Authentic French resources from Bonjour de France

Are you looking for authentic resources in French? Have a look at Bonjour de France. There are many great resources available here, including games, vocabulary development activities, listening and reading comprehension exercises, cultural readings... This is BdF's description of their site:

"Bonjour de France est un « cyber-magazine » éducatif gratuit contenant des exercices, des tests et des jeux pour apprendre le français ainsi que des fiches pédagogiques à l’attention des enseignants de français langue étrangère (FLE). À travers ses différentes pages, ce magazine se veut aussi un outil de promotion de la francophonie. De nouvelles rubriques interactives apparaîtront régulièrement afin que ce site soit pleinement un lieu de ressource et de partage."

The resources are tagged according to the European Common Framework. For American teachers, the Framework designations roughly correspond to the ACTFL proficiency levels in this way: 

A1, A2 = novice
B1, B2 = intermediate
C1, C2 = advanced

I encourage you to check out this great site - you are bound to find something of value to your classes that your students will enjoy and find engaging.

A Sample Dictogloss Lesson

I posted about the idea of using a Draw and Tell to differentiate a dictogloss the other day using a draw and tell story to review transition words the other day I did it and it worked out really well.

• With my rowdy class I started by putting a text on the board. It said 

 READ THESE DIRECTIONS CAREFULLY 

I will not be taking attendance right away. Please sit down and take out a piece of paper and a pen. When you are quiet, I will tell you a story. You should should NOT write down anything. Just listen to the story. I will begin when you are quiet. 

•  That worked better than it could have. They were quiet and ready within 5 minutes ( I was pleasantly shocked). Then I told them the story.  There was a boy. He was young. He was three years old. He went on a walk. He was attacked by bees. He was scared. He ran away. They followed him. He jumped into a lake. He stayed there until the sun set. The bees went away. He went home. I was eating eggs and bacon. I was happy to see my dog. 

NOTE: This story, though brief, is actually pretty hard since it is purposely bland! SO keep it simple.

• I told students to work on their own and try to recreate the story to be as close to the original as possible. They had 2 minutes. A few of them freaked out, but I let them know they would hear the story again. and they weren't expected to get it perfect.
• After two minutes I told them the story again. This time I drew the dog that goes with it. I told them they had one more minute. Most students did NOT look at the board; however, I noticed some students looking up and using the picture to help them.
• When the minute was done I told them to partner up and they spent the next 5 minutes working with someone else to recreate the text.
• Finally students swapped their answers with another partner and I showed them the original text. They made corrections and the team with the least mistakes got bonus points.
• I asked the students what was wrong with this text. THANKFULLY (as we had been studying transition words) they told me it was missing transition words.
• Now, with their partner, had to re-write the text to include AT LEAST
• 1 relative clause
• 1 cause and effect transition word
• 1 sequencing transition word
• 1 contrast transition word
• 1 addition transition word
• (When students finished early I added other categories to get them to add too)
• Finally we shared all the different ways the sentences could be combined.

This worked really well as a review of transition words, and we practiced general listening, reading and writing skills that would be on the exam. Even though the use of draw and tells is normally reserved for younger groups I think in this case it was a useful add on to help some students with the dictogloss. 

Reading more effectively

Hello all,
Here you can find a few tips on how to improve your reading skills in English. Enjoy!

http://independentenglish.wordpress.com

Useful Website: Proyecto Sherezade

Hello all, Claudia here,

I want to share with you a nice website I came across for Spanish teaching. Proyecto Sherezade is a site developed by a group of scholars who want to share unpublished stories from all Spanish speaking regions. You can use the texts to teach culture, literature, reading comprehension, etc. They even have a few of the stories in audio format so your students can work on listening comprehension.

Check it out and let me know whay you think!

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~fernand4//index.html

Spanish: El Día de Acción de Gracias

Hello everyone, Claudia here,

Do you need help explaining the Thanksgiving celebration in Spanish? These are links to some useful sites that talk about the whole tradition. One activity that you could do is have your students get in groups and try to explain what Thanksgiving is all about. After that, you could present the information from the sites to your students and have them talk about how much of the story they were familiar with. This will get students engaged since Thanksgiving is a topic they are very familiar with.

http://www.fireworks.com/spanish/holidays/thanksgiving.asp

http://www.usembassy-mexico.gov/bbf/bfholidays_AccGracias.htm

http://www.christiananswers.net/spanish/q-eden/ednkc002s.html

Reading in a Foreign Language

Hi all, Claudia here,

A close friend and colleague of mine told me about this great activity to start a reading or literature course in a foreign language. I recently tried it out in my classroom and it worked very nicely.

First you need to choose a short text, written in the students' native language, that will be well known among the students but that has a few uncommon words that not many of the students will know. You give each student a copy of the text and, in the target language, ask them to read it and underline any word they don't know. After they are all done, you ask them what words they didn't know, and you tell them the ones you don't know. Ask if anyone can explain the meaning of any of the words mentioned. You then close the activity by asking the class if they were able to understand the text at all.

The point of this activity is to show students that, even in their native language, there are words in texts that they might not understand, but that despite those words they can still understand the texts. So in a foreign language it also is possible to understand readings with out the use of a dictionary for every single word you might not grasp right away.

You can see below a copy of the text we used in our class. Please let me know if this works for you or if you know of any other good ideas!

Spanish: Reading Activities

Hi all, Claudia here,

Today I would like to share a fun way to review chapter or text readings with your students. I have found that follow up activities for texts are hard to come up with, especially fun ones. What you can do is prepare some questions on the assigned reading, it can be as many as you want and can range from very simple easy questions to more complicated ones.

You arrange your class in a circle and have a small soft ball with you. The idea is to pass the ball around the circle as in playing Hot Potato, but you use music instead of calling hot potato. So you play some of your favorite Spanish music and in the mean time your students pass the ball around until you stop the music.

The student holding the ball when the music is paused gets to answer one of your questions about the reading. It's up to you if you want to display the questions on a screen or read them to the students. Of course if that student doesn't know the answer you can ask the rest to help out and then you play the music again!

Students really like this activity and it works really well for morning classes when your students are still a bit sleepy!

I hope you try it out and let me know if it works for you!