Mme B's Classroom

This Back to School Unit was a true labour of love. As with all teachers, I do love purchasing from Teachers Pay Teachers before I go off and make my own content. Creating from scratch is time consuming and 40 minutes per day to prep is just never enough to create everything that one needs. But I have found that the few units I did purchase didn’t have everything my new group of students needed. So I created this content to fill in the gaps.

Starting with my assignment; I am now the only Core French teacher in my k-8 school, and therefore I have a lot of different abilities and behaviours throughout the day. Taking a few weeks to gauge where my various classes were and what their likes/dislikes are, I started to notice that I just didn’t have the content to help them be their best. Knowing that I had a wide range of skills, abilities, and attitudes, I knew that I needed to come back to the classroom with a new strategy.

Starting each unit with an anchor chart, we went through a few activities ( I call it a Fun Pack) that required students to go through their dictionary and search for the words. Many had never used a personal dictionary before so I liked getting this out of the way early in the year, mostly because I will be using one to start each of my units.

Primary

For the primary grades, we worked on oral communication and listening, more than anything. We played a few games that got them into listening for a select few school supplies, always going back to the word wall for help when they needed it.

I started the Unit with a short story to showcase the various school supplies that we would be working with, and how to use them in a sentence. There are two options available, based on the needs of the class. Between the 6 classes, I used both options depending on their preference.

I start sentence generation by starting with des phase melangee, then giving them a word bank to create their own to match various pictures. Eventually they creat their own from a word bank and I loved hearing all the individual responses they came up with.

Students worked on creating simple sentences starting with “Je vois”, “C’est” or “il y’a”. They had to tell me what the vocab was and then we started added a colour adjective to boost our sentences up.

We played BAM! twice throughout the month on our “Freedom Friday”. For the littles, I don’t like to steal their cards, so I made them do jumping jacks. When it’s nice out, I like to take them outside to play this game, as it can get loud and they need the space to jump. They loved that it was so silly, their Homeroom teacher loved that I tired them out, and they all worked really hard to get the winning prize for most cards at the end of the game.

Also on Freedom Friday, we played a version of Kahoot. Instead of using computers, I got 4 pieces of card stock per group; yellow, red, blue and green and I project a Kahoot game on the whiteboard. They need to flash the right card to show me what they thought the right answer was. Based on the majority, that’s the button I pressed to move to the next round. They were loud and excited but they loved it; “Mme, you make the best games”.

To finish the unit, we made a Dans Mon Sac A Dos book, where they read the sentence starter, traced the vocabulary word and drew the picture to show understanding. It took them a few days to complete and they were so proud of their hard work.

Juniors

After reviewing our anchor chart, we start discussing Verbs and Personal Pronouns using vocabulary from the unit. These are concepts that will be brought up throughout the year, and exceptations getting increasingly more complex.

We read the book, but the Juniors didn’t want to write their own. They wanted to get right to the games and learn that way. So we did.

I created this BAM! deck (technically it’s called BANG but they kept shouting “She banged me” last year, so I made it BAM this year and my new group of kids are none-the-wiser). I have 2 Junior classes and they both wanted to play very different versions of the game; 1 group wanted 2 lines and the first to call it out got the card, I stole the card from the last to shout BAM! when that one came up. The 2nd group is my more difficult class, they do not like French at all and therefore finding something that they wanted to play was exciting enough as it is. They decided it was boys against girls (we had equal numbers and everyone was onboard), first to shout the answer got the card, and BAM! meant they had to do a feat-of-strength to keep their cards. Each group picked a warrior for the round, then rotated which team decided on the feat; jumping jacks, arm wrestling, tic tac toe, and even staring contest. It was wild, but they loved it and studied to play again in a few days in order to get better. And they did.

We did Sentence Creation puzzles, where they went around the room collecting cards to create a proper sentence. They needed a Subject pronoun, Subject, Adjective and a preposition if they wanted to be fancy. They consulted their dictionary to see which pronouns went with which subject, and if it was et or est. It was amazing to see them ask friends for help looking for a word or correcting their neighbor by giving advice on what to use instead.

The J’ai qui a was rough this time around. Neither group had played before so getting them to quiet down enough to listen while their peers read their cards, was a task in and of itself. But we managed to play a few times after our initial rough start, and I told them next unit we would be competing against the other grades for the best timing. Considering they all have siblings in my other classes, this was a great motivator to get them to focus on the task.

For their Freedom friday, we played various Blookets, Boom Cards and Bingo. I don’t know why they like game-based testing so much but if they like it, I will create more for them.

Intermediates

For the most part, my intermediate class did the same work as the Juniors but I had higher expectations from this group.

Along with reviewing Personal Pronouns and le verbe Avoir, we went over creating negative statements and reading comprehension. I listed a series of backpack contents and they needed to match it to the picture.

Our Freedom Fridays consisted of Boomcards, Blooket and Bingo. They were surprisingly excited to play Bingo in exchange for Jolly Ranchers – the best hard candy for the lowest price, and it’s Halal.

Our Sentence Creation Puzzle yielded much better sentences and I asked them to create 2 per person.

Their final project consisted of creating their own classroom and writing a description of it; Je vois, C’est and Il y’a statements.

Results

For the most part, I would say that our first proper unit set the bar for classroom expectations. I have a great idea of what each group is capable of, and they now know what kind of units and activities they can look forward to.