Update

Things are going fairly well here in French land.  My students and I are used to the no-desks thing, but I realized that I made my hems too close to the edge of the fabric, so I need to fix that over Christmas break because they are starting to pull apart at the seams.  I also realized after a couple of weeks that I needed to number the chairs so that they could be easily put back in place after group activities.

I am still "interviewing" my French 1 students.  So far, they know how to say (without hesitation for 80% of them) My name is, I'm this age, I have a...(dog, cat, driver's license, job, or car), I live in...with my..., a multitude of activities that they do, and we're now adding I like, I want, and I can.  Not too shabby.  And obviously, they are hearing lots of 2nd and 3rd person as we discuss the kids in class.

I'm struggling a bit with my French 2 students because I started talking about what they did over the summer, but that got boring as we moved into October.  So now we are moving to creating stories about the students.  This week, I had a student who confessed that she wants a car, so we created a story about her going different places and asking for a car.  There are times when they blow me away with how much they know and then there are days when they don't know the most basic things.  I'll just keep plugging away!

With my French 3s, we are doing lots of current events and authentic activities (I love 1jour1actu).  We played Martina Bex's game Mafia and they are BEGGING to play it again.  We also did an activity yesterday that was speed dating with hypothetical questions (ie: if you won the lotto, what would you buy?, If you could be any animal for a day, what animal would you choose?).  They had one minute to discuss each question with a partner.

My French 4/5s are deep into IB curriculum.  We basically talk about what's going on in the world and try to discuss what we would do if we were in politics or how we can make a difference as ourselves.  It's going pretty well...

Anyway, I've finally figured out how to blog from my school account, so I should start blogging more frequently (fingers crossed.)

What has been your best activity this year?