Day 4

I didn't get a chance to blog at the end of the day yesterday, so I'm a bit foggy as to what I did or how it went...this will probably be a shorter blog.

I started off the day with my second year classes and decided that, rather than review avoir the usual way, I would use the avoir phrases unique to romance languages (I have hunger v. I am hungry). We took notes over the phrases and then I asked the students to come up with gestures so that we could associate a physical movement with the meanings for the various phrases. This went amazingly well. I drilled them on them, had them moving around, and laughing. It was really interesting to me to see two classes come up with the same, seemingly random, gesture for "I have luck..." (a sky rainbow from Spongebob??). I had a great time with the students and got some of those chatty Cathies back from the disaster of Monday.

With my first year kiddos, we continued to work on commands. I know that I'm not doing it "right" because I'm giving them the Vous commands instead of using the Il form. It was a mistake that I started on Monday and am not quite sure how to remedy at this point. We shall see... They are enjoying it and I upped the ante by asking for volunteers to act out my commands, giving those starved for attention a chance to shine. In one of my classes, we had some extra time, so I did a little story-telling with them and ended up with a baby-eating Hitler (I'm beginning to see a pattern) who ate Britney Spears' babies, because he was so evil. They really enjoyed using "malin" from the first Muzzy episode that we watched last week. I also found a great CI TV show on youtube that does a great job of explaining what is going on. I'm sure that a lot of French teachers already know about it, but it's called Telefrancais. So far, I've really enjoyed it because it's cheesy enough that it makes the kids laugh, unlike the Chez Mimi or Extra that is available on unitedstreaming.com. Those shows are okay, but they talk over the kids' heads and they try to hard to be funny and cool.

Anyway, I think my great experiment is going pretty well so far. I still haven't talked to the high school French teachers about what I'm doing to see if they are going to hate me for it or not. Maybe I'll set up a meeting next week...I just really feel like language at this stage should be about comprehension and communication...not grammar rules. No offense to my high school French teacher, who was wonderful, but I really don't remember a lot of the "grammar" stuff that we did in school. Instead, I remember the group of boys who always fit in something about a saucisson and a foque into each of their skits. If I can make some basic communicative phrases stick in their heads like that and give them the confidence to produce the language to native speakers and others...I feel like I've done my job. Whether or not the upper level teachers will agree with me, I'm not sure.