French trapdoor activity: mes vacances

This French trapdoor activity on the topic of recent holidays is a fun way of providing scaffolded speaking practice for KS4 students.

It can be printed in A3 format and stuck on the board as a teacher-led mind reader activity and/or used for pair work as a trapdoor activity. To save on printing, the instructions for the pair work activity are also provided in a PowerPoint slide.

Working in pairs, students highlight words or phrases from the list of options in each box and must guess which ones their partner has highlighted. Each time they guess incorrectly, they go back to the beginning and start again. Students can then translate their version of the text into English and adapt it to write about their own holiday or an imaginary holiday.

The text uses the passé composé and the imperfect tense and practises vocabulary for accommodation, weather, tourist destinations, free-time activities and food.