There are at least two words in French that mean “suddenly”:
- tout-à-coup
- soudain
I would assume that this might be true in other languages. Here is an idea that Sabrina shares with us to teach those words, and it is a good one that others may want to incorporate into their classes:
She states:
…in every story something happens all of a sudden, so we’ve been doing the following and it’s a lot of fun. I’ve trained my class – everytime they hear tout à coup – to snap their fingers twice, thump their feet twice and say soudain…
My class riffed on that idea today. As soon as I said tout-à-coup, everybody said “soudain”, then hit their desks with their hands twice, except for four cheerleaders who stood on the seats of their desks and put their arms over the head and synched their two claps with the desk beating. It was pretty cool.
I did assign the job of the Soudain Girl to this, whose job it is to initiate the Soudain move so that the class has someone to follow.
This is much like the Mais Bleater job, where the purpose of the move is to freak out observors, because, with both the bleating (coming from one student) and the soudain move (coming from the entire class), the thing takes about five seconds and it’s over and the class is trained to act as if nothing happened and so the observor gets a little wigged out, which is always fun.
One more thing – I was thinking the kids would need a code word to tip them off that the word suddenly was coming up. So:
“Class, did X arrive slowly. No class, X didn’t arrive slowly, X arrived suddenly!”
So “slowly” would be the code word for “suddenly”. I’ll see if that works.