F is for French Angels - Oh La La!

Welcome to my posts for the A to Z Challenge 2016.

This year, I am posting 

Special School Stories

 tales from either my time as a teacher or teaching assistant within classrooms in the U.K. or from my own school days growing up around the country

I am not a linguist but I love languages and so I have often been involved with getting European projects off the ground at the schools I have taught at and I have never balked at teaching children or having children teach (if they know one I don't!) various phrases in several world languages.  So when it was proposed that the younger children should start learning languages too it was my name that cropped up as the teacher to do it and that I would teach French and I would make it fun!

It was to be the infants' Christmas production and the speaking and acting parts were few and far between.  I had a very talented Year 2 class for one afternoon a week so I proposed we would add an additional scene to the production and this would allow those in the class without a speaking part to perform a song in French.  Sometimes I say things without really thinking things through!!  

With various nods from the other infant teachers, I was left to sort it out.  I soon realised that teaching a traditional French Christmas song in the three weeks before the production (in only three hours of lesson time!!) was going to be out of the question so I decided instead to go for the song Chanson D'Amour below:

Suddenly the new scene was very different to what everyone had imagined it was going to be i.e. the children singing a French Christmas song as a lullaby to the new baby Jesus near the end of the production - instead we now had a scene that would be cut in after the "normal" angels has appeared to the shepherds in the story. It would go more along the lines of "Pitch Slapping" with my French Angels  basically telling the other angels that they needed to have more style and launching into the song - ending with an oh la la in a very French superior but chic way.  Their costumes (and I had both boys and girls being angels) were white dresses for the girls and white shirts with black trousers for the boys and all of them wore ... sun glasses!  These angels were super cool and didn't they know it!  Getting a backing track for the song proved a nightmare and in the end the one I had to download had a terrible risque picture so I had to make sure I never had the whiteboard on whilst it was playing!!!  Although in our first rehearsal with all the other classes, the other infant teachers couldn't quite believe their eyes and ears the scene proved to be a big hit and when we played in front of the rest of the school and to parents there were lots of laughs as well as a big round of applause for my little French Angel superstars.  

(Thank you to Monacomac at deviantart.com for the Spock sketch)

Let me know what languages you speak? Which did you learn at school?  Did you have strange scenes in your Christmas plays sometimes?  Have you ever been a most unusual angel?

You know I'd love to know so leave a comment below :)