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Online shopping for vocabulary acquisition

A sure fire winner of a lesson is when you take a class into the computer room to do an online shopping exercise. Our approach was to give our Year 8s (near beginners) a grocery shopping list in English, with a column to complete in French, a quantity to buy and the cost to find. We would use this task near the end of a sequence on food shopping so that pupils are already quite familiar with the vocabulary.

You can tell the class to find the best match possible (because you can never guarantee your worksheet will be up to date) and to get the best value produce.

Tell the class to open a second window with a dictionary like wordreference.com so they can look up meanings quickly.

Depending on the speed of your class, this exercise could take between 40 and 90 minutes. Faster workers can spend more time browsing and you can add an element of competition by giving individuals the challenge of producing the cheapest bill. Incidentally, I would set this as an individual task if facilities allow it.

There is a range of grocery shopping sites; we happened to find auchandirect.fr easy to search, either by individual item or by browsing aisles. Most pupils tend to use the search box once they have checked the French vocabulary (this makes them write accurately).

The original of the sheet below is an Excel file in the Y8 of frenchteacher.net. I am copying it below:




Anglais
Français
Quantité
Prix
Apples (Golden)           

1kg

Pears

500g

Bananas

500g

Kiwis

500g

Pineapple

1

Tomatoes

500g

Potatoes

1kg

Cabbage (green)

1

Cauliflower

1

Courgettes

500g

Onions 

500g

Garlic

1 paquet

Beef (entrecôte)

1kg

Chicken

1

Lamb (côtelettes)

1

Jam (Bonne Maman)

2

Tin of apricots

1

Ketchup (Amora)

1

Green olives (whole)

1 pot

Olive oil (Auchan)

1 litre

Eggs (cheapest)

6

Butter (salted – Auchan) 

250g

Milk (semi-skimmed)

2 litres

Camembert (cheapest)

1

Yogurt (with fruit bits)

16

Pâté (foie gras)

1

Croissants

10 x 40g

Cider (cheapest)

1 litre

Water (Perrier)

1 litre

Cornflakes

500g

Crisps (cheapest)

6

                                               





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