...went the sound of French I today. [Friends will notice the usage soigné of the sports metaphor. I'm all about the sportsball, as you know.]
Actually, it sounded more like:
¨Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait hier?¨
¨Hier, j'ai perdu des clefs.¨ x1,000,000,000
One of my favorite things about my experience at CAVILAM last summer was that, although I came back with ideas that revolutionized my classroom, none of it required me to completely abandon everything I do.
Example: I've been using Battleship as a classroom activity since I picked it up from my co-op teacher during my student teaching. The most basic thing was to substitute the letters on the grid for subject pronouns and the numbers for verbs, and...BOOM...instant oral conjugation activity.
That was good. Today's was better (grâce à Marjolaine Pierré!). Rather than this being a simple grammar drill activity, adding one little step made it communicative.
By having the person on the defensive for each turn ask a question first (¨What did people do yesterday?¨), the ¨A1, ¨B3¨, etc. guessing game becomes an answer (¨I made a pie¨, ¨We sold a bike¨, etc.) instead of a dead-in-the-water (pun'd!) sentence just for the sake of grammar practice.
My other observation about what students have done with this activity in the past is that the pronoun + verb oral conjugation activity in this stage of the game (I just introduced the passé composé yesterday) usually results in numerous errors. And practice makes permanent.
So, as I put this activity together today, already knowing I wanted to shift the goal to interpersonal communication, I said to myself, ¨Self, we're going to go ahead and conjugate these verbs for the kids. That way, when they speak, they will speak correctly, with some fluidity/fluency, and the answer won't be completely removed from the question due to long pauses." The other benefit of doing this is that by focusing on communication and giving them a bit of a script, they are--hopefully--internalizing the patterns and the sounds of this new structure. Tomorrow, then, we will do more structural drilling but with much greater ease than if I had simply said: ¨Conjugate!¨
Lastly, I did make an additional adaptation: rather than printing out paper game boards, I structured the activity so it could be easily completed on students' Chromebooks (which had the bonus effect of feeling a lot more like traditional Battleship). The document I've shared, however, can also be printed if you'd rather.
THEY LOVED IT! Kids got so into the game, the French that they were practicing was correct and fluid, and I had requests in every class to be able to play again.
P.S. Some of my kiddos were throwing around vocabulary like ¨un porte-avions¨ and ¨un sous-marin¨ because learning those words made them happy, I guess.
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