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!