I have been thinking so much about these ideas since Brattleboro. During her language lab, Annabelle used a fantastic attention grabber: she would cry hola, hola and her students replied with coca cola. It was extremely effective with both adults and students, and I walked away itching to find something that works as well for me.
With my younger students, I've had a lot of success with a song: "Mains en l'air, sur la tête, aux épaules et en avant, bras croisés, sur les côtés, moulinets, et l'on se taît." I'm not sure where I first heard this, but I did find a video that went well with the song, though I only actually show this video to my super littles, as I think the older ones would think it's baby-ish. (Though, it still works wonders with my fourth graders, who learned it as third graders) I also created a poster with some decent images to accompany the song; email me if you'd like a copy, as I'm still figuring out patents and using images and the like. Anywho, I've been pondering what I could incorporate into my classes, regardless of level. I spent a lot of time talking to folks at the Express Fluency CI conference earlier this month and it started the wheels turning for me. I was striving to find something that would be culturally relevant, linguistically appropriate, and catchy, all at the same time. It made me think of a moment I had a couple of years ago when I was trying to connect with some locals during a summer in France. (Thanks, Tinder!) My friend Romain said during one of our conversations, "T'es sûre que tu n'es pas française?!" ("Are you sure you're not French?!") I was flattered to think that I had the ability to make a French person say, "Whoa, just how good is this American girl's French?!" So...I thought maybe I could use this to my advantage in my classroom and incorporate some common expressions as attention grabbers for my older kids. I wanted something where the teacher could say the first part, and the students could respond with the second. (In my examples below, the teacher's call is red and student response is blue.) The two expressions that really caught Romain's eyes were Allons-y/Alonzo, an expression from a Godard film that apparently made its way into Doctor Who! I also love, C'est cool/Raoul. (One could also substitute ma poule for Raoul.) After digging around a bit online, I found some other fun possibilities involving names that have cultural significance. En voiture/Simone A l'aise/Blaise Tranquille/Émile A la tienne/Etienne Check out the bottom of this post for a whole list of other possibilities! Then came the challenge of finding a great phrase for a Brain Break to mirror Annabelle's Chocolate hand game (she explains it, with photos, here on her blog). There aren't many four syllable French words, so I turned to expressions. Here are some possible ideas: aller-retour camionette boîte à conserves pâtisserie or boulangerie What other attention grabbers or French-specific Brain Breaks do you have? Please share! Bisous. After playing around with the idiomatic expressions with names that I listed above, I moved on to general expressions that I though could transfer to the classroom. Here is what I came up with: qui plus sait/plus se tait (I like this one because of the meaning behind it!) mon petit/chou c'est du/gâteau crème de la/crême à toutes/jambes après la pluie/le beau temps occupe-toi/de tes oignons vouloir/c'est pouvoir laisser les bons temps/rouler chose promise/chose due le temps/c'est de l'argent pas de nouvelle/bonnes nouvelle petit à petit/l'oiseau fait son nid quand le chat n'est pas là/les souris dansent qui va à la chasse/perd sa place plus on est de fous/plus on rit qui se ressemble/s'assemble tel père/tel fils on est tous/dans le même bain un sou/est un sou l'erreur/est humaine (or, divided differently, l'erreur est/humaine) l'union fait/la force (or, divided differently, l'union/fait la force) quelle/salade (I'm not sure how I feel about this one, I think the fact that the teacher's call is only one syllable could be challenging.) These expressions could also be used as passwords à la Bryce Hedstrom, and incorporated into class in a plethora of ways.
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I'm really excited to use lots of rejoinders this year. There are some great blog posts out there on this idea, especially by Bryce Hedstrom and Grant Boulanger, two incredible teachers who have been instrumental in stressing the importance and usefulness of the concept of rejoinders. I've seen these short phrases quite a bit here in Brattleboro at Express Fluency, and want to make a concerted effort to incorporate them into my classroom and make them part of the classroom culture. I believe that in arming the students with short, common expressions in French, I can cut down on the amount of English spoken but also empower the students to feel confident expressing themselves in French. Sooo...I started thinking about it, and had a lightbulb moment: combine these great expressions with some fantastic images-bitmojis! Examples of my bitmoji rejoinders(see all of them here; it's a view-only image, but you can make a copy for yourself!) ![]() For those of you who don't know bitmojis, it's a personalized emoji that you create. Check them out here! You choose hair color, facial features, skin tone, outfit, the whole she-bang! Then you can filter through the categories to find a particular image that fits an emotion, situation, or thought. Here are some examples of my favorites. Bitmojis are most often used on mobile devices, but you can now put use them on a laptop or desktop computer. ![]() You can download a bitmoji extension to Chrome to allow you to access your own bitmoji library. A little green smiley face appears in the upper right corner of your browser window. Click the little face and then browse through their categories, or search a specific word. You can then copy and paste into other documents or email messages. Not only are bitmojis ubiquitous with our students (ergo, I'll be wicked cool for using them), they are fantastic images! Make your own bitmoji, and let your rejoinder imagination run wild! PS-I decided that I am going to choose only 10 or so to have up posted at the start of the year. I am hoping I'll have my act together enough to be able to pull them out as the year progresses, introducing them organically as they fit classroom situations. This year at the VFLA annual conference, I was lucky enough to "share the stage" with the amazing Laurie Clarcq. After lunch, I gave a short follow-up to a session I had done last year at the VFLA conference on Movie Talk. The focus this year was parallel storylines, which I had seen for the first time at NECTFL in February. Mike Coxon, Eric Herman, and Blaine Ray did an amazing demo of this technique that I knew would change my teaching. So I thought and thought, and decided to do this activity using "Runaway" as my Movie Talk video. (Check out that video here.) My dad was going to come into my classroom to film this, and I was planning on using that footage as the focus of my presentation. But, it was March, and I live in Vermont, and Mother Nature decided to throw a curve ball. We had a huge snow storm the day I was going to do a MT with a parallel storyline for the first time, and alas, no school. I had no idea what to do until I was talking to a (non language teacher) friend who suggested I do the lesson with live teacher actors as a demo at the conference since I didn't have a video of my class. It ended up being genius. Teachers still had the chance to see this technique in action, and I had a "dry run" before actually trying it with my sixth graders. It was relatively successful: 80% of those who responded to our evaluation strongly agreed or agreed with the statement "I found Allison's presentation helpful and useful." One respondent said, "Thank you for the reminder of how this can work. I love your demonstrations and your energy." The next day, Laurie spent the day working with me and several colleagues. She had a great idea: I should teach the lesson I had intended on filming with my students prior to the conference that day. I agreed to take over from my substitute for one class, and Laurie and my colleagues were able to watch the lesson in action. Here's a video of the class; you may want to read the rest of this post before watching the video. The lesson unfolded this way: I prepped the vocabulary the way I normally (see this old video from last year, when I was doing a more traditional MovieTalk lesson).
Once I PQA-ed and gestured the vocabulary important to the video, I showed the first bit of the video and did some questioning, as I normally do. Then, I stopped. I chose two student actors, who would act out a story that paralleled the plot of the MT video. We had watched as far as the refrigerator's handle falling off. We then carried on, abandoning the original video and shifting to traditional TPRS story-asking. Once we had come to the end of the plot for our new story, we finished the video. I did not pause and ask questions while we watched the video, as I normally do. Here's where things got interesting. I did some of my traditional follow-up activities: true/false, Pictionary, put the events in chronological order. We then moved on to a reading of the original video. (You can check one of those out here.) I did this slightly differently this time. Normally, I write the reading and do activities with it. This time, I had students retell the plot of the video as I wrote it down. I projected the story on my SmartBoard, so students could see in real time what I was writing. (I have three classes, and we ended up with three different readings. If you click here, you'll find a folder containing all three versions.) During the next class, we did the same thing with the plot of the parallel storyline that students acted out. In class, I then had students draw storyboards of the parallel storylines (We used a sheet that's 3x3, and I gave students two minutes per square. I wasn't aiming for amazing drawings, just something they could use for their homework.) Students had two homework assignments: 1-show the video to a family member and narrate during the viewing, and 2-retell the parallel story using their storyboards as a "script." However, it was at this point that things took an interesting turn. When students were retelling the parallel storyline to me and I was typing it, I realized that it seemed a lot like a script. So, we began to modify it. And it took off. We ended up creating a whole play from our script. In two of the classes, each student had a different role: actor, narrator, or, in one class, producer. In the third class, every student wanted to act, so we did three different versions of the same script. Here's one of the first kinds of videos, with all student actors. I'm still in the process of finishing these videos, but I'll let you know when they're all done.
Sometimes you just have to run with what interests the students. I'll admit, there was a lot more English spoken than I would have liked during the actual filming of the videos, but seeing the students' enthusiasm and engagement made me realize how worth it it was to "go with the flow." I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, or how you've used MT and parallel story lines in your classes, successfully or not! Merci! I've been toying around with the idea of coming back to blogging. I started my first blog in 2011, immediately after having been to my first TPRS conference with Carol Gaab of Fluency Matters in Cancún, Mexico. (You can check it out here.) But, like life is wont to do, other things took over my to-do list and blogging fell by the wayside. There are so many blogs out there that I love checking out (I'll post a list of those soon), and I don't think I will ever get to the prominence of these amazing people, but maybe someone will read something here that helps them out. I want to be able to share my experiences with others, but also use this as a format to process things that happen in my classroom.
I spent a long time trying to come up with a name for my blog. I tried finding anagrams for comprehensible input, but I wasn't really psyched with any of the results. (The Public Rennie Smop? Blue Chip Pennie Storm? Be Nice Short Line Pump? Munich Beer Split Open? OK, that last one isn't bad...) So I looked up "input" in French. I found a couple of answers, but alimentation was my favorite. It means "input" as in power to a machine, but it also means "nutrition." Fascinating. I like to think that I'm feeding my students' minds. I want them to feel nourished when they leave my classroom, in a cerebral way. But, I want it to become "automatic." They are not processing language the way I did (running through verb conjugations in my head, worrying about whether my definite article is correct), they're simply using it. And to think of the multitude of ways I can deliver language: reading as the main course (the "meat" of the matter, or, in my case, the tofu!), PQA as salad (cleansing, simple, easy), Movie Talks as dessert (fun!). So that's where I'm going with this. I hope that you will follow me along my journey, as I am really excited to head down this path. Bisous. |
AuthorAllison Litten, the 2019 VFLA TOY, teaches French at the Marion Cross School, a public PreK-6 school in Norwich, Vermont. This is her twenty-third year teaching, and twentieth at Marion Cross. Archives
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