Chez Renée

Today I played a conversation game in my French III class that was a big hit, and more importantly, got everyone speaking French and having a good time while doing it.  This game is good for upper-level students.  The directions take a while to explain, but it's worth it!  I wish I could remember where I got this idea...it was passed on to me by another teacher somewhere along the way :).   Students are to imagine that they are strangers stranded at an airport due to a snowstorm, and are to have a conversation based on this premise.  Only one person is allowed to speak at a time.  Students take turns asking each other where they are from, what they do for a living, and so on.  Each student is allowed to invent his own identity.  The more creative they get with this, the more fun everyone has!  Before the conversation begins, each student is given a secret index card which tells them their role in the game.  There are 2 spies, ...

Bonjour everyone!  I hope you've all had a great start to the new school year.  It's been a busy one for me, and I've gotten a little behind in my blogging...but I've been trying some new ideas in my classes that I'd like to share with you.  This one actually was inspired by my principal, who mentioned it in passing in one of our departmental meetings. The idea was to try a speed-dating style speaking activity.  I divided my class into groups of 2.  One student in each group had a profile that I created giving basic information such as their name, age, where they lived, their nationality, etc.  To make it more fun, they had a simple costume to wear as well...I have various masks & hats that I used for this.  The profiles included Jack Sparrow, Santa Claus, Yoda, Elvis, George W. and so on.  The other person in the group was the interviewer and was given a card on which I'd written some basic questions ...

I imagine that many of you out there in the blogosphere enjoy reading Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry with your upper level French students like I do.  I've collected many ideas over the years for activities to use while teaching this wonderful book.  I think these ideas  were passed on to me by my friend Mary, and I believe she found them on the FL Teach ListServ .  I use these at the end of our study of the book after students understand the book well.  I usually give students the choice of one of the following:  Write, create and illustrate 4 postcards written by the Little Prince to his flower from some of the planets he visited in the book. Create a board game or a card game that uses questions based on Le Petit Prince.   Illustrate the game and write original questions and answers to be used in the game. Design and create a planet that the Little Prince might have visited, maintaini...

We have just completed our second year of a 1:1 iPad program at my high school!  Now that it's summer (hip, hip, hooray!!), I'm reflecting on the apps that I've used in class & trying to determine which ones have been the most useful. One that I seem to keep turning to is called Doodle Buddy .   Doodle Buddy is a FREE white board app.  Students can draw or type in various colors and styles on a blank white board.  They can also change the background of their boards to designs offered within the app, or they can upload their own photos from their camera roll as the background.  I've found this last feature particularly useful. Here's an example of how I used this app while helping students to practice using ordinal numbers.  In the past, I would have had students draw animals, placing them on different levels of Noah's Ark, on a worksheet as they listened to my instructions in French.  This year I tried this instead:...

Popplet Lite is a FREE app for iPad which allows the user to diagram or map ideas with ease.  I've been meaning to try this app with my students all year, and finally did so in my French IV class.  We had just finished reading Le Comte de Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo) as a class.  This was a lot of work and took us a lot of time.  After finishing our study of the book, we watched the film in French.  As is often the case, the film is quite different from the book.  I wanted my students to compare the book with the film in French, and using Popplet to do this worked really well. I asked students to map out the differences and the similarities between the book and the film, and then to share the popple with me.  Here's an example of a student mapping the differences: And here's a popple showing the similarities: I found this app very easy to use and very intuitive.  It is also possible to insert photos into ...

Have you heard about Quizlet? It's a very powerful tool all teachers should know about! Basically, Quizlet is a website that allows you to create flashcards in many languages. Students can access the cards you've created and play games and even take tests in order to learn the words on the cards.  They can also  listen to any word in French and hear how it's pronounced.  And it's FREE. I decided last year to make Quizlet flashcard sets for every unit for each level of French that I teach.  That was a lot of flashcards!!  I put links to all the sets on my class web pages, and now students can go there any time they want to and study for any unit they want to, which I think is a great resource for a teacher to provide.  If you would like to see the sets I've made, or even use them, you can search for my user name ( madamermwood ) at the Quizlet site. The questions becomes, however, how to integrate this tool into a wo...

This year I tried a new project at the end of the semester as a way to review what we'd learned.  My high school is in year #2 of a 1:1 iPad program, and I consider myself lucky to have this amazing tool to work with when considering a new project.  I decided to try an app I'd heard of called PuppetPals HD .  This app allows students to create puppet shows using different backgrounds and different characters, and they are able to record their voices as well.  The possibilities for creativity are endless, and to top it off, the app is free! I asked students to create a puppet show after giving them specific guidelines for what I expected to be included.  Students had a lot of freedom to create whatever sort of story they wanted to.  While creating these projects, I was happy to see lots of smiling and giggling going on.  I was also pleased with the results.  Here's an example. I was delighted to ...