Educational activity based on the short film Les petites choses de la vie
Produce written texts: find and organise ideas, construct sentences, and write them down.
Develop a sense of authorship.
Les petites choses de la vie © Benjamin Gibeaux
TitleLes petites choses de la vie
ThemeFamily relationship, Figure of speech
Genre & keywordsWonderful, bird, animals, childhood, Eiffel Tower
Age (for the film)3-11 years
Duration08 min 03 s
DirectorBenjamin Gibeaux
MusicBenjamin Gibeaux
ProductionBenjamin Gibeaux (France, 2012)
Imagine dialogues, build a story from the video.
Nothing is more motivating for children than than using a video or pictures as a starting point for writing. These materials will help stimulate children's imagination. Depending on their age, we can ask them to title the pictures, write a caption, invent a dialogue, or even write a whole story. With younger children, this can be done through shared writing, with the adult scribing (dictée à l'adulte).
First, you will need to pick out the useful images for the activity, noting the time code in the video. We can then freeze the frame at the right moment. But it is possible to take screenshots to paste into a Word document and print it out, so that each student can work at their own pace, the work can be differentiated, and their work is recorded right beneath the relevant images.
Here are a few selected images, given only as examples. Images to caption, find a title: 1’41 – 3’31 – 6’52 – 5’06 – 6’04 – 6’52 Dialogues to invent: 1’33 – 2’02 – 2’10 – 2’38 – 3’56 – 4’20 – 6’04
Print the materials for this activity...
From this work we can ask older children to write the story that this video tells. This story can be read to another class. This activity could also be done in several classes and the results compared.
Extensions/variants
Make more drawings to illustrate the students' story. Rather than writing the story, we can go through the video with the students and ask them to make up what happens next: will the characters find their child? Draw the illustrations for what happens next.
Activity sheet written by: Valérie du blog Val 10. Discover the Val 10 blog...
