I was able to attend/help out with a workshop this weekend hosted by a local private school and led by my good friend Elicia Cardenas, Director of Training for the Comprehensible Classroom. It's the third time I've seen this workshop, but I always come away buzzing with ideas. This time, my colleague and main collaborator, Caitlin McKinney was able to attend as well.
Here is what we are working on this week as a result of Elicia's training:
On Monday, I tried one of the brain breaks I saw where, when I say a place in the Target Culture, students find a partner and create a quick secret handshake. From then on, whenever I say that place, they find that specific student, do the handshake, and then find their seats. Kids were laughing, joking, and looking out for each other (making sure no one was left out).
At the end of the day, Caitlin and I met to see what changes we want to enact moving forward. Elicia had challenged us to consider how much our daily routines flow with our curriculum and what changes we can make to help it flow more easily. From that conversation, we decided to change our Conversation quotidienne (daily conversation) to more of a traditional PQA circle one day with a reading follow-up activity the next day.
Today, in French 4/5 (we are doing a unit of nomadic vs sedentary lifestyles), the statement was "Si je vivais dans un camping-car, j'assisterais à tous les concerts de mon artiste favori." We talked about who my fave artist is and compared that with what the students would do if they lived in a camper. Lots of circling, lots of comparison.
In French 3 (we are doing an environment unit), we looked at an infographic of the trash production of a French family and my sentence was "Selon moi, je jette moins de déchets en verre qu'une famille française." Then we had a conversation and followed it up with a write and discuss.
In French 2 (we are doing a unit on natural disasters), the sentence was "Quand il pleut, j'aime lire." At the end of class, I asked the students to write a sentence (in French or English) explaining what they like to do when it rains and to let me know if class was too fast, too slow, or just right today. I was 95% sure that the students would say that today was BORING and that our conversation was way too easy. Guess what? Out of 60 students, only TWO said that it was too slow. Everyone else said that it was perfect (and that they LOVED today) or that it was still too fast.
Holy cow. I can't wait to see how tomorrow goes with the reading activity (we wrote a paragraph using the target structures and kids will do a cooperative mural).
