound slightly different
-
colours we may already have met as nouns to (orange/argent/or)
-
silent letters
-
and final silent letter combinations on the verbs
-
meaning of the verbs because they look like an english word e.g montent- mountain/ glissent ( they often think means glisten but then they can see glide when it's explained too!)
-
using picture and colour context to determine meaning of words we aren't sure of - as this is part of a powerpoint where the stars fly in at the end , the colours are written on the correct colour etcetra
We rearrange the colours into alphabetical order or add new colours using the bilingual dictionary
We use the verb examples to look for own verbs with children who have begin to think about verbs and how to change endings and the pattern here is regular with "er" verbs so it's an achievable task for all the class!
We change the ending and think of /look for new plural nouns for the final word- as a surprise for own listeners and readers
And then we prepare our performance - with younger learners it's a class performance with actions and sounds and with older learners then it's a performance with a twist -an added verse of their own.It needs actions and sound of course too!
These activities lead very well in to our physical sentence prompts activities which you can read about here :
And the Spanish version .....? Well here it is :
azul
rojo
amarillo
verde
¡fantástico! ¡ fantástico!
suben
bajan
hay muchas estrellas
violeta
naranja
dorado
plateado
¡fantástico! ¡ fantástico!
suben
bajan
hay muchas estrellas
.