Moroccan Food Festival

'Best lunch ever!'  That's exactly what I heard from one of my students about our Moroccan food festival in class this week, and she wasn't even speaking to me!  My students are finishing up a unit on Morocco and I wanted to allow them to have a fun way to further experience what they have been learning about.  I carefully chose recipes that my students would be able to make (Some had parental help) that would be easy enough and not too expensive to make and also "youth friendly".  The "secret" to Moroccan cooking is in the spices but these are easily found at our local grocery stores. We ate "family style" in the classroom and sat around a large table made by pushing together many of our desks. Since utensils are not typically used in Morocco my students knew they would have to use their "bread" to help eat their food. We had such an amazing time! Try it out!  It was so much fun!

For the recipes used:  Recipes of Morocco 

Practising Reflexive Verbs?

Mr. Bean - getting up late for the dentist on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VumrpkL6RS0

This is a great video for humour and for practising "reflexive verbs"!  Today I used this to review how to use reflexive verbs in the passé composé.  After much laughter, the students viewed the video while making a list of what verbs they could use to retell the story.  Afterwards, they were to write the story in the passé composé using the reflexive verbs pertinent to the story.  They will later read their paragraphs aloud to me. 

Faisons des achats en France!

If you can't go shopping in Paris,  France the next best thing is to go on a "virtual shopping spree"!  On-line shopping is becoming an everyday occurence for many people and even my own son does this on a regular basis.  Although not from a Parisien store he certainly shops as diligently as anyone who would go into a store at the mall!  Galeries Lafayettes a very popular department store in France also has an on-line shopping site where my students did their own shopping today with "virtual euros".  :)  Although they certainly could not finish the activity that is found at my store within an hour, they certainly had a great time trying to do so.  "I still need shoes!" - "Are you comfortable spending almost $300 on boots?"  - These are only two of the comments that I heard my students making while I glanced and listened around the room.  The chatter was totally "on task" and they were having a great time at the same time.  "Would you really wear that camping?" and the comments continued.  "This is the kind of work I like to do.  It's not like work at all!"  What better way to have students talk about your lesson than like that?  :)  Give it a try!

Shopping in Paris, France - an internet activity

The dice game

Over the years I have found that students learning a foreign language always create sentences of the same length.  In order to try to promote a variety of sentence lengths in my students' work I have used a variety of activities in order to promote this.  This week we played the "dice game".  In its simplicity the student's find it enjoyable and yet also challenging.  Each student takes their turn to roll 2 die.  Whatever number comes up is the number of words the table of students must use in their sentence.  They continue to write sentences for about 15 minutes using this method.  I encourage the older students to use "conditionnel", "past conditionnal" and even "subjunctive" in their work.  At the lower levels we discuss transition words before beginning the activity so that they don't think it's an impossible task!  :)  At the end of the time period, I roll the die and ask for volunteer sentences that they have created for each of my rolls. 

That was fun!

"That was fun!"  Those have to be some of the best words a teacher can hear when students are leaving the classroom!  Because I truly believe that a relaxed atmosphere allows for students to be more open to language learning, "fun" definitely needs to be on the menu.  :)  My colleagues and I have just finished our "EXPO" project with our grade 8 students.  They are (12/13 years old) and are not quite beginner learners to French but are the first level for us at high school. Our EXPO project has the presentation day set-up of a Science Fair where students tour around the classroom looking at other students' projects. They have an information sheet that they must complete while doing so.  Our goal is to have our students learn as much about the French speaking countries around the world as possible so that they are more open to the knowledge that it is not just in France or Canada (where we live) that French is spoken.  Apart from the basic information that they must research for the project they often "cook" and bring food samples to class on EXPO day.  Well that day was today and with a mixture of Poster Board and Technology projects (PowerPoints, Prezis and websites)  we had 90 students in one large room with an amazing amount of excitement!!  - a busy yet awesome day!

Technology and students at work....

Oh my gosh! Where has the time gone?  Sometimes January crawls by; however, it is right around the corner already!!   We are always looking for authentic tasks for our students to do and I am certainly no different.  Today my upper level students did a gallery walk in my class and pretended they were tourists on a holiday.  Of course I did not travel with them and so they were not able to ask me any questions.  :) I set up 15 different stations with a variety of documents that I have collected along the way on holidays - train tickets, train schedules, brochures from museums, ads from magazines, map of Paris, postcards, and so on.  Students had questions that they needed to answer about the documents in each folder.  Everything is in French - both the questions and the documents.  The students worked with a partner and used their cell phones to use the internet to look up vocabulary that they didn't know.  I love it when I can use their technology skills and embed them into my lesson!!   And even better was the following comment I heard along the way: "Oh, this is cool.  It's going to be so much fun and I'm going to like this."  It was a good day. :)

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.