It seems like the best ideas are always the ones that come to me at the last minute. I've always been a procrastinator and teaching is no exception, but I tend to do my best work under pressure (or at least I tell myself!). A few weeks ago I was trying to think of something to do with my first graders to introduce city vocabulary about twenty minutes before class when I came up with this game. It not only helps students practice place names but also basic directions.

I have a set of laminated flashcards of place names illustrated with cartoonish pictures of the places. Pretty boring, until you add construction paper roads AND hotwheels! I started with just the roads and displayed each card to the kids, having them repeat and look at the picture to figure out the definition. Following this protocol I added them to the "city" one at a time, sometimes justifying their location in simple terms ("Je mets la pharmacie à côté de l'hôpital" or "Je mets le parking en face du supermarché").

Once our city is complete I show them four different directions and write them on the board:

à gauche
à droite
tout droit
arrêtez

Next I pull out my little car, explaining that I am new in town and they have to give me directions. I announce my destination and start driving, making sure to pause at each carrefour and wait for directions. The key here is that I do NOT understand directions given in English, and I will keep right on driving if they don't tell me to stop at my destination! The kids really get into this game and it gets pretty hilarious when they mix up their directions and drive me off road or straight into a building. This is the perfect game to get students speaking in the target language because they are either motivated to help me get to the right spot or be mischievous and drive me off the road on purpose. Joke's on them because as long as they are speaking French I am happy :) Once I've practiced with them a few times they are pretty good about taking turns driving on their own and I can include the game in a rotation, allowing me to focus on other skills in small groups. You can even get fancy and add school buses an ice cream trucks with special destinations!

One of my favorite parts of my job is creating displays for student work. Mostly because it means we are finally DONE with a project, but also because it's such a fulfilling way to show learning to families and the students themselves. When kids can see a final product that's visually appealing you can just see their pride shoot through the roof and spill over to other students. I love to see a group of students crowded around a new display, noticing how each child worked a little bit differently.

Today I got to put up one of those new displays for a writing project my 4/5s just finished. And this time I figured out how to make it interactive! I have been trying to incorporate more technology into my classes--to varied levels of success--and found inspiration in this article. We had already been working on using frequency words and conjugating -ER verbs, so it seemed like the perfect moment for a writing project.

This was the prompt: Choose a character. Think big... it can be anything from a cartoon character to a person from history to an inanimate object! Write a paragraph describing your character and include two things that she/he/it ALWAYS does and two things they NEVER do.

I loved seeing what they came up with. I had flying pigs, Samuel Eto'o, Snoopy, multiple unicorns, and even lead... literal lead, as in the substance. Once they were finished writing and decorating their sheet, I had each of them practice the pronunciation of their paragraph for about ten minutes before using a recording app to create a clip of their reading. Finally, I generated QR codes for each composition and put them together. Et voilà, c'est tout! You can find more detailed instructions for making the QR codes on this blog article I referred to earlier.

So far it has been a big hit! Parents love hearing their kids speaking French and there haven't yet been any problems with the technology piece. How have you been most successful incorporating technology into your foreign language classroom? I'd love to hear from you!

Since Francophones the world around are known for their style, why WOULDN'T my second and third graders put on a fashion show??

I'd been looking for a craftier project for them because I often feel bad that my K-1's get to do all the cute stuff. We were studying clothes (see here) so it made sense to use that unit. After I showed them photos of some wild haute couture, they were officially inspired and ready to go.

Our design process was manifold, starting, as it often does, with a sketch. This part was fun and helped get the creativity flowing, but I may cut it out altogether next time I do this project. Though they came up with some great designs, their ultimate product turned out to be a lot different due to material restrictions (and gravity/reality?). In retrospect it was more redundant than productive to have them create twice. After the sketch, the kids got to make their actual fashions on clothespin mannequins I assembled myself with a glue gun. Using fabric scraps, sequins, paper, ribbons, and LOTS of glue dots, the students brought their visions to life on the mannequins! The next step was creating a script for the fashion show to describe what each model is wearing, including the colors of course.

 

Finally, the fun (and chaotic!) part. I used the Puppet Pals iPad app to have them each create a narrated clip of their model walking down the runway. The great thing about Puppet Pals is that you can use your own pictures for both the characters and background, plus it is super kid-friendly and easy for them to manipulate independently. I found a picture of a catwalk with a quick Google search and uploaded it for them all to have a consistent background for our show. The kids took pictures of their mannequins and cut them out to use them as character. Once they had practiced their pronunciation with me, I let them find a quiet spot to record the commentary.

 

A couple hours of editing on iMovie later, I had complete fashion runway show with catwalk music in the background and lots of kids speaking French! This was a wonderful way to get the kids a bit more comfortable with their speaking and the more reticent children were so excited that they would get to perform without worrying about getting up in front of everyone.



One of the best investments I made this school year was a whopping $6 purchase at Goodwill back in October. Telephones! With a cord, making them "old-fashioned" of course.

They've been great fun and a huge motivator for kids to get speaking. It's pretty easy to customize a short, easy-to-memorize dialogue based on whatever unit we're studying and the kids get so excited when they come out of my panier magique. On Halloween we used the phones to make monster prank calls and practice saying "J'ai peur !!" My other favorite dialogue is a short one I use during the body unit to practice naming body parts. It looks like this:

I have a two volunteers come up, one to play the doctor and the other to play the patient. The patient draws a card from a pile with a picture of a body part on it and then conversation ensues.

Souffrant : Paris, 1-2-3-4 ! (dialing)
Médecin : Allo ?
Souffrant : J'ai mal !
Médecin : Où ?
Souffrant : Au pied (or according to the card).
Médecin : Dommage ! (il raccroche)

The premise of the negligent doctor who responds, "Too bad!" to the patient's complaints will never not be hilarious for children and they love to see just how evil they can make the doctor sound or how painful they can make the patient's "J'ai mal". Moral of the story: got telephones, kids will speak!

Earlier this year I spent some time with my fourth and fifth graders going over the basics of French pronunciation. Nothing too complicated, just the essential accent marks (this accent dance was a winner!), vowel pronunciation, and particularities of sounds that don't exist in English. My goal is for them to be able to read written French even if they don't know the meaning or haven't seen the words before.

As a culminating project, I had them work on French tongue twisters and create posters to show the meanings of the virelangues for performance in an all-school assembly. Although we ran out of time for the second piece, it was a fun way for them to get their mouths around the trickier sounds and made for a cute wall display:

I used this site to select the virelangues, and was able to find some really great ones that were easy to differentiate. Here are the ones I used:

Zazie causait avec sa cousine en cousant.

Zazie was chatting with her cousin while sewing.

Trois tortues trottaient sur un trottoir très étroit.

Three turtles trotted along a very straight sidewalk.

Un gros porc dort au bord du beau port du Bordeaux.

A big pig sleeps beside the lovely port of Bordeaux.

Dans la tente ta tante t’attend !

Your aunt is waiting for you in the tent!

As-tu vu le tutu de tulle de Lili d'Honolulu?

Have you seen Honolulu Lily’s tulle tutu?

Sachez, mon cher Sasha, que Natasha n'attacha pas son chat !

Know, my dear Sasha, that Natasha didn’t tie up her cat!

Because I like spending completely unnecessary amounts of time on crafty projects rather than doing actual work, I cranked out these mini paper clothes during my prep time:

These little guys were a big hit with my second and third graders (my favorite quote of the day: "hey! I have that sweater!"). We played a spin off of one of my favorite game formulas:

1. Lay out a bunch of objects, naming them as you display one by one and asking the children to repeat after you.

2. Ask them to "fermez les yeux s'il vous plaît".

3. Choose one student to remove an item.

4. Ask them to "ouvrez les yeux".

5. Call on students to guess the missing item (in French of course!).

It seems simple but for whatever reason the children are consistently super motivated with this game and I almost always see all hands raised––although many of them think they can get away with giving the answer in English! If you're in a pinch for time it can also work well with straight up pictures of the target vocabulary.

It helped that I found some mini clothespins sitting around in my apartment, begging to be used for this project. Thus was born "Au Voleur !!", the clothesline game. The premise: while you all were sleeping, a thief in the night snatched an item of clothing hanging out to dry. Bonus points for the student who can guess the thief.

Bandes dessinées! What could be more fun?? I hand drew one of these templates on a whim one day and have already used them more than a few times, and at a couple different grade levels. You can switch up the format and dialogue depending on the subject, and leave more or less of the text blank to differentiate for abilities and age.

For this particular one, first graders had just been introduced to emotion vocabulary. We spent the first week practicing and playing games with "Je suis...", so they were accustomed to that format. The dialogue should look something like this:

-Bonjour!

-Bonjour!

-Comment ça va?

-Je suis ______________ . (triste, heureux, surpris, effrayé, ravi, etc.)

The fun part is filling in the thought bubble, since students get to decide what happened to the stick figure that day to make them feel a certain way and draw in the scenario (using lots of color of course!). I leave the template pretty basic on purpose, so when I get those kids who finish way earlier than the rest, I ask them to keep embellishing with expressive faces, clothing on the stick people, borders, etc.

Cute factor: 8/10
Happy doodling!