The class is a mixed group, with several of our long-standing students having learnt French in our primary school, and some of our new-starters picking up the language for the first time this year. They’re all becoming experts at using the present tense now, and they can use a wide range of adjectives in French to describe their family, house and surroundings. We finished the last term by ‘going shopping’ and ‘going to a restaurant’, so they were introduced to the conditional form je voudrais to ask for things they’d like.
The next stage for us is to introduce them to the future tense. This enables them to have French conversations with each other such as ‘Qu-est-ce que tu vas faire pendant les vacances?’ or, ‘what are you going to do in the holidays?’ Firstly, they’ll learn what we call the near future, which is using ‘going to’ instead of the more formal ‘will’. This week they conjugated the verb aller, and then played around with a selection of infinitives that they already knew – such as jouer, faire, manger – and some new ones like acheter, boire, voir – to say what they’re going to do, see, play, eat and so on. Miss Ford was impressed as her students proudly came up with the following plans:
-Je vais visiter Paris
-Je vais jouer au tennis
-Je vais acheter une pizza et puis je vais manger la pizza
-Je vais acheter une voiture!
Special congratulations to our newest student Kana, from Japan, who after just two lessons was using the French future tense along with her classmates today!
Miss Sarah Ford