If you teach in 5e, you'll soon be receiving the latest addition to our Shine Bright textbook collection: Shine Bright 5e. It's a textbook and workbook rolled into one! Check out the introductory video! http://www.speakeasy-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/SN_Video_ShineBright5e.mp4 Inside you'll find: A game to discover the textbook-workbook. A short introductory chapter to revise the previous year's work, Welcome to the Avengers Academy. 8 chapters, 4 short, 4 longer to vary the rhythm of work through the year. Varied activities directly in the book to have pupils engage actively with th ..read more

In our series "Your Students Have Talent", check out these amazing comic strips created as an intermediate task by pupils using our Reading Guide Gangsta Granny. The 4e Euro students were studying David Walliam's humourous novel and were tasked with creating an illustrated version of the scene where the protagonist Ben discovers a biscuit tin of jewels in his granny's kitchen -- which definitely doesn't fit with his image of a boring grandmother who only plays Scrabble and eats cabbage at every meal! Congratulations to Elena, Philippine, Faustine and Camille from Maison de l'éducation de la L ..read more

What are you planning for la Semaine des langues? This year’s edition is from 18 to 23 March and is on the theme of « L’important, c’est de communiquer ! », which we would happily adopt as our motto here at Speakeasy News. The event makes special reference to the Olympic and Paralympic Games this summer in France: a multi-lingual, cross-cultural event like no other! Lots of schools have events planned. Here’s a selection of initiatives and ideas. The Académie de Nice has organised a plurilingual competition, Histoires communes, to create videos linking sport and modern languages, on the ..read more

It won’t have escaped your notice that this is an Olympic year. To get into the swing of things, we’d like to take sport as the theme of our annual creative-writing competition. We’d like pupils to use their imagination to write a story about sport in any way they want. They can write about loving sport or hating it. A super popular sport or an obscure one, or one they make up. It can be about winning or losing, participating or supporting. It can be in any style they like: romance, science-fiction, a thriller, a detective story, funny or sad. You may want to impose a theme such as Olympic spo ..read more

If you are studying the 1961 film of West Side Story with your LLCER 1ère students, our Reading Guide will help them analyse key scenes, explore the background and inspiration to the work, and different iterations of this story of star-crossed lovers. West Side Story is a 20th century retelling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet set in a working-class neighbourhood of Manhattan. The Capulets and Montagues are replaced by street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, representing different immigrant groups. The 1961 Oscar-winning film, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, is an adaptation o ..read more

The West Side Story production that has just finished in Paris will be touring to Bordeaux, Lyons, Rouen and Nantes in February and March. A full stage production, it is in English with French surtitles. The musical comedy by Bernstein, Sondheim and Robbins is a reworking of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, with the Capulets and Montagues being replaced by rival gangs  in New York. If your LLCER students are studying the film version, this would be a great complement. And in any case it's a great night out. The "star-crossed lovers": Maria and Tony. West Side Story Bordeaux 9-18 February ..read more

New rules about identity papers come into force on 28 December that will make taking school groups to the post-Brexit UK a bit easier. Many teachers had given up trying to take classes on trips to the U.K. since post-Brexit rules came in that required every pupil (like every French person travelling to the U.K.) had to have a (paying) passport instead of just a (free) identity card. And pupils who didn't have French nationality had to obtain a visa for the U.K., an expensive and time-consuming process. At the bilateral summit held between France and the U.K.  in March, it was announced th ..read more

"This is England" is a great festival of British short films based in Rouen and the surrounding region with a special programme of screenings and teaching materials for primary, collège and lycée classes. The 2023 edition  will take place from  11 to 19 November.  The selection for this year is now on their website and you can choose to filter by jeune public (primary and 6e), collège or lycée to see information about the films that will be on offer in the different schools' screenings, which will take place in 50 different cinemas around the five départements of the Normandy re ..read more

Radio France has an amazing website that provides resources for teachers wanting to have their pupils sing. Logically most of the songs are in French, but there are four in English and several in German. If you check out the songs available on the Ma chorale voix interactive site, click on "plus de filtres" and you can choose language as a filter. In English there is "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor, "Imagine" by John Lennon, "You Don't Own Me" by Lesley Gore and "Ocean Eyes" Billy Eilish.  For each, there are recordings of the music, sheet music and the lyrics, plus for three of them a ..read more

If you are studying Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 with your LLCER 1ère students, you may want to take them to see this theatre adaptation in French which will be touring the country from January. Bradbury's dystopian novel about a future world in which firemen don't put out fires but instead burn books is a new addition to the set texts list this year. Théâtre Amer’s adaptation by director Mathieu Coblentz was first presented in Villeurbanne in 2021 and has already toured extensively. The new tour dates will begin at the end of January in Bayeux: 28 January 2024, La Halle ô Grains, Bayeux (14 ..read more