Tuesday, September 13, 2016

La Personne Spéciale

This year, I went full-hog into Bryce Hedstrom's Persona Especiale with all levels of my classes, with the understanding that the language we use in the upper levels will obviously be more complicated than the language I use with my lower levels.

I decided to start recording myself teaching so that my TPRS buddies *cough* you guys *cough* can give me constructive feedback.  Please don't destroy my soul, but if you have a few minutes (or 30) to watch and let me know what you saw that you liked or that confused you, please let me know!  I am always striving to be the best French teacher I can be!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeK6eChPNcI

Friday, September 2, 2016

Pencil Grab

Reading through my blogs that I subscribe to, I came across a blog by Martina Bex where she talked about Movie Talk.  I was kind of scanning through it and looking for target vocabulary that I could use for the movie clip she references when I stumbled across an amazing "game" that Martina took from Kristin Duncan who took it from Carmen Andrew-Sanchez.  And I tried it yesterday!

So, instead of using a new reading (which would be ideal), I typed up some of the facts we had learned about a student in class through La Personne Spéciale (Bryce Hedstrom's first unit of teaching) and we read through them.  Then, students sat in pairs with a pencil between them.  I would say a true or false statement about that student (only those facts that were typed up because I wanted them to look and re-read if they got confused).  If the statement was true, students raced to grab the pencil and the student with the pencil earned a point.  If the statement was false and the student touched the pencil, they lost a point.  I had so much fun tricking my students with this.  For example, I have a student who can imitate Barry Gibbs (how old are these kids?!).  So for one of her phrases, I said, Suzie can imitate Barrrrrrrrack Obama!  The groans and investment from the kids was awesome.
Here is a short video I took of one of my classes playing.  It wasn't as exciting because I didn't trick them, but you can see how it works.  The kids were very happy to be filmed, as you can see :)