A typical Monday

So this Monday we did our phrase of the week, which was A+ this week. I thought they would really enjoy learning some "text" language, but it really confused them. Oh well. We'll go on to something else next week. Then, we went over prepositions again and then talked about their weekends. I'm finding that it's really hard to blog at the end of the day because the last two classes of the day are KILLERS for me. They are so draining and take up so much classroom management that I just don't have a lot of good things to say at the end of the day. I think I'll try blogging in the middle of the day...

April 7: Standards-based grading

This was the second half of my non-sub day this week, so I won't talk too much about it. Last week, we had a meeting of those of us who are venturing into Std-based grading. I'm really thinking of changing my grading again next year. This year, I did 70% assessments and 30% homework first semester and then changed that to 90% assessments and 10% homework for second semester. There is another teacher in my building who does 100% assessments. And she's a math teacher who assigns math homework every night! She says that she keeps track of homework and whether or not they turn it in, but it counts for none of their final grade. I REALLY like this idea. I find that I mainly do completion grading on these things anyway...so I might as well not count them as anything. Sooo, I'm thinking that next year I will break my grades up into reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Listening assessments will be my little quizzes that we do after stories. Reading will be very standards-based because I will design my test so that they are answering different levels of questions and can stop whenever they get stuck. I blogged about this last semester, if you are wondering exactly how I do this. Speaking would be based on re-tells. Writing would be based on free writes and fluency. Can they write 100 words in 5 minutes? Would a native reader understand the story? Did the author write with spelling and grammatical accuracy? With this, I would count a 3 as having the appropriate number of words and a native speaker would understand. 2.5 would be less words, but a native speaker would understand. 2 would be mid-level words, but very hard to understand. They would get over a 3 for wowing with content or accuracy. Thoughts??

April 6

Today my 1st years played with some Quia vocab or freerice.com (you can do French vocab or even art!!) while I tried to catch up on some other junk. It wasn't the best lesson, but I had to have something that a sub could do with the other half of my students yesterday! For my 2nd years, I wrote a melange of the two hours' stories and made copies for everyone. They were supposed to read it, translate it, write a copycat story, and try to put it in the past. The copycat stories were pretty amazing. I had a student who never says a dang word in class read her story and it was full of all those tiny words of awesomeness like "parce que/because" and "plus que" more than. Instead of writing simple sentences, she was using those words to create more varied sentences. I was very happy. Two other groups had amazingly creative stories using last year's vocab and funny details. I had one group that was a little behind the others. The problem with that group is that I have some students who are SO creative in English that they just can't seem to limit themselves to being creative with the vocabulary they know in French. So there were tons of words in English. Oh well. As far as transferring it to the past, they didn't do so well. Again, oh well! They did all seem to know that "il y a" becomes "il y avait." So that's something! On to tomorrow!!

April 3rd

Another block day! My 1st year students started off with Mon Pays again. Then we went straight into Pauvre Anne and finished Chapter 5. Next we took a "brain break" and watched episode 4 of Chez Mimi, a very silly show on Discovery Streaming that is made for French language learners. My 1st years have already watched all of the Telefrancais episodes (available on youtube), so this is our next step...I don't know what we'll watch when we're done with Chez Mimi! After that, we took a quick quiz over Chapter 5, just oui or non with me giving statements in English about the chapter. Most students do very well on these quizzes and I consider it a pretty good indication of their listening comprehension. Then, I had them do a five minute free write. I try to have them do this about once a week to practice writing fluency. I do not check grammar or spelling or anything. The purpose is for them just to practice writing. The goal is for them to write more words than the previous week, with an end-goal of over 100 words in 5 minutes. Once that stuff was done, we sang a silly song called En Voici, En Voila by Alain le Lait (found on Youtube) about different kinds of food. Finally, we finished the day by talking about what the students had done over the weekend. With my 2nd year students, we followed a similar agenda, but we substituted a TPRS story using l'a emmene, s'est reveille, and a quitte as our 3 phrases. We finished that story and then took a comprehension quiz like the one we took with the 1st years. Then we did a free write and followed that with watching the last episode of Extra (again, available on Discovery Streaming). I've ordered Friends in French to watch with the 2nd years next week. My goal is just to get them listening to authentic French and getting used to not understanding every word. My goal when I'm speaking, telling a story, or we're reading is for them to understand every word. So this is their chance to make wild guesses. We finished with talking about their weekend. I love this activity because it can take a really long time if you ask a lot of follow-up questions. Plus, it gives kids a chance to say Je suis alle au cinema or j'etais malade. J'avais une boum. I'm exhausted! More blogging later!

March 31st-Block day

We have block days at least once a week (which is actually two days), but we are blocking just about every day right now to accomodate state testing. Fun fun! I'm hoping to be able to get back into a groove of having a lot of activity choices, because I've been relying an awfully lot on just reading Pauvre Anne and Pirates. So today, I started the day with my first years and we started with our song warm-up...I'm pretty sure I've blogged about this activity before, but let me know if you have questions. This week I'm using an old song: Mon Pays by Gilles...oh what's his last name?? Anyway, I'm trying to mix in some old classics so that my students really get a good base in French music (and Quebecois, bien sur!) Next, we reviewed the story of Pauvre Anne from chapter 1-4. I try not to do the full review every day or they just get super bored, but I like to do it pretty frequently to refresh some of that awesome vocabulary and help the slower kids catch up. So I asked a lot of questions about what's happened so far. Then we started reading chapter 5. When we're reading, I now read a paragraph out loud, pause so they can ask for clarification on unknown words and then usually circle some key plot points in the paragraph. If the paragraph is particularly confusing or has a really important bit of information, I will have the kids translate individually. I take a volunteer for the first sentence and then let them pick someone else for the following sentence. I know that this breaks all sorts of reading rules, but with the dictionary in the back, I know that every student CAN translate it...it just might take them a while. And I've even got some students who will give a slower student a super easy sentence because they know it will boost their self-esteem. That's really cool to see! I also stop for culture clarification sometimes, like when Anne goes to the bank to exchange her U.S. dollars for euros. It's a great chance to talk about the proximity of the European countries and how they banded together to gain more power and strength globally. Once we had read 2 pages, we took a singing break and sang a new song: Bee Bee, Mouton Noir, a translation of the classic nursery rhyme done by my old cooperating teacher. Then we spent some time learning a "cheer" that I was taught in high school going along with the prepositions. Devant, derriere, a droite de, a gauche de, sur, sous, dans, avec, chez, a, de, pres de, loins de, a cote de, en face de, au milieu de, tout droit. I think I might have a couple of spelling errors there, but you get the idea. For some reason, this is super easy to remember and very helpful later. Finally, we finished with a rousing game of football (americain). I used Fred Jones' idea for this game, straight out of his book. I drew a football field on the board and broke the class into two teams. I didn't have my large class today...I'm worried it might not go so well with a class of 30... Anyway, I had questions that were worth 10, 20, and 30 yards. Each student took a turn being "quarterback" and trying for their choice of yards. If they got it right, I moved their magnet that many yards on the field. If they got it wrong, the other team could sack their quarterback for a loss of 10 yards if they could answer correctly. It worked very well in my classes and they were pretty engaged. I like this game because it gave every single student in my class a chance to be successful. With my 2nd year students, our song of the week is US Boy by Jena Lee...a super-catchy current hit about how much French girls love American boys. We then had storytime, continuing a story about a boy named Kitty Kat Man, who helps George W. Bush find the best BBQ in the world. I have to admit that things got a little goofy in this story. At one point, Bush gets scared when a cashier at Gates BBQ yells (Hi! May I help you??) at him and pees his pants. When he tries the McRib, he throws up, which makes Kitty Kat Man throw up (and his stuff has a hairball in it, of course!). Then who shows up, but Dolly Parton. And how in the world do you describe her without describing all of her attributes. So I taught them nenes. Not sure if any other French teacher in the world would be comfortable teaching this word, but since it was taught to me by a 2yr old boy...I figured it couldn't be too crass. After story time, we played football and that was a day!

Blog every day??

I haven't blogged in quite a while, and I think it's because I'm just waiting for something amazing to happen. But I'm missing the small victories that come with every single day. So I'm debating blogging every day or every other day to say what my lesson plan was...how it went...and any small miracles that I see. So...let's see how this experiment goes!

This is why I teach!

Just last week, I was chatting with my aunt-in-law, a reading teacher in a very tough school district. She had had a bad day and was looking for some support from a fellow teacher. We talked about how rough it is to feel like you're making a difference when the results just aren't there...

On the heels of that conversation, I had a moment that affirmed my choice of profession... On Friday night, at my son's soccer game, I ran in to one of my students from last year. It was odd to see him there, since I live 35 miles from the district I teach in...but oh well. This student was a student who was walking a fine line between good kid and deliquent. I knew that he had support at home, but his friends were taking him down a bad path. He got in trouble almost every day in my class and really seemed to be asking to be kicked out of school. But he really touched my heart. I knew that there was something special in him. So I tried to ignore some of his behavior and just kept silently pushing him. So, Friday night, I ask him how things are going for him at the high school. He has a 3.0!! And an A in French!! He said that he was really surprised how much he remembered from my French class after a long summer off of school. And that was a student from last year, before NTPRS and all that awesome training and coaching I got in Chicago!

So I keep the faith that those students who are trying so hard to get left behind, that try so hard to push my buttons...some day, they'll wake-up.

How about you all? With those kids, do you push them? Do you have high expectations for them or do you take a passive stance with them? I struggle with this because my instincts tell me to be passive and touch base with them every so often to let them know that I want them to do better without breathing down their neck in class, but I also think that they need high expectations just like everyone else. Thoughts?