By Mme Stuart (MFL Teacher)

Last week, my Year 9 French students were tasked with creating a seating plan for an imaginary meal organised by the school, and designed to enable family members to get to know each other.

Stage one involved each student choosing two members of their family that they wished to attend and filling in a piece of paper with their likes and dislikes. They were also able to practise using their adjectives by saying what their family members were like/not like.

Stage two required them to get into groups and organise a seating plan based on each family member’s description. In principle they were to place people next to someone else that they would get on with, but some groups had fun by being evil and deliberately placing people next to someone they would not get on with.

During stage two the students were encouraged to use as much French as possible to discuss their choices. Once the final seating plan was made, each group member explained to the rest of the class in French why they had placed two people from their seating plan together. Post task, when we discussed the ‘flexible thinking’ skills they had demonstrated, some of them rated themselves as 100 on a scale of 1 to 10!