A lot of teachers ask me about how I run my classroom so I figured it was finally time to do a blog post about it. Seeing as it's almost September, I'll lay out how I set things up and how I explain how my classroom works to my students. I believe that a strong foundation in oral French is essential and that learning French should be fun. These beliefs are very evident in everything I do and that you see in my classroom.
One of the first things I explain to my students is "Les six étapes del'aquisitation d'une langue seconde", which is a poster that I made based on my understandings and beliefs about how you learn a second language. I get this printed up as a poster at Staples for around $15.00 because I like it best in colour format.
We always discuss the rules for our classroom and these can be summed up into five simple rules. I have created a poster with these rules, that I get printed up as a black and white engineering print at Staples for less than $3.00. I encourage my students to speak as much French as possible, all the time. To be clear, I teach a 50% French Immersion program and am currently teaching two classes every day. I teach French, Social Studies (in French), Visual Arts (in French), and Drama (in French) to one class, while the other class is receiving their English instruction and then we swap classes halfway through the day.
In addition to the posters on the wall, I created my own "Feuille de référence French Class Reference Sheet" that contains the most frequently used questions and objects so students can easily access them. I place these on their desks/tables.
I do spend some time at the beginning of the year going over routines and how my classroom works. I introduce the Strategies to Maximize Communication in French. (See that blog post to learn more).
At this point, it's time to have some fun, because, after all, that's one of my central tenants about teaching French. I usually break out one of my games; two of my favourite games for the beginning of the year (or any time, really) are "Pige dans le lac" and "Qui suis-je". They are both available for download for FREE from our TpT page. We were inspired by Nadine Pharand's version of Pige dans le lac and with her permission, added some language structures to facilitate increased oral communication in French. Pige dans le lac has students practice asking and answering questions with the verb avoir; it is the game "Go Fish" in French. It was such a hit with our students that we ended up making "Qui suis-je", which is a slightly different, but also easy to play card game that has students use the verb "être".
*A quick note but important note about the games we make.* We aim to create enough copies of each game so that the whole class can be playing with a partner at one time. This allows us to easily transition from modelling the game and having the class play with us, to students playing in pairs and the teacher moving around to provide support where needed. It's easy for a teacher to parachute in on the game play.
I make sure buy enough packs of cards for the class to play in partners, print and laminate the reference sheets and buy soap containers from Dollarama to hold the packs of cards. I label each set of cards with a number so that lost cards can be returned to the correct deck and the number is also labelled on the soap box.
Another game that I play during the first week is one that we created called "Questions au hasard", which is a French speaking game. I print off and laminate enough copies for the whole class to work in partners and each pair to have a copy of the game so that we can all play at one time. First, we play as a class and I pull up a PDF version of the game on the Smartboard and I use a giant die that I bought from Dollarama and I model how to play the game. We play a few rounds together before the students play with a partner. I like to play this particular game because there is a lot of structure so it is easy for students to figure out the format and there is also a lot of scaffolding so students who need assistance have access to support, while those who don't can generate their own questions and answers.
Another game that I play during the first week is one that we created called "Questions au hasard", which is a French speaking game. I print off and laminate enough copies for the whole class to work in partners and each pair to have a copy of the game so that we can all play at one time. First, we play as a class and I pull up a PDF version of the game on the Smartboard and I use a giant die that I bought from Dollarama and I model how to play the game. We play a few rounds together before the students play with a partner. I like to play this particular game because there is a lot of structure so it is easy for students to figure out the format and there is also a lot of scaffolding so students who need assistance have access to support, while those who don't can generate their own questions and answers.
Another thing that I go over at the beginning of the year is my homework expectations. My at-home reading program consists of students reading three times a week for at least 10 minutes in French, completing a reading response in French once a week, visiting my class website once a week (to play some French literacy-based games or watch some YouTube videos in French), as well as studying our mots de la semaine (which they can do from the website). I put together a package with the expectations, language structures and sentence starters for the reading response as well a sample response, and pages for tracking the reading and reading responses in a duotang labelled Journal de lecture. The reading log pages and reference sheets are available on my TpT store.
I run a weekly word program that I call Mots de la semaine. I just restructured my program last year and have an updated blog post all about how I run it. You can find the post here.
Here's what my class looks like at the beginning of September 2017:
