FRENCH FOR CHILDREN
Why Iimit our children to one language?
Being bilingual is one of the great skills that breaks down barriers and
opens up opportunities.
Our names are
Emmanuelle and Coralie, French natives, mums and entrepreneurs, living in
England for the past 20 years.
Being in the fortunate position of raising our children in bilingual
environments, has made us realize that less fortunate children are being badly
let down by the current education system. Limited time allocated to Modern
Foreign Language classes (many schools offer no more than 30 minutes per
week), poor resources that don’t reflect a modern multi cultural society and
boring teaching methods are failing to engage children despite the relentless
work of our dedicated MFL teachers. So we decided to take action and do something
about it!
Two years ago, we created MASKARADE
LANGUAGES (www.maskarade.net) a company dedicated to bringing fun, originality and humour to teaching foreign
languages to children aged from 3 to 12 years old (and up to 14 years old for
Special educational needs school age children). A present we have developed our products to teach French, however we are in the process of adapting them to include Spanish, English and Mandarin. We called our company MASKARADE
because we use character’s masks as part of our teaching method.
During our phase of development, we realized that there were 3 major
focus points:
- School resources needed to be designed better and needed to be visually more exciting with recognizable characters (How many of us memorized French words through reading “Asterix and Obelix” )
- Teaching methods needed to be more innovative and engaging (How many of us memorized French, Italian, Spanish words through food, songs and films?)
- And finally young learners needed to be immersed in a foreign community to understand the language but also its cultural, artistic and historic identity.
With those main focus points in mind, we came up with
“Le petit Quinquin”
Originally conceived as an animation project, "Le
Petit Quinquin" is based on a fictional cartoon community representing a
cross section of modern society, featuring 49 characters
such as wannabe pop star and football obsessed school children Lulu Leboeuf and
Alexandre Kizouka, dyslexic teenage boy Manu Pernaud, brainy, super skilled wheelchair
bounded Loic Truffaut, and many more like hungry power mayor Maurice Quinquin,
school teachers, doctors, grocers etc…
After two years of relentless work, we are about to
launch our first collection of original and uniquely designed pupils' activity
books that bring alive the characters and places of "Le Petit Quinquin". Using
story tellings and cartoons involving the characters of "Le Petit Quinquin", we
introduce phonics, grammar points, new vocabulary and practical exercises in
more creative and engaging ways that don't alienate the young learner.
Drama plays a big part in our teaching method. Through our role-play,
children develop their speaking skills and explore ideas that matter to them! To
add an element of fun to games, role play and improvisation, children wear the
masks of the characters. It works wonders, the children LOVE IT and most
importantly teachers and parents agree MASKARADE WORKS and PRODUCES results.
What sets MASKARADE LANGUAGES apart, is the scale of
characterisation that offers endless possible scenarios and hours of fun in
classroom communication. Children relate to our characters and their stories as
their natural curiosity inspires questions about the characters, how they live,
what they aspire to, as well as how they relate to each other, they learn the
foreign language without even realizing it.
Although our materials have been designed according to
government guidelines on how to teach Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) at primary
and Special Education Needs (SEN) levels and have incorporated schemes of
work that follow the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) Modern
Foreign Languages (MFL) framework, we have still managed to make it FUN!
To find out more about MASKARADE LANGUAGES and support
our work please visit our site:
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