"Qui est-ce?"

Set-up:

The day before, ask students to find an old photo of themselves -- preferably a baby picture or a Halloween picture. Tell them not to show the photo to anyone in the class, but to bring it [next time].

In-Class Set-up:

Half the students will have forgotten to bring photos, but that doesn't matter. Three is enough for this to work. Number and display the photos in front of the room. I line them up on the chalkboard with numbers written on the chalkboard above. If you have an Elmo projector, you can project them one by one, which is even better.

Instructions:

(In French) These are photos of people in this class. Look at each photo, and try to guess who it is. For each photo, write three statements to justify your guess. [Give an example: "Numéro 3: Je pense que c'est Julie parce qu'elle a les yeux bleus." Justification becomes more complex as level of French goes up. Creative students come up with surprisingly insightful comments.]

A good way to proceed, is to have students look at the photos and take notes individually, then team up, and make each team responsible for one picture. Assign one picture to each team, so that you don't have a team member identifying herself.

Remember the guidelines for assigning. monitoring, and limiting time on group work.

Presentation:

Choose a number, ask "qui-est-ce" and "pourquoi?" Don't  verify correct guess until all the photos have been discussed.

Follow-up:

As a warm-up, this exercise can feed into a linked grammar or vocabulary exercise (past tense, further description, Holidays, subjunctive), or can be used as the basis of a writing assignment.

Comments:

I usually bring a picture of myself just to make sure there are enough. This goes over well. It's amazing that even when students bring photos of themselves at beyond 14 years old or so, it is not always easy to identify them.
 

Cheryl Krueger
University of Virginia