Mme B's Classroom

As we wrap up December, many students are starting to leave for holiday early. Even more have checked-out mentally, so doing a brainy task doesn’t seem like the best use of everyones energy. This year, my primary class has decided to make their own version of a great book “La vie secrete des bonhommes de neige”

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To start the week, we watched the book on youtube. Mostly because my school library doesn’t have a copy of this at the moment, but they like to hear someone else read to them every once in a while. We did a second reading where I stopped the video at every page-turn and asked the class what they thought was being said. Reading it again slowly, picking out the words that they knew from previous lessons and the word wall, looking at the picture, and making inferinces.

There is one snowman that has a pickle for a nose. We have called him Pickles, and we loved to find him on every page as we read it again.

Students worked in pairs to think about what their snowman does after bedtime. Some repeated many of the suggestions from the story, which is fine. Others came up with their own crazy ideas, which is amazing.

Check out this fun emergent-reader created for the classroom library.

On day 2, we start to write down our ideas. Drawing a picture of our snowmen causing havoc in the neighborhood, remembering to add Pickles on every page, students started their own Class-book. “Pendant la nuit, les bonshommes de neige bois(vent) du chocolate glacé”

NOTE - I don’t expect my primary classes to properly conjugate verbs. We review a few of the unit specific verbs, and the difference between singular and plural nouns. The rest will be a Junior-level lesson.

Older students are able to create 2-3 sentences, with much more unique activities. They were asked to describe the activity and anything else in the scene that would help move along the story line; “Pendant la nuit, les bonshommes de neige aime jouer au hockey dans la parc. Pickles est le gardien de but et arrête tous les buts sauf 3. ”

Depending on how well your group works independently vs support for sentence-generation, this is easily a week long activity.

After the class has created their pages and assembled as a classbook, I like to scan everything and send a copy home to parents. To show them some of the great work their student is able to accomplish in French class.