Speed Friending for Interpersonal Practice

Good morning friends!  Hard to believe another school year is upon us.  I'm really looking forward to this year as it is the first year that our full, new curriculum will be implemented.  I'm hoping with that will come a ton of more good ideas that I can flood this blog with.

One of the major shifts I have made is in my assessment practices.  I really started getting into it around the semester switch last year and I found it to be very effective. Rather than the usual pen and paper exam with a random oral exam thrown in, each unit has three major summative assessments: presentational, interpretive, and interpersonal.  I talk a bit about those in THIS blog post.

Getting students to talk to one another is difficult, as they tend to gravitate towards the same friends each time.  It occurred to me to try something different so that they can "interview" a lot of people in one chunk of time.  I decided to set it up like speed-dating (but of course in junior high we call it speed-friending).  For a class of 24 students, I set up 12 desks in a circle facing the outside, and then another 12 desks facing each desk from the inside circle.  I then told them to sit in any random desk.

Once students are in their seats, I set a timer on the board for two minutes.  They are required to speak French the whole time.  Then, after two minutes I have them rotate.  I've varied how they rotate.  Sometimes it's just one space, sometimes I roll a die to determine how many spaces.

This activity helps prepare them well for the interpersonal exam by helping them to be comfortable not only just speaking, but speaking with whoever they happen to be paired up with.

I've even taken it a step further sometimes (for example during the free time unit) and had them take notes on each person they interview.  Then they are required to write about who they want to be friends with and why.

photo from cvamemphis.org

Question Ball

I noticed as I clicked "new post" that this is my 100th post!  It's so awesome to see what this blog has not only done for me but for my readers as well.  It always makes me happy to see people posting in other places about using these resources/ideas and how they worked for them.

This is an idea I cannot take credit for, it's actually something my student teacher did.  Nonetheless, I just had to share.

I've definitely been pushing more for interpersonal proficiency in my room (something I really lacked in past years), so we have the students speaking quite often.  To mix it up a bit, my student teacher found a cheap $1 ball and wrote a bunch of relevant questions on it for our unit.

In the activity, the ball was thrown to a student.  Wherever their right thumb landed was the question they had to read out loud and respond to (en francais bien sur).  They really enjoyed it and it was fun with how random it was.

One way to even mix this up is to start by asking a student a question and THEN throwing it to them.  They must respond to the question first and then ask the question by their thumb to the next student and throw the ball.

Either way, it gets them speaking but is low pressure as it's just a simple question.  See the photo below for a photo of the ball.  Please excuse my chipping manicure ;)