Chez Renée

One of the best things I've ever added to my curriculum is something called Manie Musicale . It's designed specifically for French teachers! If you've never heard of it, it's a French song competition modeled after the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. Students across the world vote for their favorite songs from a bracket of 16 current songs selected from all over the French-speaking world. I started participating a few years ago and have found it to be 100% worth it! Manie Musicale is free, but you do need to register your school to participate.  Brackets must be filled out by March 1 each year.  Teachers create bulletin board materials, games and other activities to use with students and share them with all of the other teachers participating!  Here is my bulletin board from a few years ago. It was made with the shared materials available on the Manie Musicale website. Teachers decide how they will reward the students with the best brackets.  I chose to giv...

Bonjour fellow teachers!  I'm excited to share a new idea with you that I tried for the first time last month.  I was inspired by a presentation I attended at a world language conference on creating a "break-out" lesson.  Have you heard of these?  I decided to try one as part of my semester exam review in my French III class. It was a lot of work to create this lesson, and at one point I did wonder if it was going to be worth it.  My students adored it though, and I thought it was fun, creative and a great way to review major concepts from the semester. If you aren't familiar with the concept of a break-out lesson, the basic idea is that groups of students are racing each other to unlock boxes containing clues which lead them to unlock the next box.  Each group is racing to be the first to make it to the final box.  So, one needs to create some sort of story which gives the students a reason for wanting to race to that final box.  That wa...

I would say that after more than 20 years in the classroom that one of the most important lessons I've learned is this:  If you can get your students interested in what you want to teach them, it will make you instantly more effective as a teacher!  My mentor would agree.  When I was a new teacher, he encouraged me to find out what students wanted, and then repackage my lessons accordingly.  I have found this to be very wise advice.   My students are immediately interested in anything that has to do with my classroom mannequins.  And why wouldn't they be?  Wouldn't it be SO MUCH more interesting to sit in a lesson where a teacher was telling & acting out a story about a life-size department store mannequin than to read a boring dialog in a textbook about Pierre & Anne who went to the grocery store?  I took that textbook dialog meant to teach students how to use the passé composé and threw it out, replacing it with a  story I wro...

Bonjour tout le monde!  I hope everyone has had a great start to their school year! I haven't posted in a while, and I'd like to thank those of you who've recently reminded me that you are reading my blog which has really encouraged me to keep on writing. I'd like to share a successful lesson that I taught last week.  This lesson was used in high school French II and students were learning how to name various professions.  I took a writing activity from my textbook (which described what certain people did in their professions and asked students to guess what it was based on the description), and turned it into a television style game show!  I made index cards on which I wrote the short descriptions and the French name of the person assuming that profession.   Then I made a Power Point presentation to create a game show atmosphere.  The slides of the Power Point showed the same names and descriptions that were on the index cards.  I also inserted game ...

Happy winter from the Mitten!  This weekend I spent a lovely few hours in my kitchen trying a new recipe.  Even though I've had the incredible good fortune to have lived in France, I had never heard of les petits bonhommes  until I saw a French chef preparing them on a cooking show.  They are absolutely adorable, and ever since I saw the show, I've wanted to find time to make them for my students.  You can find the recipe  here . The recipe is not simple and does require some time.  I love to bake though, so for me it was enjoyable and also very satisfying to be able to expose my students and also my own family to this French treat!  Here's how mine turned out: Let me tell you, these things smelled heavenly!  Not only are they cute, but to me they are so very, very French! I would describe the taste and texture as something close to a German soft pretzel, except that the dough is slightly sweet.  They are made in Alsa...

As I write this post, I'm sitting by my swimming pool enjoying the month of July and reflecting on the past school year.  This lesson was one of my favorite lessons, and it was something I'd never tried before.  I think it's so important for teachers to continue to learn, grow, and adapt.  This lesson was born out of a desire to find a more effective and interesting way to introduce the correct use of the passé composé (compound past tense) & the imparfait (imperfect tense) when describing past events.  I used it in my French II class, which for me is the first time the concept is introduced.  The idea I came up with is something that I discovered that many elementary school teachers already use...I first saw the idea on Pinterest.  Here it is:  use a crime scene investigation to get students to recreate a past event.  Brilliant!!!  I have to say that I've learned a lot from elementary school teachers over the years!  If you've ...

Bonjour tout le monde!  I hope you're all having a great school year!  Today is the first day of my spring break, and I'm really looking forward to some rest and relaxation, and some time to catch up on my blogging :).  And it looks like spring is finally arriving here in Michigan!  I feel invigorated already! I've been teaching for a number of years, but for some reason I've never included Le Poisson d'avril (the French equivalent of April Fool's) activities in my classes.  I tried it for the first time this week, and was happy with how it went.  I explained the French tradition of taping paper fish on the backs of others without their knowledge and then yelling "Poisson d'avril" when the prank has been discovered.  My classroom mannequin, Jacques, was decked out with fish in order to draw attention to the activity. The paper fish are traditionally taped on one's back, but I put them on the front here so that students could see them....

Bonjour fellow teachers!  It's the end of April...a time of year when most of us feel tired and are wondering if we can make it to the end of the school year.  It's the time of year when we feel like we're just limping or maybe even crawling to the finish line.  Creativity wanes.  We find ourselves just trying to survive.  And our students probably feel the same way.  Believe me, I know...and I feel your pain. I want to offer you some encouragement.  It is for all of these reasons that something new & exciting is just what is needed in our classrooms.  For our own sake, and also for the sake of our students.  We can not hope to pass along enthusiasm for learning to them if we're not excited about what we're teaching ourselves!  I get excited when I try something new and it turns out to be successful, and that's exactly what happened last week.  I had an idea about a new story I could write about my classroom mannequins, Jacques...

Hello fellow teachers!  I'm so excited to share this new idea with you!!  I tried it for the first time in my French II class last week, and it was an amazing success on so many levels.  I imagine that many of you ask your students to make videos for an assignment as I do.  This activity was done right after my students turned in a major video project which was due right around the time of the Oscar Awards.  In the past, I have asked the class to vote on the best video & I awarded a prize to the winner.  I liked doing this because it inspired students to produce something they were really proud of, rather than just making sure they met the requirements to get a decent grade.  I also discovered that my students often surprised me.  Sometimes students who didn't shine in other areas showed amazing creativity & ingenuity that I hadn't seen before.  But this year, I took this idea to the next level.  I held a mock Oscar Awards cerem...

If you've been reading this blog, you know that I use antique department store mannequins in my classroom as a way to teach French creatively and with pizazz.  My students love the stories I write about Jacques and his girlfriend, Suzette.  I often act out these stories, which are written to reinforce whatever I'm trying to teach at the moment.  In my opinion, the use of these mannequins is one of my best ideas for keeping my classroom exciting & stimulating.  You can imagine my excitement when I recently discovered 2 antique mannequin children for sale!  I knew that these mannequins would be Jacques & Suzette's children, and would provide inspiration for me to write new stories.  It didn't take me long to decide to buy them, knowing that I might never find mannequin children again. Here they are! I love the detail on these...they have real eyelashes!  It will be one of my goals for this new school year to write...

 Have you ever had your students write and perform puppet shows in your world language class?  I've done it frequently over the years, and it's an activity that I highly recommend if you haven't ever tried it.  I can't believe how excited high school students get over playing with puppets.  We did this in first year French this week, and my students came skipping with joy into the classroom during these days.  I even heard one of them say, "This is the best class ever!"  There was a lot of giggling and laughing going on, but students were also actively engaged in writing and speaking French.  Here are a few photos: I have a rather large collection of interesting puppets and also a puppet stage, but I bet students would have had just as much fun with a humble sock puppet.  Students began by writing scripts in groups of 2.  They had to choose from a list of topics I'd provided and write a conversation between t...

I just returned from a 10-day educational tour to France & Spain with my students, and it was truly one of the best student trips that I've been on yet.  This was only my second time leading a tour as the head teacher, and the first time was quite a few years ago with a different travel company.  I've also traveled on other tours as an assistant teacher.  The travel company I used this time is called NETC , and I could not have been happier with the service they provided!  All of my students came back so excited about what they'd experienced, and most of all, with renewed resolve to work harder at learning French or Spanish.  What music to my ears!  I had a wonderful time as well, and found that even I was inspired in new ways. Here are some of the reasons that I love NETC: Tour directors who live in Europe.   This person meets you when you arrive and directs the entire trip.  Having such a person in this role gives your stu...

I've been meaning to write a new story for The Adventures of Jacques & Suzette, my classroom mannequins (see previous posts on How to Use a Mannequin in Your Classroom for further explanation).  In particular, I've intended to write a story about Valentine's Day, but have had difficulty finding the time to do so.  I was inspired anew on a recent trip to Rome, where I saw padlocks covered with the initials of lovers locked to chains and posts on the bridges crossing the Tiber River.  I learned that the tradition is for lovers to lock these padlocks to the bridge and throw the key into the river as a symbol of their love. This tradition also spread to France, where lovers lock padlocks to the Pont des Arts  (this is the name of a bridge, for those of you who may not speak French) in Paris.  How romantic!  So, I wrote a new adventure about Jacques planning the perfect Valentine's Day date for his girlfriend, Suzette.  They wen...

I've begun the fabulous adopt-an-escargot  project in my third-year French class this week, and there is definitely excitement in the air!  I love how much this project awakens the interest of all of my students...even those in other levels of French.  Today, students in lower levels of French could be found gathered around  Escargotville in the corner of my classroom :).  It warms my heart to see this. Today I used the iPad2 in conjunction with this project.  Students were asked to write a haiku poem for their dear baby escargot.  After reviewing how to write haiku, students used the StoryKit app to create a page which contained a photo of their baby, the text to the haiku they wrote, and a recording of their own voice reading the haiku.  Students were able to send the link to me through email, and I was then able to project the pages onto the big screen so that everyon...