Thursday 7 May 2015

People Pillar Portrait Poem

I am looking for really easy and effective ways to create writing opportunities with young learners who are working out how to use nouns and the relationship between nouns and adjectives in the target language.
For all the ideas you need a picture stimulus and bilingual dictionaries and card strips  to write down their people pillar portrait poems .
i think that this activity would work  really well to for a Father's Day focus, for a Year 6 leavers focus on what describes  a Year 7 "ready to learn" new starter etc .... the potential is almost limitless

Stage One  
Focus on one masculine singular noun and a stimulus picture e.g "un clown"


  • Ask the children to look up and cross reference adjectives to describe a clown
  • Are there any adjectives that the children need to write in French before the noun- talk about these first!
  • Ask the children on rough paper to write the adjective in the correct position next to the noun in a list - therefore you repeat thre noun"clown" and write a different adjective next to the noun each time.

Un clown amusant,
un clown actif,
un grand clown,
un clown .........,
...................
  • The children can now make your first "people pillar portrait poem".All they need to do is to write their list written in rough on to the card strip. 
  • Create plasticine or blu-tac feet for the card strip and add clown heads to the pillars.
Stage Two 
Focus on a feminine singular noun and a stimulus picture e.g. "une reine" 





  • Ask the children to look up and cross reference adjectives to describe a queen.
  • Ask the children to anticipate the familiar changes that they can remember to the spelling of the adjectives if they are being written next to a feminine noun
  • Explore the spelling of unfamiloar adjectives and find the feminine ending spelling 
  • Are there any adjectives that the children need to write in French before the noun- talk about these first!
  • Ask the children on rough paper to write the adjective in the correct position next to the noun in a list - therefore you repeat thre noun " reine"  and write a different adjective next to the noun each time.

  • Une belle reine, 
    une reine magnifique,
    une  petite reine,
    une reine.....
    ...............

    • The children can now make your second "people pillar portraipoem".All they need to do is to write their list written in rough on to a new card strip. 
    • Attach the new card strip to the  plasticine or blu-tac feet  so that the card strips for the clown and the queen are back to back.Add  a queen's clown head to the new card pillar.
    Stage Three 
    • Ask the children to find their own two nouns -one masculine and one feminine.The nouns should represent people or professions.
    • Ask the children to create their own people pillar poems and challenge the children to try to use some of the same adjectives to describe both the masculine and feminine nouns.
    • This will allow the children to make comparisopns on spelling of the adjectives when being used with a masculine or feminine singular noun.
    Making the activity 3D
    Clare Seccombe and I have been busy challengimng each other to take ideas we have generated or found and add a twist.Recently I challenged clare to create a 3D version of the People Pillar Portrait Poem. The challenge was successfu; and here is Clare's blpog post response....




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