La+Surprise+de+Handa

During the first half of Spring Term 2008, Y4 pupils were introduced to the French version of Eileen Browne's popular story, Handa's Surprise. The book tells the tale of a yooung African girl named Handa, who sets off to visit her friend Akeyo carrying a basket of fruit on her head. However, Handa's friend lived in a neighbouring village some distance away and along the journey various animals steal the fruit from the basket without Handa noticing! Finally, an escaped goat bumps into a tangerine tree and causes all the fruit to fall into Handa's basket, refilling it just before she reaches Akeyo's village. What a surprise for the two children!

Pupils found the familiar text easy to follow, partly because many had first encountered the story some years ago in the Foundation Stage. However, the text also contains a very large number of cognates or near-cognates, (words which are the same or very similar to English), and this helped to facilitate their understanding of the events. French fruit nouns like avocat, orange , banane , mandarine , and fruit de la passion are all easily recognisable; as are animal nouns such as girafe, zèbre, éléphant and antilope. Other French nouns like village and odeur as well as adjectives such as ronde, crêmeux and pointues were all translated by the pupils with very little difficulty.

The children had the opportunity to re-enact the story using props such as soft toy animals, animal masks and play food. The pupils' memory skills were also put to the test with a range of match-up style card games! Pupils were able to use these word and picture cards to write some short sentences detailing which animal stole which fruit as this slideshare shows... media type="custom" key="5385483" Why not print your own set of match-up cards to use at home by clicking on any of the icons below... 

Sparklebox also have a lovely set of [|downloadable French resources] for use with this story too.

Some children also created their own animal images using Microsoft's Paint program. Their work was embedded into a colourful Glog alongside a series of sound files recorded by Charlee C, Sara- Marie B & Kourtney W... media type="custom" key="7191701"

 Finally, here are two videos from Youtube that will help you to revise the fruit vocabulary you have learnt so far and hopefully learn some new words too. media type="custom" key="5377431"

By now you really ought to be a fruit expert! So why not see if you can label [|all these images] with the correct French words? You might also like to try [|this activity from digital dialects]which will help you to learn some words for vegetables as well as revising your knowledge of fruit vocabulary. Have fun!