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!

Mmmm Pizza

So I have a policy in my classes that if the entire class gets a 90% or above on a test or a quiz, I buy them pizza.  It may seem like a daring proposition to make, but I have to say, in my entire time teaching, I haven't had this happen yet.  I've been close several times, but never had it happen.
Until last week.  I gave a verb quiz on the chapter verbs and my French 3s all got above a 90%.  It was a hard quiz too because there were a ton of irregular verbs (they're working on the chore unit right now).  So I am getting them pizza today.  Being the end of the month, it's the chapter test, so I'm going to let them munch on pizza while they take the test.  Hopefully that is motivation for them in the future (and for other classes) to do well.
I must say, though, thank God for Little Caesars.  I don't have to break the bank to get them all a slice of pizza :)

Pronunciation: The key between blood and boobs

So today in class, my students asked how to say "blood" in French.  I wrote "le sang" on the board, and before I could pronounce it, someone pronounced it as it sounds in English.  Literally "le" and "sang" (like sang a song).  The correct pronunciation is more like "sahn" but a nasally n sound.

I made that same mistake back in my day when I lived in France.  I was trying to say there was blood somewhere, but little did I know, with my American pronunciation of the word, I was actually saying there were boobs somewhere.  In French, breasts are "les seins" which is pronounced like you would say "sang" in English.

So I started giggling when this student blurted out what they THOUGHT was the pronunciation.  Of course, they were intrigued why I was giggling, so I wrote "les seins" on the board.  I pronounced both for them, without giving them meanings.  I then wrote the English translation next to each word and re-pronounced each one.  It didn't take them long to realize they were saying breasts instead of blood.  The reaction was quite hilarious.

And now they're going to go home and tell their parents they learned the difference between blood and boobs today.  I'm such a great teacher.....