My Old Blog

This free app is available on iTunes and at the Google Play store .  I love it so much because it lets children create art using really interesting colorful effects that will leave children feeling stunned at the touch of their finger tips.  My daughters have been using KidsDoodle at home and I have to do everything in my power to keep them from prying their tablet away from one another when they are taking turns on this app.  My daughters created the following doodles and the words my older daughter used to articulate her work to me was rather impressive. This experience got me thinking about how this app could be useful in my classroom. So how does this artsy app relate to French Immersion, you ask?  Well if you think of all the language that potentially could be conveyed when explaining how their images were created, you can appreciate how this could be a great opportunity for children to mix creativity with oral language skills.  Children could ...

I've taught online using Edmodo . Like Moodle, Edmodo is a Learning Management System (LMS) which allows you to share course content, updates, send messages to students, and manage student memberships. Students are able to download assignments, post replies to updates, send messages to either you or the entire class, and access their grades. Another interesting thing to note is that Edmodo's interface is somewhat similar to Facebook. Updates are posted with a profile picture attached. Replies to updates can then be posted and will appear just below the update. No "Like" buttons, invitations to play "Farmville" or ads on Edmodo's site, though! One of the things I think some Middle and Secondary School teachers (and parents) might like about Edmodo is that students are not able to send private messages to other students. One can then rest assured that no inappropriate correspondence is privately happening in the course. If students want to send a messag...

Leçon sur l'imparfait (Bonjour de France) Leçon sur l'imparfait avec vidéo et test (Français facile) 

Voici quelques activités de quoi vous pouvez en profiter au sujet de la baguette (ou le pain français ici au Canada).  Vous pouvez aussi trouvez les réponses aux questions pour ensurer que vous avez bien compris les activités. Bonne journée!

Someone recently shared this gem of a website  containing several images that are ideal for foreign language instruction.  I have been using images to encourage conversations and to be used as springboards in writing in my French class.  Often, I have turned to Flickr for photos, providing students with question prompts to help them focus in their responses to the images. Visuals can evoke different reactions in students, ranging from confusion to laughter.  What I have loved most about using visuals is that they solicit a multitude of responses from students!  This experience always reminds me of the importance of appreciating that there are several interpretations of one image and that there isn't one response that is the only correct answer. The images in the website "Visuals for Foreign Language Instruction" remind me of comic books, a favorite among my students.  They invite children to write dialogue on them and to consider what events might be...

La grammaire -l'accord -l'imparfait -la capitalisation -la négation -la ponctuation -la possession - les accents - les adjectifs -les adverbes -les articles définis et indéfinis -les articles partitifs -les conjonctions -les déterminants -les homonymes -les noms - les prépositions -les pronoms -les verbes L'écriture La lecture Le vocabulaire Les chansons Les citations Les dictées   Les compétences orales

Le chat colla... par Cordell Barker , Office national du film du Canada Écrire un court résumé de ce film avec le passé composé et l'imparfait .   Qu'est-ce que tu changerais au sujet du film ?

I have used videos in the classroom in the past to promote writing skills development.  I have also used videos to promote oral language development.  For more details, please read this earlier post . Recently, I read a great blog post by one of my favorite online language educators, Sylvia Guinan, on using movies to teach English.  This prompted me to revisit some old Mr. Bean videos, now readily available for viewing on Youtube.  Apart from getting a good chuckle from them, they also gave me some inspiration for future classroom activities.  While watching them, I wrote down some starter sentences that students could use to prompt discussion on scenes from Mr. Bean.  Because it is important to increase fluency among language learners, I think that we should encourage students to communicate with one another in the target language.  Discussion also helps students articulate their ideas and can be a good pre-cursor to a writing activity. Belo...

I discoverd this free app on Miscositas' Facebook page this morning (¡Gracias!). Telligami is available on iPhones and iPads.  Tellagami lets you customize your character and record your voice or type in the text, select a voice, and have the character speak on his/her own.  You can customize the character's gender, hair, skin tone, and clothing items.  You can also change the background in which the character is displayed. I think Tellagami has good potential for the language classroom, particularly with my French students.  I would like to use it with the purpose of helping my students strengthen their oral language skills.  I plan to integrate this app-based activity into my morning routines in class, randomly picking students to quickly create a monologue in French comprised of about 3 - 4 sentences on a particular topic or in response to a question.

Happy New Year everyone! After a nice 2-week break, it has been back to the classroom for the past two weeks.  Since December, I have been creating my spelling tests (or in French, dictées) from words we have encountered in our weekly reading texts.  I have been using weekly texts to strengthen their reading comprehension skills through teaching strategies that will help them decode words.  I typically choose words that I think students would find challenging so that we can discuss them in class and so that they have a context when studying these words for their weekly dictées. This week's text is L'Alaska from the site Il était une histoire .  I use this site often for my weekly texts as I like that students can listen to the stories and play games that strengthen their comprehension of the texts on the website (provided the student or parent has a free account with the website).

As Christmas is fast approaching, I was reminded of this gem of a website that I blogged about last year.  If you have little ones or are teaching young children in a French language program, you may want to share this website with parents. You can customize a message from Santa to a child by answering some of the questions and sharing some images of family/friends. Please don't select that the child was "vilain" (naughty)! French Immersion teachers, consider drawing a name out of a hat once/twice a week and creating a personalized message for that child to share with the class.  This would undoubtedly rekindle the magic of Christmas among the children.  You can then introduce some of the vocabulary and expressions from the video message with the children in the classroom. Last year, my 4-year old daughter was listening with total rapture while listening to her personalized message from Père Noël himself. Visit perenoelmagique.ca to create your message! ...

French Flashcards is a nice app with flashcards that helps students learn grammar and vocabulary while tracking new words acquired.  Students can choose one of the files to study from: By swiping the card up or down, the translation (in English) of the expression or word will appear. By swiping it left or right, a new card appears.  But first, the student is prompted to indicate whether he/she got the correct or incorrect answer on the current flashcard. Students can also play a matching game with images or test themselves with the Quiz option: Please note that ads appear at the bottom of the screen. I would recommend this app for beginner and intermediate-level students. If used in the classroom, I would recommend the teacher implementing new vocabulary and expressions in writing or spoken activities in class to improve retention of newly acquired words. French Flashcards is available for Android tablets here.

Thanks to this great post by one of my favorite teacher bloggers, Ana Maria Menezes, I have learned how to create a quiz using PhotoPeach . This is my first time actually using PhotoPeach but I am not new to using images in the French Immersion classroom.  I see so much potential and benefits to using images as a medium of language instruction.  Images serve as visual aids and can help students more readily form associations between objects/feelings/places and their words in the target language. I have been a big fan of using images as part of my "Image mysterieuse" weekly writing activity in class.  I would put up an image from Flickr and ask students to write about what might be transpiring in the image.  Sometimes I would also use sentence prompts to accompany the images, facilitating the thought process behind this writing exercise. Using PhotoPeach to create Grammar quizzes would undoubtedly be a more refreshing approach to teaching grammar or spelling...

I have blogged about BookBox in the past when I was using it to teach Portuguese to my 4-year old daughter.  I am very elated to see there is also a French version of BookBox as an app you can use to listen to stories and read along in French. The stories are animated with a read-along feature, highlighting the words as they are being read.  It apparently has been scientifically proven that the read-along (SLS) feature strengthens reading skills as words are highlighted in sync with the spoken word. What I really like about BookBox is that the stories are available in several languages.  Although I see the value of an immersive approach to learning a language, I can also see the benefits of supporting the target language acquisition through one's native language.  My daughter, for example, has listened to stories both in English (her native language) and Portuguese and French (target languages).  She has shown an ability to form associations between w...

Storybird is an amazing tool that I blogged about earlier this year when I was using it with my Grade 6 French Immersion students.  It is an art-inspired story-writing tool that can be great for students who have a difficult time getting started with writing. Recently, Storybird has made some changes to its site.  Now children under the age of 13 can create their own Storybird accounts.  The child would need to provide a parent's e-mail address to complete the sign-up process.  Please view my brief tutorial below for further details: IMPORTANT NOTE: Your child should not make their Storybirds public; otherwise, the stories are taken down from the site if they are in any language other than English. To keep it private, your child should select "Menu" once finished with writing his/her story and select "Publish this Storybird": When scrolling down the page, there is an option to make the Storybird public or private.  Select "Private".  Th...

I discovered Conjugate French Verbs, a great app for French language learners that allows students to conjugate and study verb conjugations of several different types of verbs in French.  It would be a great tool for students to use during the summer break, practicing their verb conjugations of "er", "ir", and "re" verbs while also learning new ones! Below are some screenshots of this app (courtesy of the Google Play Store): I tested it by making errors in my conjugations to see what would result.  The app shows your errors and what the correct answers are by either double-tapping your tablet screen or dragging your fingertip over the verb conjugations.   This app also lets students choose "Random", allowing them to randomly conjugate a verb using any given tense and persons (je, tu, il/elle, nous, vous, ils/elles).  It also tracks scores on verbs that students attempted to conjugate as well as verb tenses. I ...

I recently installed the app for BookBox on my Android tablet.   This free app consists of several stories in multiple languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, French).  Stories can be viewed on Youtube while words spoken are highlighted on the bottom of the screen to indicate which word is being read. My 4-year old daughter is enjoying these stories, listening to them in both English and Portuguese.  She listened to the story in English first (in which she is fully conversant), then in Portuguese (her target language).  I would highly recommend using Bookbox as an Android App for any language learner.  You can install Bookbox on your Android tablet or phone by visiting Google Play store at this link.

Since my last post about using Storybird in the classroom, I must admit that the excitement among students in using this site has begun to wane.  What is interesting to note is that it seems the male students in my class are the ones expressing dissatisfaction.  My female students, on the other hand, seem to generally still show enthusiasm about it all. When asking some of the girls in the class why they like Storybird, the common response is the illustrations.  They love the colorful, cute images.  This got me thinking about what it is the boys would find appealing.  I have boys in my class who love to draw in class.  One of my students has even gone to the lengths of drawing a character representing every boy in my class! So after some searching, I stumbled upon Story Jumper.  This site allows students to design their own illustrations and write stories.  The boys were all over this new site!  Everything from wizards to robots appea...

shawnzrossi (Flickr) When I introduced the site called Storybird to my students, I wasn't completely certain of how they would receive it.  Would they like the wide option of images offered on the site?  Would they think it would be too "juvenile" given most of them are around 12 years of age? They have been so excited about using this tool since I mentioned that we would start publishing their stories on our wiki.   Last week, my students were working on their Harry Potter Book project in Edmodo.  One of my students, who loves to write, approached me and asked "could I please go to the Storybird site?".  I casually responded with a "yes".  Shortly after, I heard a flurry of whispering among the students and a few other students then approached asking the same question.  They were eager to write stories! So what does this experience teach me?  Apart from the fact that Storybird has become a popular tool in my classroom, it is teaching m...

This fantastic gem appeared in my Facebook status update feed today.  The American Association of Teachers of French shared a link to this pdf version of a board game you can use with students in your classroom. This is a great game for students to learn parts of the body, colors, and action verbs.  Instructions are also enclosed in the pdf attachment at this link. Amusez-vous!