Stories

Choose a children’s story book in the target language, with the words written on the screen

which the children can listen to and repeat. One of my favourites in French is Va t’en Grand

Monstre Vert (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHrZ1Zq14bc).

I would ask them to listen to the story a couple of times before joining in. They could start with

just repeating the colours. Some may feel confident copying the whole sentence. They could also

make a voice recording of themselves.

You could then ask them to make a list of the colours in the book and maybe draw and label

something of that colour they can find at home. Or you could send a gap fill of the storyfor

them to complete using the video.

Another story I like is ‘Une Histoire Sombre’

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSiliJKBBoo&t=25s). The phrase ‘sombre, très sombre’ is

repeated throughout the story and is good for practising the nasal vowel ‘o’ and the rolling ‘r’.

I have to admit I have struggled to find similar in Spanish – I have learnt that capital letters are

often used for simple repetitive books, or the background has music in Spanish stories much

more than French ones and this is very distracting.

This is a nice version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar in

Spanish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Xji5krOhTI

The Spanish is more complicated than the French in the stories above but as it is a familiar

story, children could be asked to identify and repeat the days of the week and/or the foods. They

could then draw the food and label in Spanish and even add the day of the week with the correct

food.