I pretty much fell in love Tina Hargaden's video post in the CI Liftoff FB page in which she took us on a tour of her classroom, explaining her procedures and classroom setup and such. I decided to do something similar, but with the hopes of getting some ideas and feedback and (both positive and negative) criticism of my approach to my space.
The video is 10 minutes, so hopefully you'll be able to get through the whole thing without turning it off with thoughts of, "Good grief, this is boring," or, "Man, is this painful or what?"

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.

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!

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.