Pioche!

I just love it when my students enjoy one of my new products!!  This year I spent time creating a game of "Pioche".  (Go Fish in English)  After spending time speaking with my European friends and my French Canadian ones I found that the two areas call the game of Fish two different names.  In areas of France children play "Pioche" and in Quebec my friends' children played "Va pêcher".  No matter what you call it, it's a great way to bring an easy childhood card game into the classroom while reinforcing not only "speech" but also a theme of vocabulary of your choice.  My students are using my "Noël" collection and are playing Pioche with Christmas vocabulary cards.  Each game has 120 cards so that the students can collect 2 or 4 of a kind. I have put the vocabulary pictures here on green cardstock so that they last longer.   If you are interested, visit my store at:

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Mrslryan

Look for French Christmas Fun in the classroom!

Good old fashioned fun!

As we head into the Christmas holidays
 and it becomes more of a challenge to keep our students focussed on learning, it's more important than ever to have "fun" in your classroom.  Not only will it make the time go by much more quickly for both the students and yourself but it is the perfect way to reinforce all of the basic French skills of reading, listening, and speaking with a board game or two! Monopoly, Scrabble, The Game of Life, Clue - just to name a few - all have French versions of their English counterparts.  Yes, the major publishers have them available but we were able to find them at a lesser cost through a toy store (on-line shopping).   :) 

Creating a story

Today I wanted to promote not only speaking skills but also wanted to encourage my students to listen to each other!  We started by spending some time "speaking" about a picture on the screen.  The picture was suggesting a "theft from a filing cabinet with only gloved hands being seen" in the picture.  It was a great way to create mystery. After the students spoke about the picture for a period of time, I had them create a story together.  One person started the story and we continued to circulate around the room until the story was done.  Each student added a little bit of information and each created more twists and turns as the story continued. It became very complicated with new characters coming into the story as it progressed.  Upon completion of the "oral story", I asked all of the students to spend some time "writing" the story that was just told.  There were varying successes in this part of the activity as some had better memories than others.  Also, some were just better listeners than others.  It was a great lesson to promoting a "oneness" in our room while practising in the target language!

Teaching comprehension

There are so many things that we can learn quickly but "comprehension of a second language" is not one of them!  Improving comprehension takes time and lots of repetition and practice.  When students are not yet able to understand everything that they hear in the foreign language we need to work at strategies to help them understand SOME of what they are listening to.  The more difficult the listening "podcast" or "tv commercial" or "speech" the longer it will take the students to get to a point where they understand most of what is being said. 

Today, I had my students watch a short video which was advertising "la fête des lumières", the festival of lights which starts tomorrow in Lyon, France.  I gave only a very short introduction to the video and then asked the students the write down all of the words that they understood as they were listening to and watching the video. I then asked them to use those words in a very short "quick write" of 6 minutes in length.  I didn't care what they wrote, I just wanted them to use some of the words that they heard.  I also wanted them to realize that they couldn't spend 10 minutes deciding about what they were going to write.  (a huge time waster when time in the classroom is precious)  When students are asked to write something they don't always have the vocabulary at their fingertips in order to write something of a higher quality.  This gave all of my students a place to start.  I then showed a second video where I had the students do the exact same thing, only this time the short video was about a short story that we had recently read and are studying in class. (La Chasse-Galerie)  Again, my goal was for the students to create a vocabulary list for themselves.  This list will now be used to study from in preparation to writing their culture test about the French Canadian short story.

As is always the case, the class has a large variety of abilities.  This exercise was difficult for some and much easier to do for others. 

Let the students create the topics!

While working on authentic conversation scenarios I decided to have my students role play from a picture of a man talking on the phone. Let the authentic conversations begin!  Within two minutes of asking them to do so, out came all of the cell phones in my class and all the students began talking!  It was such a funny sight! They were really getting into the "scenario"!   As I circulated around the room to listen,  the conversations were truly varied.  Some spoke of what they did the day before, some of money owed to someone else, while others spoke of pets and even food.  The topics of the conversations were not assigned by me, just the picture prompt.  I knew that this was the perfect opportunity to challenge the students to stretch their vocabulary; and so I decided to put a bit of a twist on the activity.  I wrote all of the topics on the board and  asked the students to find their original topic and then to look at the topic listed below theirs.  That one would be their next conversation starter!!  I then set my timer for a quick two minutes, and off they went again!  I want my students to push the envelope, so to speak, in order to be better risk takers in terms of their language skills and their attempts at becoming better conversationalists. I know that with practise, even their conversations will improve!  Give it a try! 

Wow!

Wow! It's been crazy busy these past couple of weeks!   I can hardly believe where the time has gone!  Had some fun with my senior class this week when I put up a picture of a man proposing to a woman in a restaurant.  It didn't really look like a very fancy restaurant but he was down on one knee with ring in hand.   We did a role play where they took turns playing both people in the photo while I circulated around the room to listen to the conversations.  When you first think about it you might think that this would be an easy task for seniors to do, but really, it posed some challenges for them.  How do you express the feelings that you can see in the photo?  There was a wide variety of conversation but many had the one thing in common that I was surprised to hear; and that was the use of "vous" in the conversations.  It was a true testament to the fact that we always tell our students to be "polite" when speaking in French and that the French people truly cherish this part of their culture.  On the flipside, it was also the perfect time to remind students that you must take each scenario into account in order to determine whether "tu" or "vous" should be used.  We chuckled about it when debriefing about the topic knowing that we certainly should be "familiar" with our future spouses should that be the end result of the "conversation".  :)  It was also a great opportunity to talk about what possible conversations could be occuring.  Perhaps the answer was not "yes"; perhaps it was "no".  What could the followup response be?  How would the conversation continue should the answer be no. Are there terms of endearment that might be used during the conversation?  Would you tell the other person that you love them?  Do you have a "loving name" that you might use with your future spouse?  A great conversation to have.  Once we had discussed these kinds of things and also brainstormed some more vocabulary and ideas on the board; my students redid the role play.  What an improvement!!  Truly getting into character is most important!!  :) 

I'm having a sale!

I'm having a sale at my store Nov. 8-11.  Come by for a visit!  :)  Click on the link "teacherspayteachers" on the right hand side. :)

Parlons!

Well, it's been a few days since I've blogged.  It's been crazy busy at my school and with parent/teacher/student interviews and fighting a nasty cold, I've wanted to just curl up with a blanket in the evening!  Now that I'm feeling much better I thought I'd share a "parlons" activity that we did today in my class.  I introduced "inversion" questions today and so I thought it crucial that the students practise making these questions before getting into anything in the written form!  We began by having each student write down 'ONE' Est-ce que question.  I had each student say theirs aloud giving me the opportunity to make any corrections for them before doing the next step of changing them into "inversion type questions". 

My students sit at round tables which allows them easy access to each other when doing speaking activities.  The perfect number at a table for this activity is an "odd" number of students!  The first student asked their "est-ce que" question aloud to the person beside them. That student changed the question to an "inversion style" question.  And finally, the third student would have to answer the inversion question, preferably with a full sentence answer in French!  The next student (fourth student) would then begin again with HIS "est-ce que" question.  Then, the student next around the table would change the question into inversion, and the following student would once again answer the question.  With an odd number of students, each student will eventually get to ask their question, have the opportunity to change a question into inversion, and finally answer an inverted question!  I wandered from table to table while the students carried out this activity.  They did a very fine job!!  :) Give it a try in your class!   Next day?  We'll do a little writing with these questions.

Parlons français!

My students have been learning how to make simple one and two verb sentences in the present tense all revolving around the vocabulary topics of food, drinks, sports, activities, and school subjects.  After working on this for about a month and a half they are now putting their expertise to work!  Each student has a "sondage" in their hands and they are circulating around the room to complete the survey.  In French of course! :)  Before beginning the survey they needed to complete some of the questions on the "sondage" as some were "fill in the blanks" so that they students could personalize the survey to their preferences. The sondage is a full page in length and so this activity took at least 15 minutes of "speech" time to go through the list of questions.  It could certainly be divided in half in order to do 2 mini surveys.  If you are interested in this "sondage" it can be found in my teacher store at Teachers pay Teachers.  Here's the link:  http://bit.ly/P1yKPv 

:)  Lorraine  

Belgium learning stations!

Belgium - Site matching activity - pictures are stapled into a file folder for easier use

Here are two of four Belgium stations used in my classroom last week to reinforce our Belgium Unit. This product is available at TpT:  http://bit.ly/UtWBJN