KS3 · French · Year 8
What people did: plural -er verbs in the perfect tense
Past events: the perfect tense, questions
Learn it. Recall it. Make it stick.
IllumED Slides
IllumED · 1/10
Your learning goal
I can identify and formulate verbs in the perfect tense in both the singular and plural forms to understand what people did.
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What people did: plural -er verbs in the perfect tense: 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 identify and formulate verbs in the perfect tense in both the singular and plural forms to understand what people did.
Key learning points
- The letter 'c' is naturally soft (sounds like 's') before 'e' or 'i'. It is hard (sounds like k) before 'a', 'o' or 'u'.
- The 'c' is sometimes softened before 'a', 'o' or 'u' with a cedilla: 'ç'.
- The verbs 'partir' and 'quitter' both mean ‘to leave’ in English: 'je quitte la maison', 'je pars dans deux heures'.
- Use 'quitter' followed by a direct object and 'partir' followed by a preposition or an adverb of time (or on its own).
- Use the perfect tense to talk about an action that happened in the past: avoir + past participle.
Words to know
- [c/ç]
- pronounced softly as in ‘ici’ before ‘e’ or ‘i’, but as a hard sound before ‘a’, ‘o’ and ‘u’, as in ‘content’; [ç] is as in ‘français’
- perfect tense
- a verb tense that describes completed actions in the past, e.g., I listened, you played
- past participle
- verb that forms the perfect tense, usually together with a present tense form of ‘avoir'
Common mistakes
The letter 'c' always makes the same sound in French.
The letter 'c' is naturally soft (sounds like 's') before 'e' or 'i'. It is hard (sounds like k) before 'a', 'o' or 'u'. The 'c' is sometimes softened before 'a', 'o' or 'u' with a cedilla: 'ç'.
For parents, carers and teachers
- You can introduce pupils to the Astérix and Obélix comics, and the cartoon and film versions exist too. Goscinny, the writer, has also created 'le Petit Nicolas' with Sempé, and the recent animation of their lives, 'Le Petit Nicolas : Qu'est-ce qu'on attend pour être heureux ?', is charming.