Finding appropriate stories to use with Years 5 and 6 can be challenging, as it isn’t always easy to match the level of language with the level of interest. Of course, simpler stories can still be used if the language is developed sufficiently – indeed, using a simple story can work brilliantly if your ultimate goal is for children to be able to write their own stories based on a model (L6.4 Write sentences on a range of topics using a model, KS2 Framework for Languages).

Having read and enjoyed stories like Ours brun by Eric Carle and Bill Martin Jr, children can really begin to take ownership of the language and work with it creatively and independently. Then, having become authors in the new language, they can share their stories with younger children in the school.

However, if you’re looking for books to engage children in Years 5 and 6, there are many lovely story books that are more challenging both in terms of language and content that can be really effective for use with children in upper Key Stage 2.

It might be that you choose a book because of its theme, for example, friendship, loneliness, relationships with family, dreams for the future, and develop language work around this. Rather than expecting children to understand every word in the text, you might choose a few key sentences or paragraphs to focus on. Drama activities can be very effective in engaging children with texts and helping them to understand the main points, for example:

- mime – children mime what happens at a particular point in the story

- freeze-frame – in groups, children are given a sentence from the story to read and portray as a live scene (with or without sound). You then ask children to freeze and the rest of the class think about which part of the story they are portraying

- tableau – this is where children create a silent physical picture to illustrate a sentence from the story

- role-plays – children work in pairs in character to create a short conversation. Language will need to be familiar and possibly prepared as a whole class.

- hot-seating – you or a confident child takes on the role of a character from the story, answering simple questions from the class in the new language. The questions can be prepared in advance as a whole class.

Other activities to help children to ‘get inside’ a text might be matching extracts of text to pictures, drawing pictures to match text, building ‘human sentences’, sequencing sentences in the order that they appear in the story, using cloze procedure, i.e. selecting the correct word to complete a sentence and describing the meaning of extracts of the text in English. You might also like to give children extracts from the text to decipher on their own, encouraging them to draw on their knowledge of English and the new language, as well as any other languages they might know.

It might be that a theme in the book lends itself to further language development – for example, a book focussing on friendship might lend itself well to discussing feelings using a range of adjectives. Of course, sometimes you can discuss themes raised in the story in more depth in English.

You may decide to introduce the concept of verb tenses to children using a story about dreams and aspirations for the future – I’m going to be a…etc.

You may also decide that you would like to develop a whole cross-curricular project around one story book, just as you might do with an English story. The illustrations and themes of many of the story books in the CILT Library Collection, for example, lend themselves immediately to art work, science, design technology, geography, PSHE, maths, drama, literacy – anything in the primary curriculum really!

We are currently expanding our selection for stories and picture books for children in Years 5 and 6. If you know of a book which works particularly, do get in touch. We would be delighted to hear from you.

Some of the great titles in the CILT Library Collection:

- Je veux une maman-robot by Anna Laura Cantone and Davide Cali

- Mon copain Max m'a dit qu'il comptait sur son papa pour faire ses devoirs de mathématiques by Alain le Saux

- Una historia fantástica by Bruno Heitz

- Bajo las estrellas by Sandra Barrilaro

- Der Schäfer Raul by Eva Muggenthaler

- Sehr berühmt by Philip Waechter