Making Meaningful Links on Remembrance Day

With Remembrance Day coming up, now is the perfect time to start thinking about how to mark the occasion. Many of our Network Schools, they choose to remember by focusing on the battlefields, and this naturally hands itself to links with French, both in terms of language learning and cultural awareness.

‘Les Poilus’ People Pillar Poems

Our native French speaker Associate Teacher, Steph Pierre, created a complete lesson PowerPoint which network members will have access to under Seasonal Specials Autumn 2.

Take a look at this example poem – get your class to look up the highlighted adjectives in bilingual dictionaries so that they can understand the poem about the soldier.

Then, use this as a gap filler exercise to create your own poems. Using bilingual dictionaries, they can create their own Armistice poem.

For the final step, decorate this template and write out the poem onto it. Together as a class, you will have created an army of soldiers with an army of poems to match.

Fields of Emotion

During a discussion on France and the battlefields, why not try to incorporate some language learning? Show the class Google Earth images of Normandie and Picardie, as well as cities such as Amiens so they can picture the areas where the history of World War One took place.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3Eau4XFBqg?wmode=opaque]

Videos like this one are another great way of showing what life was like during the war, with a nice focus on the French people whose lives were much closer to the front lines. Ask the class what it must have been like at the time to be living in the north east of France, whether in a city or the countryside; what would it have been like to be a child, mother or a soldier? What emotions would they have felt, and as an extension how do these link to the people who are currently living through wars throughout the world?

For the activity, ask the class to write down nouns and adjectives which describe these emotions you have discussed, and then get them in pairs to look up these words in bilingual dictionaries. Create four lists of the on the board of these words that the class has collected, divided into four categories: fear, sadness, courage and love and kindness. Use these words to create a ‘mime gallery’ of emotion, by pointing to individual words and asking the class to display an expression or silent action that fits. Then, add in pronunciation of these words alongside the actions to create a performance of emotion.

To finish this activity, show the class La Valse Des Coquelicots – this musical clip is a good way to round off, featuring images of les coquelicots (poppies) and les bleuets (cornflowers), which are symbols of remembrance in France. Using inspiration from these symbols, create a field of emotions with the lists of words gathered earlier. The blue, red and green colours of the fields shown in the video should be reflected in these creations.