Earlier this year I spent some time with my fourth and fifth graders going over the basics of French pronunciation. Nothing too complicated, just the essential accent marks (this accent dance was a winner!), vowel pronunciation, and particularities of sounds that don't exist in English. My goal is for them to be able to read written French even if they don't know the meaning or haven't seen the words before.

As a culminating project, I had them work on French tongue twisters and create posters to show the meanings of the virelangues for performance in an all-school assembly. Although we ran out of time for the second piece, it was a fun way for them to get their mouths around the trickier sounds and made for a cute wall display:

I used this site to select the virelangues, and was able to find some really great ones that were easy to differentiate. Here are the ones I used:

Zazie causait avec sa cousine en cousant.

Zazie was chatting with her cousin while sewing.

Trois tortues trottaient sur un trottoir très étroit.

Three turtles trotted along a very straight sidewalk.

Un gros porc dort au bord du beau port du Bordeaux.

A big pig sleeps beside the lovely port of Bordeaux.

Dans la tente ta tante t’attend !

Your aunt is waiting for you in the tent!

As-tu vu le tutu de tulle de Lili d'Honolulu?

Have you seen Honolulu Lily’s tulle tutu?

Sachez, mon cher Sasha, que Natasha n'attacha pas son chat !

Know, my dear Sasha, that Natasha didn’t tie up her cat!

The term calligramme was invented by Guillaume Apollinaire, French writer and poet of the early 20th century. His collection of calligrammes demonstrates the art form of turning words into images by manipulating their size and form. My favorite is the lady with a hat, but he's also known for his Eiffel Tower and horse poems. I just love how whimsical they are!

My 4th and 5th graders were learning adjectives to accompany their study of the verb être and I realized it would be the perfect occasion to whip out Apollinaire's calligrammes. The assignment I gave them was to use only words to create a self-portrait, including "Je suis" with a list of adjectives describing themselves.

I had them go over in sharpie and add color to add some finesse. They had just selected their French names, so I backed the portraits on construction paper and labeled them with the new names. The result was a beautiful display that hung outside their classroom for the better part of the year. I was so happy with the way they came out!

Lots of kids struggled with the challenge of not using traditional lines for their contours, but they were all happy in the end with their likenesses. It was a practice in refuting the notion of "realistic" in their art—some of them could just not deal with it and included lines anyways! Next time I may have them prepare the list of adjectives ahead of time, as some of them were having a hard time scrounging for words as they went on in the process.