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24 heures de la vie d'un enfant

I have just been reminded of this excellent web site.

http://24h-vie-enfant.partage.org/

The introduction reads:

La vie d’un enfant peut être très différente en fonction de l’endroit où il grandit.  5 enfants nous racontent leur journée au Brésil, au Burkina Faso, en Roumanie, au Liban et au Cambodge. Si la réalité de leur quotidien est souvent très éloignée de la nôtre, elle est aussi parfois très proche. Très bon voyage et belles rencontres…

There are five stories of children's daily liives in different parts of the developing world. You could exploit the words and images in various ways, but I might suggest that students be given a worksheet with one or more of the following exercise types:


Tick off true sentences from a list
Complete an English-French vocab list
True/false/not mentioned
Questions in French
Questions in English
Linking starts and ends of sentences
Multi-choice in English or French

The level is intermediate, so this would work with good Y9 up to Y11 in England in Wales.

I used to use the story of Malick from Burkina Faso. This "day in the life" consists of 11 slides, each with a short commentary in French. You might wish to supply a vocab glossary to help with comprehension.

In terms of productive work following the comprehension stage, you could get good classes to write a simplified version of the day in the first person in French. Alternatively you could get very good students to write a dialogue based on questions from a journalist. As a third, challenging written alternative, how about getting students to write a set of statements contrasting Malick's life with their own?

All of this could easily be integrated into a sequence of lessons about life in the developing world. But that's another story...

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