FRENCH I
Café menus and name poems are two classic assignments that I have my beginning students do. Students tap into their creativity to render a final product that reflects them. The menus are later used as props in an origianl skit at the end of the food unit, incorporating all four productive and receptive language skills.
As French I students progress toward the novice-high level, they begin to express themselves at the paragraph level. These houses open up to reveal descriptions of the various rooms and furniture in the home. Language objectives included subject-adjective agreement, prepositions of location, and contractions with the definite articles.
French II
Returning to second-year French after a long summer can be daunting for some students. This first day activity, Symbolic Self-Portraits, is a fun, low-pressure exercise to help students review first-year vocabulary and structures and to get to know one another. Students draw their favorite foods, hobbies, and interests in the place of facial features and use their final product as a visual cue card when introducing themselves to a partner (en français, bien sûr ! )
The clothing unit lends itself to a lot of fun! Two of my favorite summative assessments are the Fashion Flipbook and 2-page spreads for a Fashion magazine or catalogue. In this first example, one student ingeniously combines previously learned food vocabulary with the structures and thematic vocabulary of the clothing unit to create an original “look.” The second example is a preliminary step in a spontaneous speaking activity where students choose looks for various occasions and describe to a partner what they plan to wear for the event. This activity encourages students to use relevant vocabulary, adjectives to express their preferences, and the futur proche as they describe future plans.
French III/IV
French III introduces a lot of new verb forms (like the imparfait and the conditionnel) and how to use them in concert with one another. After reading a French children’s book, Si j’étais un éléphant, students write their own story imagining what it’d be like to be something other than human. This is deceptively simple! Students must write correct si clause to express hypothetical situations–a much more sophisticated linguistic challenge than previously learned structures.
A student (and teacher) favorite is reading Le Petit Prince at the end of year four. Students feel a sense of accomplishment reading their first book in French. Among a myriad of activities and strategies that I use to support their reading, one of the more visually impactful is this reading map that helps students to summarize key chapters of the book corresponding the Little Prince’s visit to seven neighboring planets after setting out from his own. I am continually impressed not only by my students’ artistic abilities, but also by the amount of language they are able to apprehend and the levels of meaning they are able to extract from their reading of a beautiful and touching French classic.
