Tuesday block

Today, I started the class with a new song of the week: Sarah by Kyo. I realized the other day that even if the activities that we do with the song are not effective, they do so much beyond that that it is worth spending five minutes a day on it. For those WS lovers, it gives them a chance to "fill in the blanks." For those who love memorizing, they are supposed to memorize 5 out of the 10 phrases from the song. But, my real goal at this point is for what happens outside my classroom. Lisa Reyes called this "the ripple effect." Some are singing along (what???), some download the songs from iTunes, but they are all being exposed in a substantial way to French music and culture. They've heard Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel, and Dalida along with Shy'm, Garou, and Christophe Wilem. It's wonderful! So I'm going to cut myself some slack if they're not filling in all the blanks on the worksheet or passing every little memorization quiz. Then, we did our animal of the week. This is another "time-waster" in that I don't really assess anything or expect them to learn anything from it. It's my way of exposing them to the third person plural. My hope is that if they see and hear Ils sont and Ils ont and Ils mangent enough, it will stick in their head and come out when they want to say "They are handsome..." Pie in the sky? Maybe! Finally, I found a guide for Pobre Ana that I ripped off and translated into French. Even though we are already on Chapter 6 of the novel, I had the students work through the activities for chapters 1-3. They worked very hard on it and it gave me a chance to walk around and look at individual papers. Very good exercise. I'm planning on making other guides for the other novels before I teach them next year. It gives the students something concrete to look at and work with and gives me another reason to make them read the chapter...again! I'm fed up with my second years right now, so I'm not going to blog about them today. Maybe tomorrow!