And we begin again! :)

Wow! Where did the time go?  I had no idea that it had been so long since my last post!  My deepest apologies to all who follow my blog.

June in our school is extremely important with many oral evaluations being done to see how our students have progressed in their language learning.  This is indeed time consuming but very very worthwhile. 

Have you ever heard your students tell you that they can't say anything in your target language?  That day is not one that you want to hear!  Our department goal for our students this year is to truly work on the oral speaking component of our subject area and to reinforce to our students that they do indeed know a great deal and that with a little bit of effort they can prove it to themselves! :) 

How do you get 30+ students in a class to practise enough?  One of my ways is to do "market place".  I have a couple of different versions of this at my store with varying topics.  They are not long activities but give the students the opportunities to get out of their seats and speak with other students in the class with a focus on a specific topic or language component.

Another favorite of mine is the round table oral activity.  This can be done with any topic that you are working with! My younger students are learning to talk about themselves.  We started with very basic questions and learned and reviewed the information needed to answer these questions.  By the end of September I am going to show these students just how much they can say about themselves only after the first month of classes!   The round table activity allows students to practise these questions.  Student #1 asks the person to their right a question.  Student #2 answers the question.  He then turns to student #3 and asks a different question.  Students #3 answers it and then turns to student #4 to ask another different question.  Each student continues to do this until they have asked and answered all of the target questions.  Brainstorming the questions before beginning the activity further solidifies their knowledge! 

Have fun with this!!  Students will learn more about each other while practising their speaking skills!

Show what you've learned!

I try to keep the imaginations of my students working and love to see them use what they have learned in French class at the same time.  Recently, I had my students write stories in class.  They only had one hour in which to put something together.  They had a page of 'handdrawn' pictures from which to choose.  They cut out 8 pictures from a page of several pictures to write their own stories. Each story would be different as the students all chose different pictures.  They had to write a minimum of 2 sentences per picture with a goal of between 16-20 sentences for their stories. They were encouraged to use the vocabulary lists and grammar concept rules that they had in their notebooks.  They were not allowed to use any electronics for this activity.  Without any suggestions at all, they also chose to colour in the pictures.  These are high school students!  They were engaged for the full hour and had a good time with their creations.  The results varied of course as would be the case in all classes with varying ability levels.  I was very pleased with the results. To see the product in my store check out this link:  Racontons une histoire!

We're having a sale!

We're having a sale at Teachers Pay Teachers on May 7-8.  Up to 28% in savings! PROMO CODE: TAD13    Come find some wonderful products made by teachers for teachers!  :)

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!