Keeping an Organized Gradebook

Imagine this: Every time you assign homework, EVERY student hands it in on time.  There are no absent students and no late/missing work.

What a dream, right?

Unfortunately we do not live in that world.  Because of this, gradebooks can get realllllly messy.  Thanks to absences, late work, missing work, etc, it is often hard to figure out what has been entered, and what hasn't.  It's also difficult to figure out why a students' grade may have been lower or is still a zero.

I decided to bridge some methods taught to me by my cooperating teacher while student teaching as well as some of my own methods to come up with a paper gradebook system.  Because, let's face it.  Technology sucks.  Sometimes stuff gets lost, so it's imperative to keep a paper backup.

Whenever I collect something (be it as something handed in or something for completion credit) I immediately put the assignment across the top of the gradebook, regardless of if I have graded it yet or not.  This guarantees that assignments are entered in order and nothing is skipped.  It also reminds me (especially on completion credit days) to write in their grades ASAP.  Once everything is graded/checked, any blank boxes will receive either a tiny "L" in the corner, or a tiny "A".  The "L" is if the student was in class, therefore the assignment is late.  The "A" is for a student who was absent when it was assigned OR collected, so they should not lose credit yet.  The boxes with the "L" or the "A" stay blank until I either receive the missing work OR enter it into the online gradebook. 

Once I enter it into the online gradebook, any blank boxes then receive a circle.  I do this so I know that IF the circle eventually receives a number, it needs to be entered into the online gradebook on its own, as the rest of the assignment has already been entered.  I also highlight the name of the assignment in the paper gradebook so I know it has been entered into the online gradebook.

Once a student hands in a missing assignment that has been circled in the paper gradebook, I write the grade in the circle.  Once I enter that grade into the online gradebook, I will then highlight the circled box.

Using these methods insures that nothing is missed being entered into the online gradebook and it also lets me reference why an assignment is missing and/or why the grade is lower.

You can see an example below of many of the different steps represented.

So in short:
Highlighted=entered
Circled=needs to be entered
"L"=late
"A"=absent

Teaching Object Pronouns

Let's face it... object pronouns are a pain in the butt to  learn.  Direct/indirect/location/person/numbers...you get the drift.

I have found, however, that by using a cross, it is easy to teach the students all of them on one piece of paper.

The pronouns are in four different categories:
1) Direct Objects
2) Indirect Objects (preposition + person)
3) Preposition + non person or location
4) Quantity or De

So I lay it out on the board as such:

Each section gets a number (which is easy to reference later when asking students "okay, which section of the cross are we in?") as well as the pronouns themselves, when to use them, and a few examples.  When I teach object pronouns, I like to take it step by step. First, I ask what can we take out of the sentence.  Then I ask what section of the cross we are going to.  Then, when applicable, I ask which pronoun we are using.  Then I ask where it is placed.

The nice thing with the cross also applies to pronoun order.  When there are multiple pronouns used, the order goes as such:
1) duplicates
2) section 1
3) section 2
4) section 3
5) section 4

I've noticed this works very well, as it is extremely visual for the kids.  You can just see them referencing it in their heads whenever we are working with this topic. 

Looking for a bunch of my Object Pronoun Activities?  Check out THIS BUNDLE.

Maternity Leave Musings

Not sure if I have any regular readers (or if I did, do I still now after my extended posting absence).  To those of you who are still here, bravo!  To those of you that got bored waiting to hear from me, my apologies for not posting in a looong time.

On August 13th, I gave birth to the most beautiful, wonderful, sweet baby boy a mother could ask for.  He is my first child, so I've embraced my new role as "mother".

Before he blessed my life, my two major roles were "teacher" and "wife".  It's always crazy that it seems there aren't enough hours in the day to be a rockstar at everything you do.  But now I will have to add "mother" to my list of roles.

I go back to school a week from today (November 4th).  I have known since January I'd be off this long, but it's hard to believe it's almost here now.  I did teach summer school until July 4th, but I haven't been in my classroom to teach my regular students in FIVE months.  This blows me away.  Since I started teaching, I've never gone this long without being in front of a class of students.  I've been in mommy-mode for what feels like ages now, so how do I know I can get back into teaching mode?

A part of me is so scared.  Will I be able to balance my life roles together?  To be a good teacher while being a good wife and a good mother?  To be a good mother while being a good teacher and a good wife?  To be a good wife...you catch my drift.

I am excited, though, too.  I'm excited to see my old students.  Excited to meet my French 1s.  The French numbers grew a little from last year so I am hoping they grow a little more this year.  I am currently a .8 (which is probably a blessing for my first year as a mom) but if I get enough 1s and 2s to continue on to 2s and 3s next year at one of my schools, my 2/3 class can turn into two classes and hop me up to a 1.0, which I would love.  I want nothing more than to grow this program back up to what it used to be.

Anyway.  My apologies for my extended absence.  I promise to post more regularly again :)

This Friday I will be headed to WAFLT.  I'm very excited.  If you're anywhere near Wisconsin, I highly recommend checking it out.  It's like Christmas but for language teachers.

Classroom Scavenger Hunt

I'm not sure about you, but where I teach, I am expected to take all of the posters off the wall for the summer and get as much cleared out as I can so that the custodians can clean.  Because of this, things can sometimes get moved around.  Not to mention, every year with the French 1s, I have a class of new students who have no idea where anything is in my classroom.

One thing I love to do at the beginning of the year is a classroom scavenger hunt.  It gives the students the time to explore and find out where their available resources are.

The hunt questions don't just say "what color is X poster".  It's things like "what page of the dictionary is the word 'aller' on" (which makes them go find the dictionaries) or "how many kilometers separate Lille and Paris" (which makes them go find the map on the wall).  I've also asked really silly questions like "what different colors to the scissors come in" or "what animal forgot his homework" (I have a poster that says, in French, "Oh no! I forgot my homework!")

I let them work with a partner but they MUST stick together.  I don't want them separating because they might each miss out on finding where things are in the classroom.  I will also put a post-it with an X on any cabinet or drawer where they won't find any answers (generally stuff that I wouldn't want them rifling around in during the school year anyway).  The team who gets the most right wins a prize.

This activity works really well because students then know where things are and don't have to ask where certain objects are.  Eventually when we go through it, I also verbally ask the students to tell me where they found the answer to the question.

Tout le monde qui...

I love activities that get the kids moving around and active.  Students easily get bored if they are constantly in their seats only taking notes or doing worksheets.

One activity I love to do is called "tout le monde qui..."

You need to put chairs or desks in a circle so that it is completely enclosed.  There should be one less desk than people.  One person stands in the middle and depending on the theme of your game, they will say "tout le monde qui ______________".  Anyone who fits into this category (including the person in the middle) must get up and find a new desk.  They must choose a desk that is not their own, nor a neighboring desk.  There will always be one person who is seat-less, so that remaining person is the person in the middle.

Some themes I have done are colors (tout le monde qui porte _____), clothing (tout le monde qui porte _____ ), family (tout le monde qui a _______), and food (tout le monde qui aime _______).

This game is a great way for the kids to practice vocab.  At the beginning of a unit, I allow them to use their vocab sheets, but by the end, they are not allowed to.

Spoons

If I could pick one area of weakness with my kids, I would definitely say verbs.  There's only so many conjugating worksheets you can do, but games with verbs are hard to come by.

Then it hit me.  Spoons.

It is played like the game spoons. Here are the rules if you are unfamiliar with it.  However, using the printer in the office, I created my own decks of cards.  Each card has a verb on it...either the infinitive or a conjugation (je, tu, il/elle, nous, vous, ils/elles) but WITHOUT the subject.

I came up with two different ways kids could make a set of four.  They could get four different versions of the same verb (for example: portons, porte, porter, portes) OR get four different verbs in the same conjugation (for example: suis, ai, vais, fais [the first person singular of four different verbs]).  I found that both worked GREAT and they had so much fun with it.  It happened to be nice outside so we took the game outside.  If you don't have spoons, any objects will do.  I used markers and it worked just fine.

To help them get MORE practice, if they are "out", I require them to still play.  They just cannot grab a spoon.

I Spy

I am currently in a clothing unit for the French 1s.  One warmup the kids have really started to enjoy is I-Spy.  I give the kids a few minutes to study their vocab, and I write out four to five outfits of what people are wearing in the room.  I describe the people one at a time and the students need to guess who I am talking about.

This activity is great because the kids come to school in different outfits every day.  Sometimes I need to be specific because they will be wearing similar things.  Other times I can get away with "il porte un tshirt a manches longues" (he's wearing a long sleeved t-shirt) because only one student has this.

Both of my classes ask to play it almost daily.  I have seen a great improvement of their vocabulary because of it.

What am I?

I'm really in this mode lately trying to encourage vocabulary retention.  My 1s are currently learning about "faire les courses" or food shopping, so I did an activity that not only enhances their vocabulary, it also has them using the target language.  It's an activity called "qui suis-je?".

I made cards for each food vocabulary word and tied string to it.  Each student gets a food item behind them (like a backwards necklace) and they have to ask yes or no questions to their classmates to figure out what they are.  Because they are French 1, we wrote a list of questions we could ask on the board in order to keep them in the target language.  Questions like, "can you buy me at a boulangerie?", "am I red?", "am I a vegetable?", "do I say moo?"...things like that.  They have to go around the room asking their classmates yes/no questions trying to narrow down which food they are.  Once they figured out what they were, they turned the card to their front side.

I found that it worked really well.  They had to rack their brain for the possible vocab words they could be in order to narrow down their questions and then guess that they are.  One class did it perfectly without English, the other got into English a bit.  I tried to do it that if they heard someone speak English, they could take that person's card.  However, I didn't like that.  They ended up fighting and also it then made that English speaker even LESS likely to use French later.  I'm still trying to figure out a fix for that.

The Stamp

I realized that I never did my last post in my string of organizational posts, or ways to make your life easier and your students' excuses go out the window.

Often, to save myself the headache of grading 50 worksheets in one night, I will just give my students completion credit, especially at the beginning of a chapter.  At the beginning of the hour, I go through the class and just check that everyone did it, then we would go through it.  However, I found it very hard to keep track of who did the assignment and who didn't.  Often, I'd have kids coming up to me and saying "but I had it done that day!" which was difficult because, unless I specifically remember seeing an empty page, I'd have to take their word for it.

So, I decided to get a little stamp.  When I check for completion credit, if they finished the assignment, they get a little smiley stamp on their paper.  That way if I do make an error, they can prove me wrong.  No stamp means the student never showed it to me completed.  I have yet to have any student try to tell me they handed something in when they didn't.

Do you have what I have?

I saw a post on another teacher blog about a game called "do you have what I have?" to help practice vocabulary.
Basically, you put all the kids in a circle and give them a whiteboard.  Each round, the students pick a random vocabulary word and write it on the board.  After everyone's done writing, they reveal what they had.  You get a point for every match you have.
I played it this way in my first French 1 class today and the kids loved it. But I noticed they were always choosing the easy ones like "une orange" or "une tomate" (the cognates).  Because of this, I decided to mix it up for the second French 1 class.  Instead of getting a point for a match, you get a point if NOBODY matches you.  It encouraged them to dig a little deeper into their vocabulary memory and use some of the oddball ones.
I liked it much better this second way and found that they got much more out of the activity.  They all seemed to love it! They asked if we could do it again sometime.
There are many different variations you can do depending on where they are in the chapter.  In the beginning, maybe they can be allowed to have their vocab sheets with them.  Next step would be no sheets, but maybe some pictures on the board and not so picky about spelling.  Next step would be no pictures, but also not so picky about spelling.  Last step (for the end of the chapter) would be no prompts of any kind and spelling needs to count.
I will definitely be playing this again!