KS3 · French · Year 9
Pandemic in France: impersonal expressions including weather
Future and past events: 2-verb structures with prepositions
Learn it. Recall it. Make it stick.
IllumED Slides
IllumED · 1/7
Your learning goal
I can use impersonal phrases to talk about life during the global pandemic.
1 of 7
Pandemic in France: impersonal expressions including weather: slides adapted from the imported teaching text; recall questions created from its keywords, learning points and common mistakes. Self-check practice, with no automatic grading or XP. Answers stay on this page and are cleared when you leave.
Original teaching resources
The original illustrated PowerPoint is available as well as the IllumED text slides. It retains the publisher’s design and credits.
Download original PowerPoint ↓What you’ll learn
I can use impersonal phrases to talk about life during the global pandemic.
Key learning points
- French nouns and masculine adjectives ending -al change to end in -aux in the plural form.
- French adjectives with -al endings have nouns as their root.
- 'il est' can be used with an adjective and an infinitive to talk about how things are for people in general.
- In impersonal phrases, ‘il’ never means ‘he’. It often means ‘it’, but does not refer to a specific person or thing.
Words to know
- impersonal verb
- a verb that doesn’t refer to a particular person or thing, and whose subject is most often ‘il’ (it)
Common mistakes
'Il' always means 'he' in English.
In impersonal phrases, ‘il’ never means ‘he’. It often means ‘it’, but does not refer to a specific person or thing. It is often used in weather phrases, saying what time it is and what you must (not) do.
For parents, carers and teachers
- You might want to ask students to think, pair, share examples of where they have seen impersonal uses of 'il' before showing the examples the Oak characters come up with at the beginning of the third lesson cycle.