I recently came upon a wonderful activity idea from French teacher Chelsea Peeters on the French Teachers in the US Facebook group, which I adapted for my own classroom. Chelsea gave me permission to share my version of the activity here on my blog.
With the Olympics in Paris this year, there are lots of opportunities for French teachers to incorporate the event into their lessons. This year the mascot of the games is a phrygian cap, a type of red hat worn by French people throughout history. Chelsea had the idea of having her students make their own phryge, as it’s called in French, give it an identity, and write a short biography of it. My students did something very similar. First, we looked at this website, which describes the phryges and their role throughout history and in the games. You can choose to view the site in English or French. Next, we looked at all the Olympic and Paralympic events, which are listed here. There are some new events this year! Then, students each got a coloring page of a phryge (there were about 19 different coloring pages of phryges doing various events that they could have gotten). The coloring pages were a free download here. I didn’t let students pick which coloring page they got, but they were allowed to trade with a classmate. Some of the pages depicted the Olympic phryge, and some depicted the Paralympic phryge, which has a prosthetic leg. Then students chose a gender, name, and other biographical information for the phryge and wrote a short paragraph about it on the page. I asked them to state its age, eye color, hair color, several describing words, and what event it does. If it wasn’t apparent from the coloring page what event they do, they could pick one. The only things they had to color were they eyes and hair, but since this was done on a state testing day and I figured students could use a little break, I gave them plenty of time to color the rest of the phryge in as well. Click here to view the instructions sheet. Here are some of the results:
You can view more on my classroom blog here. This ended up being a good pre-writing activity. Although students were writing a whole paragraph here, they had a lot of scaffolding with vocabulary provided to them. On a subsequent assessment, they were asked to write a brief description of a person based on a photo, and it was clear that this activity helped prepare them for that.
In a subsequent lesson, we read an article about the Paris Olympics in French from Allons-Y magazine, which can be accessed here with a subscription (“Ma checklist pour les JO !”). The phryges are mentioned in the article, along with some other cool photos and facts, such as how the surfing competition will be held in Tahiti. I reminded students that Tahiti as actually a part of France. Unfortunately, for copyright reasons, I cannot share the article publicly here. If you are not a member of the French Teachers in the US Facebook group and you are based in the U.S, I highly recommend joining. A search for “Olympics” will yield all sorts of wonderful activities and resources.
I ended up buying a plush phryge for my classroom to carry on the excitement. Students wanted to know what its name would be, so I decided to have a contest. I have selected six phryges that students made, and students will vote on their favorite. That phryge’s name will be the name of my plush phryge.
Have you done any activities about the Olympics in your classroom? Please share them here!
Note: The intellectual property rights to the mascots is most likely owned by the Paris Organising Committee for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It is believed that the use of mascots’ likenesses in the form of coloring pages for educational purposes qualifies as fair use under U.S. Copyright Law.
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