My Old Blog

 

 On va jouer un jeu...These 5 words always perk up my students' attention and curiosity the moment I say them. I haven't taught one class yet where students did not look forward to playing a game in class, even if it involved conjugating verbs or recalling vocabulary we have learned.  Students love the element of fun that comes with playing games in the language classroom.   Games are also very important in helping students build their knowledge of the French language.  Most games I play encourage oral language development in the classroom.  This is an area of learning that sometimes can be quite neglected at the cost of learning grammar rules and acquiring reading and writing skills. Here are some games that I highly recommend your students play: 1.  Une minute pour gagner (A minute to win it) -provide a student with a challenge that they must complete in order to win.  Because we have been working hard on practicing our verb conjugations, I ofte...

 Teaching in a Late French Immersion classroom has truly taught me the value of having a word wall.  I teach in a school where I don't have my own classroom space due to shortage of spaces.  Instead, we share our classroom spaces with other teachers.  I mostly teach French Language Arts in one classroom on the 3rd floor.  This is where I have set up my word wall.  I am very grateful for having a supportive teacher in that space to let me take up a fair chunk of the white board for it! A word wall is powerful because it provides students with vocabulary they are learning.  It helps them associate words with images if you use pictures with your words (as shown above).  Having a word wall also helps improve word recognition for students.  We have been using words in class that we have learned in September that students still recall without seeing on our word wall anymore.   If you are like me and are tight on time, I would strongly rec...

  I recently completed an online course offered by Parfaitement Parnell on TpT.  I found it very useful and loved the fact that she included a workbook and course resources to refer back to in my writing program.  I am currently teaching grade 6 Late French Immersion.  They began their journey in learning French for the first time in September.  Because of their limited vocabulary, our primary focus over the past few months has been developing vocab knowledge and working on sound blend recognition.  We have played several games and used repetition to help reinforce these new concepts. My students are now writing sentences based on vocabulary they already know.  Every week, I will post a paragraph in English for them to translate into French and evaluate them on their understanding of the words they have learned.  I also evaluate them on their conventions (punctuation, capitalization) and how much content they can write.  Tia's course on Writ...

  I started using Google Classroom this year with my grade 6 Late French Immersion students.  It has been one of the best tools I have used in my classroom for a number of reasons: 1.  students can submit their assignments from anywhere and I will be notified  2.  I can easily grade assignments once submitted 3.  I can quickly send out an e-mail to students who have not yet submitted assignments 4.  When creating an assignment, I can include all the needed links and materials to complete it 5.  as a French Immersion teacher, I love it because students can record themselves speaking.  This allows me to listen to their recordings and keep them for future assessment purposes. I recently watched a video from Pocketful of Primary about making the grading process easier in Google Classroom.  It is really worth watching if you are new to Google Classroom.  I learned the following new things from this video: 1.  You can select "To revi...

Sumdog  is a website that allows children to play math games while also practicing math skills at grade level.  Games adapt to the child's skill level as they play.  Students earn points as they continue to play and achieve new levels. Teachers can create accounts for their class through Sumdog.  I created accounts for my students with ease and was able to print login cards for my students to have handy when signing into their accounts. You also can create assessments and math practice tasks for students.  You can customize the assessments and math practice tasks according to your student's ability level.  For example, you can create a daily multiplication practice for your class and modify it so that certain students might just be working on multiplication by 2s and 3s, while other students are working on higher number multiplication questions. Currently, Sumdog is offering free 15-minute webinars to teachers interested in learning more about how t...

Never in most of our lifetimes have we seen something impact us globally like the COVID-19 virus.  From week to week the government is making new announcements and the changes that are taking place can be quite overwhelming to digest for many of us. As an educator on spring break, this vacation is not like any I've experienced before. I think I speak for so many educators when I say that it isn't a time of true rest and relaxation.  I awake each morning looking for direction on what we can expect to come as we are being told we will be returning to work next week.  Our students will not be in our classroom as the government has issued an indefinite suspension of classes. More districts are looking to remote learning options and how to best support teachers with off-site learning for students.  I have fortunately experienced teaching online in the past and see a lot of possibility with using the internet to deliver instruction to students during these uncertain t...

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 ...

Below are some great resources I found online to support educators with using Google Drive for assessment and supporting students' learning journeys online. The first time I used Google Drive with students was when I was teaching French online and wanted students as part of a weekly assignment to edit a document written in French with spelling and grammar mistakes.  Google Drive's features have since evolved and offers for so much greater potential to be used in educational settings. Sit back and take this quick test drive in Google Drive first: 5 Crucial Google Drive Tips for Teachers: http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/09/5-crucial-google-drive-tips-for-teachers.html Google Drive and Docs for Teachers (Free e-book): http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/05/google-drive-and-docs-for-teachers-free.html#.UtiRcfgU4Q8 Google Drive for Formal Assessment: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vktCO3xiIelPkEjpAzuwhpSFOd-EZP2BaXLXg9ds_Z8/edit?pli=1#sli...

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...

Please view this tutorial about Edmodo, a safe learning management system for students. I have used Edmodo with French language learners (online teaching) and with my Grade 6 French Immersion Students as part of our Harry Potter Book Project with students from Cairo, Egypt. It is a very useful tool if you don't have Moodle or an affordable (or free) Moodle hosting service. I am a strong advocate for the open source movement :-)

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...

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.

The following slide presentation is part of my workshop that I am offering to teachers at my school on Friday October 19th: Ipad App Treasures for Teachers from Bernadette

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.

I think this is a great app for beginner-level French students, especially young children.  With French Numbers 0 to 10 , children can study the digits, number words, and representations of the number (e.g. 6 leaves for six).  This is a more holistic representation of numbers and the visual images used for pictorial representations can be counted on the screen to practice counting in French.  Another thing I found appealing was that the digits appear with hands showing the number of fingers held up to correspond to the digit shown.    Below are some images of the app: Ads do appear on the app for various products and services.  The user can enable or disable sound on the app.  You can enable quiz mode for your child to test him/herself on knowledge of numbers.  To hear the answers, your child needs to tap the screen There is also a dice icon at the bottom that when selected, will randomly provide an image of the number (e....

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...