When I did my student teaching, I was working with a TPRS teacher, so I had a pretty good idea of the theories before I began teaching myself. I've stolen (no such thing in teaching, right?) several ideas from her that I use in my own classroom. They work for me, when I remember to do them.
First, I try to have an animal of the week. I have a bunch of stupid stuffed animals given to me by friends who don't know what to do with the crazy amount of stuffed animals that we parents accumulate as our children grow. I pick out one and give the French translation. Then we talk about the animal. For example, this week, I had a monkey (un singe). We came up with 5 sentences to describe monkeys in general. They live in the jungle or the zoo. They eat bananas. They say "oo oo ah ah" They are brown, orange, etc. They throw poo. I try to always have at least one bizarre sentence to make them laugh. It works better with some animals than others. This gives the kids a chance to learn animal vocabulary that we can use in stories and it gives them a chance to practice the third person plural conjugation. Hooray! Success number one.
My second success that I try to do once a week is to have a phrase of the week. I was doing the animal on Friday and the phrase on Monday, but I've pushed it back to Monday and Tuesday now. I pick a colloquial phrase that they would otherwise not learn until a study abroad experience. Sometimes I ask my sister in France for a phrase that is branchee...today I went here: http://www.uqtr.ca/argot/frame.html. I put the phrase on the board with the translation and tell the students that we are going to try to use that phrase as many times as possible this week. I never bring it up and we don't do anything more with it. Sounds like a useless exercise, right? Except that kids really remember these phrases. Today I'm using J'en ai marre (I've had it/I'm fed up!). It is amazing to me how often these phrases show up in writing and stories.
Whatever works, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment