Aller

I am still teaching verbs to my beginners and learning verbs becomes a full time job as a language students but knowing verbs moves your language skills through the levels very quickly. Aller is one of the irregular verbs I teach early but it is important for students it is a foundation verb in French and forms the core of a number of expressions which are frequently used. I don’t teach them all at once but I do teach them one or two at a time – like, allez, viens (come on!)and il faut que j’y aille ( I have to go.) The Imagiers conjugation video for aller is .

France des saveurs

France des saveurs has a very comprehensive look at French cuisine by region and so is an invaluable site for the teaching of French food. It runs in French and English.

ER Verbs

I have tried to put together a visual representation of how I have been teaching er verbs this year. It is part of the whole verb picture. I am working on a slide presentation to teach French verbs in the present tense but that is not finished yet as I am still teaching them. That will take the rest of this term. So, for me, it takes the whole term to teach verbs in the present tense to my beginners. I started with my presentation so we looked at the conjugation and the endings. We then made a list of er verbs and some sentences. We have constantly come back to that even as I teach the new verb groups. The videos I have used are Moi, j’aime skier, a song my student teacher introduced called Tu peux choisir and it is a good song to go verb hunting and ending hunting. It is an exercise he introduced and it works well for verbs and the students will recognise the verbs more and more ans we progress through the verbs. I played them the Imagiers er verb video which explains it all very well. We have done work book exercises, worksheets and sentence building. We are working on a game to write sentences , cut them up and then reassemble them. I have written up the pronouns and stems and then asked them to recall the endings . I have made some verb quizzes with ProVoc and they really like that especially the race against the clock quiz. The whole point of all of this is to get them to communicate. So we have done the sentences but we are finishing it off with the petits personnages mystérieux.It could just as easily be something to do with the family members, or a pet or friends. All in all it has been a very comprehensive approach and now that I have established how that works well with digital input I am more than happy. Revision can be done with the Aimer video.

Trois petits cochons à la gaga

Might as well complete the video hat trick and allow you to add this little gem to your collection.It is the story of the Three Little Pigs in French but it is a very engaging production with a very catch song so that students can see the words and be drawn in. This sort of video is also useful with older students who can feel a sense of success but also have their load lightened with a charming , little video they can relate to.

Moi, j’aime skier

Pigloo is a good little character to use for learning French. There are songs we recognise and most of the clips come with the words. This clip is good for teaching animals, verbs, activities, weather. The more students learn, the more they will understand this clip even at a basic level.

Learn verbs with Tu peux choisir

Ce clip est très cool! My student teacher brought it into class and used it to teach verbs! The students all loved it because they liked the narrative and then they could easily identify all their verbs they were learning. They can highlight infinitives, er verbs, ir verbs, re  verbs and irregular verbs. Tu peux choisir will also teach them how to use auxiliary verbs. Great grammar song! The words are here.

Verbs for beginners

Digital Dialects   has a number of easy games for students learning French. This one on verbs is helping to ensure they know their verb endings.  It’s a matter of clicking on the red arrow so all the focus is on learning the language.  It is then worth going back to the menu to find other verb and vocabulary games .

French Subjunctive

Reblogged from Toutes Les Couleurs du Ciel:

I struggle with french grammar and I have always found it difficult to fully understand the french Subjunctive. This week I’ve been trying to revise it and found the videos and exercises from this website very helpful. Let me know if you’ve found any other good interactive games, quizes or videos on the subjunctive! Here are the videos for all of you trying to learn it too:

Read more… 1 more video

We can all struggle with the subjunctive. This is very helpful.

ER verbs au present

My year 8s were delighted with this this afternoon. Monday last two lessons is not a prime time for teaching verbs but I went in there full of hope and determination. I taught the patterns and concept of verb conjugations first. We made a list of ER verbs and then we looked at this video. They found it easy to follow because of our prior preparation and then they really loved his accent and the way he spoke with them. The ending of the video left with such a good feeling about verb conjugations!

Youpi! Mon blog passe au vert.

Image: Petits gestes écolos Un Blog = Un Arbre -> ma production de carbone est compensée. It is an initiative which was part of a reforestation plan which the German Mach’s Gruen campaign started in 2010 and finished in 2011. It was a straight forward call to bloggers to offset their carbon emissions. Alexander Wissner-Gross PhD and physicist at Harvard University had worked out a blog puts out about 3.6 kg of carbon a year and a tree absorbs about 5kg. I actually believe he would have been far more accurate with his numbers. This sort of easy call to action is something which is achievable. I have a tree planted for each of my blogs and schools could plant trees either on their grounds or as part of a reforestation programme elsewhere to ensure their technology is carbon neutral. With the German programme you sent an email and someone else did the planting. Since that programme has finished and we have nothing similar here I didn’t find it hard to go out and plant my own trees! The trick is to make it easy for everyone.

Il faut adopter une attitude éco-responsable et planter un arbre, c’est facile! Il y a des gestes de tous les jours qui pourront aider.

Les couleurs – chanson

Yelle – à cause des garcons

This song is a real favourite with students. The original clip by Yelle is here. A couple of minutes with a good song does wonders for enthusiasm and motivation. You also find if you bring something to the students they will bring their ideas to you and thereby increase your resources. With more experienced classes you can do the lyrics and students really appreciate that and you will find they will go and download other songs and find the lyrics and add to their own French practice that way.

Learn Vocabulary

On the WordSteps site you can learn more than French and it does support other languages and other learning material. It is a very easy site to manage and navigate. Nothing complicated and the French section helps you to learn vocabulary but it is based on trust. Good concept. You test yourself and you are honest with yourself if you know it or not. It’s a great site to easily use up those times when you are stuck somewhere with nothing to do. If you have mobile access to the internet you can just do a bit of vocabulary learning. Great site to encourage beginners.

I really blog you

Presse Citron (linked right)never fails to come up with something surprising which can really put some life and energy into a lesson because Presse Citron has a wow! factor which I have blogged about before. If you follow this link you will arrive at the post for I blog you and you can discover that Web 2.0 has a lot of power and punch. You can follow the links from this post to the I blog you site which is very cute and you can download the song for free. Doesn’t get more up to date than that!

Introducing yourself

The French Tutorial is a good site to know if you want to refresh your French or learn the basics. It is neither patronising nor too fast. The material is presented in a very straight forward easy to manage way. It is worth registering and there are no catches. You can download the material as an e-book and it is well worth having. This section on introducing yourself focuses on the basic information you need to remember to introduce yourself adequately in French.

French Alphabet

Digital Stories

The digital EHON site is starting to convert a number of Japanese stories into various languages. One of the languages it supports is French. The link takes you straight to the French section . One of the charming stories is Dongoruso, le chat vilain. it would be fantastic if the site would provide readers for the stories or if people would volunteer to read the stories in the languages the site supports. One thing at a time , though, they are busy getting the stories online. It’s a nice thing to show students because they respond to the images and then are willing to work through the language content and then perhaps they can make their own little stories in a slide presentation. That would suit older students. I like this site because it means you are teaching a target language but discovering the culture of another country through their texts.

Marmiton.org

Marmiton.org is a great site if you are looking for some authentic French recipes. Like Cahier de Cuisine which I blogged about before, it has a whole range of irresistible recipes.

Le Point du Fle

Le Point du Fle runs in English, French and Spanish and is a comprehensive site for learning French at all levels. It has plenty to choose from and caters well to all levels. It also has a section for teachers. The site also links out to some good material for learning other languages too so let your colleagues know!

Second Life

Second Life is a good way of practising French because you can run it in French…and other languages. If you look in the section at the bottom of the screen then you will find the French version of the video and you can judge for yourself if it would be worth using this in class or even encouraging students to use it at home. Don’t overlook games and gadgets as a good way of learning French. A lot of gadgets can easily change the language and a number of games will run in French and for students, this is a big draw card. There is not yet a lot on 5 Minute Life Videopedia which runs in French but there are some things and hopefully there will be more.

Opening a wine bottle with a shoe

Okay, this one is probably for adult learners of French and for teachers. The little video of How to open a wine bottle with a shoe is extraordinary! It’s helpful, useful, the French is clear and easy to follow. If you are learning French there are plenty of words which you will pick up along with the novel tip of opening your wine bottle with a shoe! It’s worth going to wimp.com because it does trawl for good videos and some of them are in French. The videos are always a bit different so they create an enthusiasm factor for you without your even having to try.

Quizlet Flash Cards

I know, you are over Flash Cards. For a while there that is all we had as French teachers to enable us to engage with e-learning and there is a limit to how many flash cards students want to do. Quizlet is different in that it has a lot of contributors and so there is plenty of choice for flash card activity . Now that students often have their own laptop then it is a good site for them to do some their own practice. Consider adding flash card sets of your own because the more we contribute to sites like this, the more choice we shall have and the easier it will be for us to manage e-learning requirements.

Il n’est jamais trop tard pour apprendre

When I sense students are feeling despondent or disheartened with learning French then it calls for a quick fix. That might be a good song, or a little video but I find the best way to reignite them and boost their confidence is to do it in 10. 10 French words, 10 French expressions…always ones they can easily master. This can take a few minutes or several minutes or even a whole lesson if I believe it warrants it. Usually not. Usually a 10-15 minute burst of energy. For a start they like the pronunciation and the face pulling. Secondly they like the noise and thirdly they like how easily they can learn in 10. So I might take non or oui or temps or jamais and really work it. With jamais I might do:

1. jamais
2. à jamais
3. à tout jamais
4. jamais de la vie
5. jamais sûr
6. jamais vu
7. sait-on jamais?
8. plus belle que jamais
9. presque jamais
10. c’est le moment ou jamais

We pronounce these things until they are comfortable. I might give them a couple of minutes to come up with a couple of things of their own and we might extend my list to 15 or 20 with their additions. They like that and take it seriously. During the next few lessons I find opportunities to use the expressions and remind them. I might go to a site like French Podcasts and let them listen to the one on jamais or I might download the MP3 to use it later or the PDF of exercises that we can do in another lesson or suggest these things for homework and then, the icing on the cake…a great song to practise jamais:

Je ne changerais jamais par La Grande Sophie

Il n’est jamais trop tard pour apprendre

I gave you all that information yesterday about how to focus on a word or expression and lift your classes. I took the information and transformed it into a slide presentation with the links to the podcast page and song, so now I have an e-lesson set to go. Do not be frightened to experiment. Having a slide presentation on SlideShare means students have access to this and so do I no matter what the operating system.

One minute videos in French

1 minute de pause is a great site to know because it has one minute video cartoon episodes in French which you can use for your own benefit in learning and maintaining your French or with advanced learners. I would show it to beginners too because it is entertaining and has a good ecological message. You could guide beginner through it with support and encouragement. It’s a site for developing enthusiasm about learning as well as diversion! Yannick Noah the French tennis player and singer features in the cartoons and that really is his voice. He is doing a lot to support ecology and education . You can join the site and make your own avatar and generally just have fun while you are learning!

Languages Online

Languages Online is a site created by the Victorian Education Department in Australia. It supports and provides online activities , ideas and worksheets for a number of languages , but we are only interested in French, right? There are some great little things for beginners in French, so they would set a good foundation and experience upon which you could build. Those early experiences with language learning need to be good! So far there are 35 topics for French which will fit into your themes for beginners.

Online French Help

Online French Help is a site for beginners to learn French. It offers themed vocabulary but if you join the site there is more on offer in terms of support for learning French. It uses native speakers. The participation aspect of it is a good idea for adults who quickly need to get some French under their belt but I hesitate with sites like this because of internet safety issues for children. In time we shall sort these issues out because there would be nothing better than for students to have online access to supportive native speakers. As it stand there is still plenty of material you can use in a classroom with students and then monitor the other aspects of the site yourself.

Verb Conjugators

Where would we be without verb conjugators and you used to have to carry around a whole separate book! Not any more. They are all online and here are some excellent ones. I’ll share 3 with you. Le Conjugueur has a downloadable version as well as its online version which you can install on your computer . It also has versions for mobile phones. This one is tried and true and my students and I have used this reliably for several years. Conjugaison en ligne is great because it has conjugations, exercises, worksheets and downloadable materials. It has a cute interface too! Takes the worry out of verb conjugations. Then there is the ruby red Les Verbes which has a nice clean clear approach and does a great job!

RadioFrance

RadioFrance is a very good streaming radio site because they have lots of choices for the sorts of things your might want to listen to. It’s a good way to keep current, to practise and maintain your French and immerse yourself in a bit of culture and news. The choices allow you to pick and choose according to your mood. If you a looking for French radio sites you cannot go past this one which must be listing them all! My students have always seemed to enjoyed exploring FunRadio.

Music Clips

This isn’t a site you can just go on with some students as it is current material and not all of that is suitable for school use. It is a site you can make good use of to keep yourself up to date with popular music in France and some of the material would be suitable for class. It at least offers you a good look at the music and songs and covers a wide range of artists.Regarder-Clips is well worth a look.

Telling the time

L’horloge de Mathilde is a cute little programme which you can download from here and then run it on your computer. it teaches analogue and digital time and the parts of the day. My students have always learnt the time in French very quickly and easily with this programme.

Nursery Rhymes

This is one of those gloriously fuss free sites. You go on Comptines, you click the song and it plays. No searching and finding, no digging through layers of pages. The songs are very well known but if you do not know the words, go to the bibiolthèque tab and you can click on the song and the words will be displayed which you can then download in .pdf form. The whole site is worth exploring because there are some good activities and resources there.

Enseigner.tv

TV5 is a good site to go to because it supports the teaching of French in francophone countries, but there is material on the enseigner.tv site which you can use with more advanced students. The site selects videos and then provides worksheet support and lesson ideas. It is actually worth investigating the whole site because there are quizzes and games, vocabulary practice. I tend to use it to maintain the skills of students who have a good grasp of French. The site is also now delivering materials for iPhones.

Learn it in 10

I explained before how it is sometimes a good idea to focus on 10 words and how students find that easy to work with and how it can actually give some shade and colour to their learning. They find learning 10 things manageable, but if you practise one form or one word, then they really appreciate its use. One word I do in 10 is “en” because it has such unique uses. So here are your 10 expressions:

1. J’en ai les larmes aux yeux
2. J’en ai marre
3. J’en ai ras le bol
4. Je vais en voyage
5. Il va en France
6. Allez-vous en!
7. Il va de mal en pis
8. un arc- en -ciel
9. On apprend en pratiquant
10. Il faut couper le pain en tranches

The good thing about en is that you can practise those critical nasal sounds as well.

Daily French Pod

DailyFrenchPod is an opportunity to learn French online and there are sufficient free materials for you to be able to make a sensible judgement whether it is for you or not. There are levels from beginners to advanced and the material is interesting. You can subscribe to get more material or download podcasts from iTunes. That to me is a really good sign of the technical flexibility we are now enjoying. The French is read slowly and carefully so it is excellent for working on your accent!

Babbel

I have blogged about Babbel before because it really is a good site for learning French if you are an adult. I have reservations for school students as I explained in my previous post. Since then Babbel has done quite a bit to improve the quality of its online deliver and it now features speech recognition so the site is highly interactive comparative. It also has apps for the iPod and iPad. Babbel gives you a very fair chance to assess the site with its free material and I found it very helpful and easy to navigate.

La Chocolaterie Puyricard

Learn French

ToLearnFrench is a pretty handy site to know because it has quite a few practical resources – the sorts of things you need to smooth out lessons and learning. This particular link takes you to the dialogue section where you can find dialogue scaffolding so that students can make themed dialogues and use expressions which are authentic. It keeps students on track. You can practice them as an extra to what you are doing or use them to get students to create their own dialogues.

Authenticity

It is always important to have authentic materials to show students. The door hanger can be used to teach commands and then the way a language will say something in a way you do not expect it to. Ne pas déranger is different from learning Ne me dérangez pas and me dérange pas. So one little picture can turn into quite a lesson on negatives, imperatives and reflexive verbs and then formal and informal language. This hotel was completely revamped last into a far more modern hotel, so that door hanger won’t even be used any more so we talk about le tourisme.Sometimes there is someone in the class who can read the Japanese and it’s good for students to see that other countries present information in several languages. Authentic materials give you so much more to teach. This hotel is called Le lagon…so we can talk about what it means, i can show them Le Lagon and un lagon…and we can talk about la mer, l’océan, la plage, le lac. One little door hanger goes a long way!

Classroom Language

Apprendre le français is a very straight forward site which teaches the vocabulary and expressions students and teachers need to conduct their classroom in French. Best way to learn a language! The site has expressions for teachers and then a separate list for students. All of these expressions have native speaker sound files.

Bonjour

The Bonjour free aspect of this site gives you a chance to evaluate some of the easy material offered by the Rocket French Course and other French courses which you pay for. I maintain my own French by going online, using the CD stacker in my car, my DVD player and then my iPod Touch. I have paid for CDs and iTunes downloads to help maintain my French. Technology has comes a long way recently. When you buy a CD you don’t always know what the material is like and how it will be presented. It is good to have a way of evaluating some material before you commit to purchase. In any case this is a good site to help beginners with some basic vocabulary. As a teacher I don’t want to be touting business for people but I can see I am in the perfect position to do that because for my experience and then the number of courses I am familiar with. I still don’t want to do that in a classroom. That said, I have blogged about this site because it does offer you a way of improving your French, firstly through the free material and then if you choose to pay. I signed up for the free 6 day email course and I have to say that delivery of the promised materials is quite quick…and my first lesson has arrived while I have been blogging this!

Why learn French?

French is a major language in the real world and on the internet and so it becomes a good language to use to smooth communication. Increasingly employers are looking for people with language skills and so French is a good language to offer. There are so many reasons and most of them are listed here on this very comprehensive site. Learning a language adds to thinking, literacy and communication skills. On an international , global market using languages is essential. French is a good start because so many people know French and can help you.

Ma Famille

This site by Alexandra Guy is beautifully presented and just perfect when you are trying to teach your students how to describe their own families. The site is one of the best ones I have found for helping with the language associated with speaking or writing about their families. It works well because it is real. Students like real.

Au marché

Les animaux domestiques

This is a very good site from the Victorian Education Department to learn how to talk about animals in French. It will in no way swamp the beginner. It builds up confidence quickly. That done, Les chats is a lovely French site to expand vocabulary when you want to talk about pets.

Interactive Verb Practice

The University of Texas at Austin has a very strong French department which comes up with some very innovative ideas for French and has done so for years. This time it is just what you have been looking for – an interactive verb practice site where you can learn your verbs in logical groups and then the verbs which always catch you out. you select the verb or the group and then the tense. As simple as that. Great practice site which looks good too.

Salade de fruits

The karaoke version can be found here!

Mon Quotidien/Daily Routine

The GCSE Bitesize site offers some excellent practice in French for those who have some grasp of the language. The particular exercise is on the daily routine and as each page goes by, you learn more and more until you reach the text which is also translated into English. It is a site which genuinely supports you in learning French. Truth is , you could start with the text first and then work backwards to just listening to it. The materials are there and you can decide how they will best serve you.

Les activités

Teaching students about activities and getting them to tell you what they did at the weekend or on their holidays can be boring because it is the passé composé revision and then days of the week, then times of the day and then, on top of all of that a list of things they might have been doing. So there is list after list and then the practice. So focus on one thing at a time and then in one double lesson put it all together. You can break it up a bit with flash cards, slide shows for learning vocabulary and tenses, then activities. Then there are these two online activities which they can do independently. Quizlet gives them some flashcards to practise independently. Byki gives some pronunciation practice and then a solid list of activities they can master independently.

Reflexive Verbs

French Recipes

La Cuillère is a lovely site for finding straight forward and easy to cook French recipes. Nothing else to say – try it!

Passé composé

The passé composé is definitely something to be learned in steps. The formation of it, the verbs with avoir, the verbs with être, the reflexive vers, the agreements. It all takes time but lots of practice makes it easier. First you can go to Tex’s site and do the verbs with avoir. You can then do the verbs with être or you can go here. There is a slideshow here which explains all the details…in French! CliffsNotes gives you a very clear overview to consult at any time. Bonne continuation!

Adorable Little French Girl

Telling the time

CliffsNotes is a very helpful site which enables you to cover the basics in French. It sets the material out in a clear, fuss free manner and you can easily grasp the basics before you move onto more complicated or more demanding sites. This is the link for telling the time and then you can go and download l’horloge de Mathilde and really practise it!

Les verbes pronominaux/reflexive verbs

Le Tour des Fromages

You cannot learn French and not know about cheese! There are two good maps here. To find out about cheeses then this is a good site. You can consolidate the learning with this wonderful webquest. Bon appétit!

Learn French

ielanguages.com is a good place to start learning French. It is easy, straight forward, graded in levels of difficulty and has a lot of support for learning the content. There are sound files, flash cards and exercises.

Phineas et Ferb

Direct and Indirect Object Pronouns

First an explanation which will support the text and teacher explanations: here. Now see if you can do this exercise. Vocab? helps you with the words. This site has the same explanations but with sound files.

Vogue.fr

You cannot always get French Vogue in Australia. Like today. I went to town and there just wasn’t a copy. So here I am on the French Vogue site and it is not the same as reading a magazine and sharing that, but it is a very inspiring site . The fashion parades are things I show in class from time to time because the students find the fashions so different and the boys are just as interested as the girls. We look to see what we’d buy and how we’d describe them in French. I ALWAYS preview the fashions first before I show them in class.French fashion can be very inspiring when morale is low or the class is dragging it’s feet a bit because they are tired form other activities or illness.

La maison

learning about the house in French can be very tedious because there is so much to learn. Then you are basically left with drawing up a house plan and adding furniture. These days I get students to describe their dream home with pictures, or focus on one room – like their idea or dream bedroom. Students have worked really hard on learning house and home vocabulary that way. Two invaluable sites when I am doing this exercise are Maison Facile and Marie-Claire Maison. Students are just transported by the ideas on these site!

French Vocabulary

Byki is a great site for getting to know basic vocabulary and expressions. It presents the material in different ways and then you can test yourself with the flash card set up.The added bonus of having everything pronounced for you is really helpful. The downloadable programme works on Apple and Windows.

Numbers in French

Numbers is French is a very straight forward site for learning the numbers. If you’d like something which is fun and more demanding then go here. For other online activities to practise numbers there are plenty of choices on this site.

Qu’est-ce que tu vas faire ce weekend?

This is a nice little French exercise to practise talking about he weekend. It will suit intermediate learners of French. They put the words in the gap. My class will do that first and then we’ll read it and go through it. They are then doing their own conversation about the weekend which they are going to do as a podcast or an iMovie. They are very excited and their first efforts went really well, which is why we are now expanding their French and technical skills.

Phineas et Ferb – Chanson avec paroles

Mes Year 8s sont accros de Phineas et Ferb!

Phineas et Ferb – Une plage dans le jardin

French Food Game

This site is good for practising basic French food items, but if you go to the home screen there are lots of other basic vocabulary practice games to choose from. The sound is clear and the games does not go too fast for learners. My younger students really like this site and get a real sense of success from it.

Ta douleur – Camille

Camille est absolument époustouflante et très magique. This song continues to enjoy great success with my students and this version is magical. The words are here.

Audio French

Audio French is a one stop shop for everything you could possible want to support you in your learning of French. Everything is pronounced for you. There are vocab lists, verbs, interesting links out to help you get an idea of the French culture. There is a travel log and some good tips for travelling to France. Everything! It operates as a dictionary but it is so much more than that. This site is a good example of just how much more comprehensive an online site in any category can be.

French Videos

I have been making a slide show with animals and their names in French and I wanted a video to play at the same time. I have been using iMovie. Originally I used Microsoft Producer but we only have Apple technology at work. While I was looking for suitable videos I found this great site for French video clips. I found the video of a Belgian zoo at VodeMotion but here are plenty of other clips suitable for classroom use.

Les animaux

I am busy teaching animals at the moment to my year eights. Gone are the days of giving out a vocab list and going through it. I have prepared an iMovie which runs with animals slides and vocab and then an embedded film of a Belgian zoo. The details are here on my other blog. The site I am showing a picture of I have used a lot and students really like it. you can do the vocabulary and then the exercises. If you do one section a lesson then they know all the animals by the end of the week. They like the cartoon characters and then the pronounciation practice.

Visitons un gîte

This site has a lot of information about gites. Most Australians don’t know you can stay in a gîte in France and that it can be a good experience. I make an effort to teach about gîtes. Here is an example of what I do:

Visitons un gîte.

1. Select a gîte in France which seems like the sort of place Australians would stay. Now find a similar place you know of in Australia and create an advert for it in 50 words of good French. Cite your research please.

Vocabulaire:

Vous aimez le sport?
Détendez-vous
Allons à la ferme!
Situé au bord de la mer. à la campagne
Confortablement équipé pour vous

10 marks

2. Create a one minute video of your stay in the gîte in French. It can be like a tour or you can simply do a web log which might be sent to your French speaking friends. Use iMovie or iChat and record it.

15 marks

3. Write a 150 word journal of your stay at the gîte. It can be in the form of a diary for the one week stay or it can be the account of your best day there.

20 marks

Champ lexical

Un champ lexical is a good way of getting students to look at key word, idea and theme groups in a language. They like to make them and with laptops it gives them some practice in creating chards as well. They can put a word like HIVER at the centre of the chart and then create a word cluster around it. They can do the same with characters in a story or film. It is a good way to extend vocabulary but also a way of creating the necessary language for discussing topics and themes. It is a good first step before the sentence building for text writing. An explanation is here and then some examples are here. The visual impact of a champ lexical enables students to grasp vocabulary and ideas more quickly.

Australie.com

Australie .com advertises Australia in French. It is a site for French and francophone people to find out about Australia, but it is also a site which helps Australian students talk about and study their own country in French. Since many young Australians make the great overseas trip and work in our tourism industry, talking about our country in French and knowing about this site is a good thing! The site stays current and has some good videos.

French Templates

This site is a good one to find template resources for slide shows and whiteboard presentations. The owners of the site show considerable care in the presentation of their materials and are very helpful in their approach. Map templates are always helpful to orientate students to the loacation of places. If you search for France in the search box top right ,other materials will be listed which you will probably find helpful.

Top Posts

So which posts have been popular on this blog in the last quarter?

1. le Point du Fle
2. The French Food Game – poised ready to knock off number one!
3. Learn French
4. Phineas et Ferb
5. Radio France

Well, that is interesting. Le Point du Fle is a very comprehensive,experienced, professional site with excellent support materials. The next 2 sites are very modest in their presentation but offer some sound learning options. Phineas et Ferb are a huge hit with my year 8s and I offer the 10 minute episodes as a reward but they have to prove to me they are learning French. I have been surprised and delighted with what they can come back with. Radio France offers streaming radio in different categories so visitors to my site obviously just want to hear French and learn like that. That has bearing on why Phineas and Ferb are popular perhaps . Then when it comes to content, people seem to be selecting simple and straight forward or something which is well structured and offers content depth like Le Point du Fle.

Learn the weather

Sentence generator

I actually found this on the SEN Teacher site which has some great resources and downloadables for Special Ed students. The site is worth considering since it offers a very practical approach to skills building and language teachers could learn a lot from that. This is a sentence generator which you can adapt to your own specific language teaching needs. You can change colours and fonts. Great idea! It would help give students a good sense of how to build sentences in French, something which they do not always understand straight away.

les e-mails , c’est génial

French Accents

Iave wriiten another post offering two ways of managing French accents. You can also go to this site on the web and type your text and add the accents easily. It offers a whole range of languages as well as french so it might be worth letting your friends and family know.

On a MacBook, you can type the following key combinations:

é (alt + e)
í (alt + i)
ó (alt + o)
ú (alt + u)
á (alt + a)

Ç (alt + c + c)
æ (alt + ‘)
œ (alt + q)
ë (alt + 8 + e) Substitute other vowels to get the tréma.
â (alt + 6 + a) Substitute other vowels to get the circonflexe.

« and » (alt + \ and shift + alt + \) for the guillemets.

Beginners’ French

The French-Spanish site is linked left but this version of it is very effective. There is a jukebox to learn pronunciation, vocab lists, a conjugator to get your verbs right and a translator so you are not impeded in your learning. It runs at various levels and has plenty of vocab to practise. You can branch out and learn Spanish as well!

Lucky Luke – tous à l’ouest

French Games

MFL is a great site for vocabulary consolidation games in French and Spanish. There is quite a variety to choose from and it is the short term , quick reward stuff which motivates learners and fills in those few minutes you might have here and there in a lesson. All useful basic vocabulary building practice.

Visitons Paris

I have just started assessing the work submitted by my year 9s and 10s for their assignment in Paris. It has been superb. The effort they have gone to, the uniqueness , depth and originality have all been impressive. We have shared so much already and it has been a great way to share our knowledge. These are laptop lessons. My students now have laptops and every time I set an assignment I encourage them to explore the technical aspects of their laptops as well as the content I want them to cover. I am delighted with the response…but so are they. This is the old project pre laptops and I used to get some good work from this:

Paris – Un tour de Paris

Année 9

Nom………………………………………….. Classe……………………..

Please deliver a project of a minimum of 800 words in English on the following:

Paris

1. Find some information on Paris
2. Settle on one or two aspects of the city.
3. Use pictures to support your written work if you wish, but no more than six.
4. Use diagrams or statistics if you wish but you may not directly copy from anything.
5. Your thoughts, ideas and views need to be very clear.
6. The information needs to be current and up to date.
7. The main purpose of your project is to introduce this city as somewhere we should know or somewhere we should visit.
8. The project may be presented on paper or electronically.
9. Please cite sources and acknowledge pictures

Criteria for assessment:

Followed instructions
French, if used, is correct and accurate
English is correct, accurate and suited to task
Facts are correct and accurate
Presentation is clear and logically sequenced.
Capacity to extrapolate information and discuss relevance to self, culture and current world is clear.
Presentation counts but is not more important than the personal interpretation and information.

Language: 5 MARKS
Content: 10 MARKS
Resources : 5 MARKS
Presentation : 10 MARKS /30

The new version is like this:

Année 9 NAME:

Due Date:

1. You are studying the city of Paris

2. Research information from people, books, internet. List these as resources.

3. Present a PERSONAL report of 3 minutes on Paris. It will take the form of a slideshow/video which you will present to the class and you need to embed one French song to go with your slides/video If you prefer you can use iMovie or KeyNote. You do not actually need to talk with your presentation.

4. Instructions for embedding a song into PowerPoint are here:

http://flatchat.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/powerpoint-presentations-with-music/

If you are unable to play the song as an embedded file, be prepared to play it separately.

5. At the end of the slideshow/video you will read a half a page review about what you discovered, learnt, could have done better, found interesting and enjoyed….

This is worth 10 marks.

Criteria for assessment:

1. Slide show/video is logically presented
2. Visual aspect included….maps, diagrams, pictures..
3. Title page
4. Song is appropriate
5. Review is factually accurate , informative and personal.
6. English is correct and fluent
7. Information is accurate
8. Sources are cited
9. Personal involvement is clear
10. Presentation is neat and original /30

L’Hotel de Californie

My students just loved this. The lyrics are here.

Visitons un gîte

I blogged previously about an assignment to do with gîtes so that students could learn about them. There is also a very good section on the BBC site which practices booking into a gîte and describing staying in a gîte. There are videos and transcripts. All very useful and authentic language practice.

La maison

La maison

A handy little exercise to learn house vocabulary. Short term, quick reward! Go here.

iTunes for French

iTunes has a wealth of useful material for French. I have an iPod Touch and I have it synced to a Windows computer because my MacBook is on loan from work. I don’t use my credit card , I just buy vouchers from time to time. It has been really good for French. I bought two big Larousse dictionary applications for French/French and French/English and they cost me 5.99 each rather than the 80 to a hundred dollars they might have cost in print. I have other apps which run in French for the things I like. I have been to iTunes U and downloaded MP4 podcasts to watch about various topics in French, not the least of which is how the French are introducing technology into their schools. I have free podcasts form the Alliance française and other organisations. I have news podcasts and then of course I have music from French artists. I have also downloaded podcasts for learning French and French apps for learning French. A lot come up under French Travel if you search for that. So I have a lot of portable French and some things I have burnt to CDs so I can play them in my car to and from work. Great way to maintain language skills.

Québec

Our class is going on a virtual trip to Québec because that is the topic in our text book. So far the students have found this interesting. Our next exercise for French will be to write a postcard from Québec in French. There are some nice ones here on the Cartes Virtuelles du Québec. There is also a very good official site for Québec here.

Online French Quizzes

This site is actually for ESL students but there is a bilingual section which caters to a number of languages including French. There a some online quizzes for vocabulary testing and practice. It is not a fancy site so it loads quickly and easily and can be used as a time filler or as a break in lesson. It is just very efficient at what it does. As a teacher you can contribute to it and that means we’d have more things to choose from!

Enhanced Podcasts for French

Mark Pentleton has created a video so you can see the possibilities of using podcasts in a French classroom. I am pretty sure he is also the man who runs the excellent podcast app Coffee Break which you can download from the iTunes store. In this video he demonstrates how you can get students to learn their verbs and you can see how much the students are concentrating on their language learning.

One Minute French

RadioLingua provides full blown podcasts in French which you can download and use on your MP3 player or your computer but it also has one minute French lessons. Anyone can find one minute to learn a language. There is premium content you can pay for but the one minute public and free podcasts are really excellent and the material is practised properly and explained well.

La négation

Au point GrammarNet has a good little online exercise to test if your students have understood the construction of negative sentences. The explanations are clearly explained if an error is made. There is another good online exercise here on Français interactif.

Visitons un gîte

Bonjour tout le monde! Ça va? J’espère que vous vous êtes bien amusés sans moi. Je vais bien ici!
J’adore ma vie ici en France.
Par où commencer? J’ai beaucoup à dire ! Ma journée était très agréable. Je n’ai rien vu de Abu Dhabi parce que j’y étais pour seulement quatre heures. L’aéroport d’Abu Dhabi est très grand et moderne.
Je vais rester ici pour deux semaines. Depuis mon arrivée j’ai fait beaucoup de choses.
Maintenant, je suis ici à Bordeaux. Je vais rester ici pour une semaine de plus et je suis arrivée il y a une semaine. Mon séjour a été très génial ! J’ai fait du tourisme a Bordeaux et j’ai vu toutes les attractions! Je suis allée au Musée de Beaux Arts où j’ai vu les peintures de Matisse. J’adore !
Vous savez que j’aime les balades ! Il y a beaucoup qu’on peut faire ici. J’aime marcher loin du le gîte parce que c’est une aventure ! J’ai fait du vélo à la campagne.
Les propriétaires du gîte ont un petit garçon qui a huit ans et nous sommes devenus amis. Nous jouons aux cartes et c’est très amusant.
Cette semaine je vais prendre une tente et de l’alimentation et je vais faire du vélo dans la campagne mais cette fois je vais faire du camping.
J’adore ma chambre. Elle est petite mais jolie. Il y a un lit, un miroir et une garde-robe. Il y a aussi un réveil donc je me lève de bonne heure. Il y a une fenêtre qui donne sur le jardin. J’adore la vue J’ai une photo de vous et moi sur ma commode !
Bon, alors, vous me manquez beaucoup beaucoup beaucoup beaucoup ! A très bientôt !

French Podcasts

Learn French with Alexa! This is another good site to download French podcasts in MP4 format so you can listen to them any time. You can also download the support notes for the lessons.

Visitons un gîte

• Bonjour ma famille !
• J’espère que vous vous êtes bien amusés en Australie.
• La France est vachement géniale mais ma famille me manque.
• J’espère que vous viendrez en France me visiter un jour.
• Aujourd’hui, les propriétaires du gîte m’ont donné un panier de pique-nique pour moi et mes amis.
• Mes amis et moi nous sommes promenés autour la ville et nous avons trouvé un parc pour un pique-nique.
•Puis nous avons regardé une femme hors de la maison.
• Nous avons demandé « où est le parc ? » Mais la femme n’a pas parlé français.
• Nous avons essayé d’expliquer.
• Puis elle a gesticulé et montré le jardin. Elle nous a dit que nous pourrions piqueniquer dans le jardin.
• Nous avons mangé le déjeuner sur le gazon et le fils de la femme m’a parlé
• Il étudie le français à l’école. Il était très génial !
• J’ai dit « merci » et je suis retournée au gîte.
• Je suis restée au gîte « L’Oustal du Viaur » pour une semaine.
• Le gîte est très très très très très beau !!!
• J’adore le gîte. C’est très tranquille et c’est un gîte à recommander.
• Je suis restée dans la maison coquelicot.
• Ma chambre est tellement sophistiquée et mon lit est géant !
• La vue de mon balcon est incroyable. Ce matin j’ai bu un café au lait sur mon balcon.
• Mes amis et moi sommes allés à Pampelonne, Toulouse, Cordes-sur-Ciel, Albi, Rodez et beaucoup des ville s près du gite.
• Les propriétaires sont très géniaux. Les propriétaires et moi sommes allés à la fromagerie pour un jour et ils ont achetés du fromage pour moi et mes amis. Miam miam !
• Je ne veux jamais revenir en Australie ! Je suis enfant gâté !!!
• Je suis désolée, Il faut que j’y aille maintenant parc que je suis très fatiguée.
• Ce sont mes photos préférées… A très bientôt !

La maison

We are creating our dream bedrooms and dream houses. Smallblueprinter .com is a fantastic site for students to make floor plans and then put in furniture and gardens . They can label this all in French. I have had two classes of year 8s doing this and all the students have been absorbed, interested and intrigued. They love seeing each others houses and the level of concentration is excellent. It takes 100 minutes from start to finish. We had prepared all the vocabulary last week. My students also found FloorPlanner.com where you have to set up a free account to get going. they loved it because it was more upmarket, had little fish swimming in the pond, looked really cool and when they had labelled it all in French their work just looked fantastic. Two classes of 30 year 8s at a time were totally absorbed in creating their French dream house and their French dream bedroom and they wanted to know the words. never has teaching house vocabulary been such fun!

Vocabulary Worksheets

Tools for Educators has a wide range of online sites where you can make up all sorts of vocabulary extenders. I just made an electronic vocab sheet for adjectives which will load in a browser. All the work was done for me. I just had to supply the French words. It means you can easily build online resources to extend vocab and create things students can use to build their language confidence or fill in those times in lessons where you just need to give them something good to do while you are preparing the next bit. It is also a site where you can find materials you can customise to run on your white board.

Lingo Dingo

This is not a site for slackers!! It is demanding and exciting at the same level as you would find in other games, so there is a real challenge in applying your knowledge and I cannot wait to see how my students go on this. I am certain my Year 9s will love it. This part of VisualLinkLanguages practices verbs. you have the list, which you can study at your own pace. You c an click on the flash cards and learn the pronounciation and then you can go for broke and test your knowledge on Lingo Dingo… which just happens to be very good for keyboard skills as well! It is the sort of site which has a good balance of paced learning and then the adrenlin rush students like and the good thing is that it is all based on content!

French vocabulary for beginners

Hello-World is a good site for beginners and younger people learning French. This part of it gives the traditional vocab lists in topics . They are more interesting because of the little icons and then each world has a sound file so that the student can learn to pronounce the words properly. There are plenty of other activities on the site so it is well worth a look.

Google French Tools

If you go to Google Canada they have some great tools for helping with your French. It is a matter of exploring the options and buttons on the menu bar. A one stop shop for all your French language needs!

La France en Australie

The French Embassy and Consulate General is a good place to start is you are looking for the Australia-France connection. The site also provides some excellent links out to French sites to help with learning about France and French culture.

Déco de Noël

Boowa et Kwala

Take a trip around the world and practise your French with Boowa and Kwala. They are two cartoon characters who tour the world in their hot air ballon. Each country has a series of simple chapters and each part of the French is read carefully. You can repeat it if you like to get your pronounciation better.

Lettre au Père Noël

This is a very easy online activity because the students have a template to fill in and they can then create a letter to Père Noël as a structured activity. The site also offers some other activities to help students learn Christmas vocabulary. There are two other good Christmas activity sites: Père Noël 2010 and père-noël.com.

French podcasts

Podcasts are good for learning French because you can load them onto an MP3 player and take them anywhere. They tend to go at a relaxed pace and use native or near native speakers and podcasts usually come as a series so then you can continue your learning over a period of time. There are some good podcasts here to choose from.

Comme en France

Comme en France is a longstanding , invaluable site for finding all the links and information about French products in Australia. It also supports visitors in the learning about French culture and the French language. Totally comprehensive site! It runs in French and English.

Online activities

There are a lot of activities on WildFrench which students can do if they have finish other work, at the start of a lesson, as a break from something more difficult or as a way of enhancing and maintaining their French. The activities are the sorts of things students can do without too much teacher support . It is often difficult to find materials which language learners can do unassisted but this site can fill that niche.

Currency Converter

I always insist students quote prices in Australian dollars and Euros when they are doing any assignment or research for French. They not only need to be bilingual, I think we need to train them in being bicurrency. What I used to find was it was just as well I was teaching this as a lot of students did not understand currency conversion and that they actually found it hard. xe.com is easy for students to use, they like it and they adopt it easily!

Fonds d’ecran

linternaute is one of the most comprehensive web sites I know for all things French. It covers a wide variety of news, tech, fashion, food, cultural and current topics in French, obviously because it is a French site. It means you can get totally up to date information about anything sin one spot. I have been decorating my computer for Christmas and linternaute offers a wide variety of wallpapers on a wide variety of themes. My students always used to love helping me choose a wallpaper from this site to decorate my whiteboard in my classroom. It was something swhich brought them pleasure, interest and a sense of belonging. Now I run my whiteboard straight from the laptop it is one of the activities I miss because I choose my laptop background. I change it frequently because it is an easy way to engage students right from the beginning of the lesson. Linternaute is one of the sites which helps me to do that easily.

Je me présente…

1.Salut
2.Bonjour
3.Bonsoir
4.Je m’appelle Amélie
5.Je m’appelle Monsieur/Madame/Mademoiselle Dupont
6.Tu t’appelles comment?
7.Comment vous appelez-vous?
8.Je suis nouveau/nouvelle ici
9.Je suis né(e) en Australie/en Chine/au Canada/en Angleterre/en Ecosse/ au Japon
10. Comment ça va aujourd’hui?

Expressions of time

Saying when things will happen in French can often be quite difficult for the learner because there are so many expressions they have to learn. Here are 10 they can concentrate on remembering:

1. Aujourd’hui je vais acheter du pain.
2. Demain je vais lire mon roman.
3. Après-demain je vais aller au zoo.
4. Ce matin je vais promener le chien.
5. Ce soir il va manger du pain.
6. Demain matin elle va en ville.
7. Le mois prochain elle va acheter une nouvelle robe.
8. La semaine prochaine il va à la plage.
9. L’an prochain nous allons retourner à Sydney.
10. Dans deux heures elles vont arriver à l’école

French pronounciation guide

At this point Forvo is in its developmental stage but you can see how it is likely to progress. It is covering so many languages and native speakers are pronouncing words so that you have an authentic model to follow. Geolocation is helping to create a knowledge bank of regional accents but that may not be accurate since so many people travel and relocate these days. I am certain Forvo will become a powerful language tool and it will help preserve and build linguistic knowledge banks. You can download the sound files as MP3 files so you could create vocab lists to study on your computer or MP3 player. Very handy!

This is Paris

A completely different look at a very cosmopolitan and upbeat Paris by Les Babtous. There is a message in it too as there often is with French videos. If you are thinking of showing it in class I’d say it is for older students and alert re the a-h word which comes up right at the very end. it is all in context and there is nothing gratuitous about it but we do have to respond to our school culture when necessary. Ici, c’est Paris is something which would appeal to a number of students and provide an alternate look at Paris…and the music is great.

Carte de voeux virtuelle

I have found a lovely French virtual card site for Christmas. I chose the Boule de Noel java.It changes colours and looks very pretty. Je vous souhaite à tous et à toutes de merveilleuses fêtes fin d’année et un Nouvel An plein de tant de belles choses.

Bonne année!

If you are looking for a lovely New Year card to send your friends and family which shares your enthusiasm for learning French, you cannot go past these cards. The special effects are amazing. The one I chose has a liquid effect and it just looks so lovely and is a bit different. Alors, pour vous j’espère une année riche en santé et joies. Fêtons le nouvel an avec du style. Mes meilleurs vœux 2011.

Les inondations au Queensland

L’équivalent de la France et l’Allemagne sous les eaux. Trois quarts de l’état du Queensland est touché par ce désastre sans précédent. Des milliers de personnes ont du fuir leurs villages ou villes.La Grande Barrière de Corail est menacée par ces inondations. C’est un événement qui peut arriver dans n’importe quel pays. On pense à eux . Ils sont courageux.

Euronews

Babylon Circus Des Fois

Babylon Circus is a group which is very popular with my students. If you use their music , you have no trouble at all keeping them focussed. This is a good sing along song so they remember the words much more easily. The lyrics are here on LyricsVIP. My own particular favourite is J’aurais bien voulu and that is a song which goes down really well with students.

Le Chat

Le Chat is a wonderful cartoon character created by Belgian, Philippe Geluck. His books are now available in English but we are here to learn French and Le Chat is very helpful to us! He has a great sense of humour, a laconic style and an interesting view of the world. His observations are unique. On the Geluck site you can find examples of the comic strips, some videos of Le Chat and plenty of information about Le Chat. He is a character who is very endearing and who becomes instantly popular. He will make you look good in class! There is a good interview with Philippe Geluck on TV5.

French pronunciation games

Maxetom is a site with a number of games which help you and your students learn to read and pronounce French. The sound files are clear and the speaker is excellent. They are not demanding games and so they are the sort of thing I shall use for a bit of a break in class, if I suddenly have to set some quick work and they would be very useful homework practice.It is also a site which I can use on my whiteboard for some sound pronunciation practice. As homework I would expect students to find out what they are actually saying. It would be less brain numbing than setting them exercises to fill in and give them good pronunciation skills as well. Take a look around the site because there are also some games to practice Maths and other languages. Students like to learn languages. Timetable constrictions often mean they fail to choose them. This site would do wonders for improving their attitude to that if they knew they could learn languages so easily!

Tintin

Tintin is a long time favourite cartoon character and students who do not know him enjoy meeting him. The official Tintin site has some goodies to download which you could use in class or use to brighten assignments for students and raise their awareness of what has been a cultural phenomenon. There is an English version of the site here. You can keep in touch on Facebook by subscribing to Tintin’s official fan page.

Learn French with video

WonderHowTo currently has over 700 videos to help you learn French or brush up on your French. At this stage they seem to be for beginners but as the site grows there will be other videos for other levels I am sure. I am bookmarking this site as it will be a great way to add interest to my lessons with my new students.

Max Boublil

Max Boublil is a rising star and a very popular French comedian and singer. He is very much of our times and exemplifies modern talent. This little sketch has quite a few things students ought to be able to understand. Two words “tiser” which means to drink and “chanmé ” which means cool wouldn’t be familiar vocabulary. There is another sketch on YouTube about the Wii. Much longer and really quite funny, but up to you to judge whether it would be too hard or not.

Teach French with videos

There is no doubt about it and it should not surprise us. Students want videos and feel they learn better with videos. They are a generation brought up on TVs and computers. No surprises there. Allow my own students to reiterate this:

” I like it when we watch a video and have to write what they’re saying because it helps me figure out words I don’t know and helps me remember words that I have already learnt.”

“I like it when we watch videos because it helps us to learn and it is also enjoyable so we will absorb more information.”

“I enjoy watching videos in French because it really makes me listen and begin to understand the conversations. I can pick up basic information and learn what things are. It sinks in more.”

” I like it when we watch short French videos and also when we make our own slide and video presentations.”

“I enjoyed watching the video of the French girl telling the story and watching Phineas and Ferb because I learnt a lot of new words but it was also fun.”

“I enjoyed the video conversation activity we did. I think it was fun and enjoyable but I also learnt a lot about doing a French conversation.”

“My favourite project was the iMovie project in which we had to write an oral in French. It allowed me to hear how I pronounce things so that I could fix some of my mispronounced words.”

“I like French when we do interactive stuff like making a movie or putting together a slide show. I also like working in pairs or groups a lot.”

“I feel that the introduction of the laptops has meant excellent things for this class. We do a lot of work with technology and I htink it is a convenient and faster way of learning. The student must take responsibility for staying on task and I think that teaches us skills that we’ll need in later years of study. The laptops have meant a huge number of resources are accessible to us at any time.”

” I really enjoyed the projects we did throughout the course of the year, especially the video conversation . it was a very creative way to learn and it was fun and educational at the same time.”

We are asked each year, as part of literacy development across the school , to survey our students in a prose under supervision assignment. This way the students get the practice writing and we get some very valuable feedback. I use short videos of two to five minutes and I always make sure the students have a task to complete while they are watching. Since I teach French, it is often trying to keep a list of what they have understood. I have tested them later and they do remember things well this way. I try and keep the videos topical and I have found out they will go home and come back to class with recommendations of what we could watch! When they make their own videos we do a draft script and then I make sure they know the software before we do any recording. They have loved this and worked very hard and have been quite inventive.

Depuis

It isn’t always easy to teach depuis, depuis que, voilà que, ça fait que. I have put this together to help myself but feel free to help yourselves too!

Blanche Neige

Blanche Neige is a story a lot of people know. You can get a sound version of it here which you can listen to online or download. It is read very well. There is a text version here. Even if you don’t understand all of the story then the practice of hearing and reading along is very good. It helps rhythm, intonation and fluency. The link I gave you has an English version of the story so you can cheat a bit!

Bébé Lilly – Allo Papy

The advantage of Allo Papy is that it is completely modern and totally current. The words to the song are kindly written out under the video. This is so important when you are trying to learn a language. Songs are very powerful for doing that but without the words not much is learned…just an attitude. This song will be great for teaching whether people are there or not there and where they are, for families and for phone conversations. It will also inspire students to make some of their own interesting videos to go with their phone conversations. These are quite hard to teach in class because there is a lot of phone vocabulary in French which students have to remember. The song out to take the burden out of that. That’s the plan, anyway! I am making a slide presentations to go with this to teach some basic vocabulary for presence and absence and then phone vocabulary.

Où est-il?

This is the slide presentation I have created to go with the Bébé Lilly song. It is to practice presence and absence and then to get a class started on phone conversations. I load my slide presentations with the YouTube links onto SlideShare because it is easy to access them that way. I also have a copy of the slide show and the video on my computer and a flash drive. It is really important to be ready for any eventuality when you are working with technology. I can also access my materials from this blog. I just make sure I am able to access my content no matter what! This slide presentation is good for teaching là and où.

Fuss Free French Food

While you are learning the language the best way to support yourself in your new bi cultural environment is to eat the food! French food can be very complicated but the effort is always worth it. Easy French Food by Kim Steele is a great way to get students and yourself into French food and culture . She is very enthusiastic and there is plenty on offer. No excuses now!

Body Parts

Learning body parts in French can be quite a chore because there are so many of them to learn. A good list of them is here on the French linguistics site which also offers some other useful material for teaching French. There are some flashcards without sound for oral practice here on the Study Stack site where you also have a selection of games for practising vocabulary. The LearnLanguage site offers flashcard practice in French and English and then the Lingo Dingo game to practise the knowledge. Students love Lingo Dingo!

Greetings

I have a new class of beginners starting next week so we shall need to do the greetings. It is important to learn greetings in French because French speaking people like to greet each other and visitors properly. Saying hallo to people in their language is basic to making a connection. FrenchLinguisitics has a very comprehensive list of greetings which you can use in addition to your text book or laptop work. You can use this site for some quick practice to add a variation to your own. You can also go to FrenchSpanish Online and get some good basic sound practice in. The sound recording wasn’t working when I was there, but is a good feature.

Tu habites où?

This is for starters! Où est-ce que tu habites? is better. Où habites-tu is also correct. The others are less formal. J’habite à Paris, à Londres, à Sydney, J’habite en Australie, en France, en Angleterre, au Japon, au Canada. Practise it here.

Futur Proche

By teaching the futur proche, le passé récent and then en train de, you can explode linguistic flexibility in French without putting too many cognitive demands on students. Then tend to use these expressions quite easily and feel a good sense of success.

Bonjour de France

Bonjour de France is a site for more advanced students . There are plenty of audio resources especially in the compréhensions section. There are also recipes and cultural materials and it is just a very useful site for finding authentic texts and materials for those who have a reasonable grasp of the French language. Some if the material students would be able to study alone but I find most of the material works well if you work on it together as a class. Students really value being able to hear texts. The online exercises and tests are helpful additional material for mastering language skills.

Tu t’appelles comment?

You have to start somewhere and learning to tell others about yourself and asking them about themselves is generally where it starts! This video covers the basics. There is plenty of other material on YouTube for covering the basics in French. What we need now is some intermediate and advanced material for learners at those levels.

Voki for French orals

I took a risk today because I had really been pushing my year 11s today with their vocabulary for the new assignment, some grammar and aural comprehensions. I needed to lighten it up. I had heard about Voki so I thought we could start a presentation on it and continue with it next week. They have to present themselves in French. Within 30 seconds their were shrieks of excitement and a lot of laughter. Then there was some serious silence, some sharing of tips and techniques and silence. We realised we needed to sign up to get the Vokis in a form we can share as class presentations. So we signed up and they got going. They worked on their French for what they are going to record for the Voki to say and then they had a lot of fun choosing and shaping their Voki. Tuesday next week we’ll really work on it because they are all going to look at the site properly at the weekend. I had NO motivational problems . They all were totally committed to this and I am so glad I took that risk. It meant when we put that on hold and went back to the serious vocabulary development for their summative piece, they were able to fully concentrate again. Try Voki. It looks like it is going to be a great help for learning any language or encouraging language development. It was also clear the students who are a bit shy has the perfect medium for practising their language skills.There is a good educational section on Voki for you to consider.

If you would like to hear an example of our first experience on Voki then go here and I thank the student for allowing me to publish this.

French Alphabet

You can practise some more French Alphabet practice by clicking on this post.

Ose – Yannick Noah

Students have always enjoyed this song Ose by Yannick Noah and have found it to be very uplifting. It is a song I have often shared with final year students when they are feeling the pressure of study and it lifts their spirits. This version has the words as he sings so it is very helpful when you are teaching.

Les chiffres 1-20

Bonne Saint Valentin

Cartes virtuelles Saint Valentin

The French R

The French R can be troublesome. This video will help. The more you practise, the better it gets. One day it will just happen!

Blanche Neige et les sept nains

Qui sont les sept nains? Prof, Atchoum, Dormeur, Grincheux, Joyeux,Timide, Simplet. Voila!

100 adjectives

A not quite perfect list because they forgot to put big for grand but most people would know that and mauvais is bad, il fait mauvais, yes, it means it is bad weather and ensoleillé is sunny. Il y a du soleil -is it is sunny – literally there is some sun. Il pleut means it is raining and the adjective is pluvieux – rainy. The list is very handy though when you are trying to teach adjectives. There is also some good help here on LearnerFrench.com but again some peculiar mistakes like le manteau est noire with an e when it shouldn’t have one and les pantalons has two o’s for some reason. Cliffs Notes never lets you down and has a good section on how to change from masculine to feminine. All these sites are helpful when you can only use a whiteboard as will be the case for me with the class I want to teach these adjectives too.

Practise your accent with Voki

I have already posted about Voki here. My year 11s are on their 4th year of French and so today we put Voki to a different test. They are preparing an oral using iMovie/Keynote/Powerpoint. They are one to one students and have laptops. They are putting together a slide show or a video and recording their own French voice track. At this level the orals are more complex. They have worked on their draft version as a text. I have checked that. Some recorded it at home and wanted me to listen before they made their final visual presentation. There is only one of me. What I suggested was they paste their text into Voki and then choose a voice with a French accent that would help them hear how to say it better. We worked out that the voice synthesizer of “Olivier” was the best one. I knew from the other day that the voice synthesisers weren’t too bad. They loved that and were happily working on their accents until I could see them. Took the frustration out of the whole exercise and Voki came into its own as a great assistant! My next test of Voki will be with a class who has done French for one year. They don’t have laptops yet so we are going to do our oral in the computer room. I am hoping Voki will let them rehearse their oral before I have to assess them. We’ll see.

Quelle heure est-il?

Jabo-Net combines quite a few learning activities in one go . It has cities of the world in French and for each of the cities there is the time and the weather so it is a good resource for practising countries, times and numbers for the temperatures.

Etre – the verb to be

I made this up for my beginners. They learnt the verb to be and the other vocabulary quite quickly and appreciated my effort. Bit nicer than just looking at the book and a good whiteboard resource.

Adieu Haïti

Raphaël is a singer who is popular with students. They like the music and the lyrics and he sings clearly. At the moment we are about to embark upon the topic Le monde qui change. My students will be making a multimedia presentation in French with their own commentary so this song is about one of our changing francophone nations, Haïti.

Oral assignments on iMacs

My year 9 students won’t get their laptops until next term so I have spent this term getting them used to a technology approach for learning a language. At the moment I use my white board in class and then we use the computer room for 2 lessons a week. We also use Twiducate for homework and for giving me feedback about what I am doing. I must say they are very good at adapting and are very keen to try out new things. We were going to use Voki for the oral assignment because there are some good French voice synthesisers. They had prepared 20 sentences to introduce themselves as an avatar. That was all easy because they loved the avatars and so were keen to get their sentences together. We couldn’t record our own voices because the network blocked flash as we still use some Windows computers. What I then had to decide on the spot was how to resolve this. What we did was use Voki to rehearse the sentences which the students had cut and pasted into Voki and then could play and hear how to say it . They could still consult with me when they wanted to. Then we used the microphone button on Garage Band to record our voices. Some students played their recording to me on the iMac, some saved it to a USB and brought it to me so I could listen on my MacBook. These students have one year of French and the standard was impressive. When they can do it on their MacBooks it will be easier because they can record on Voki at home or we can still do it this way in class. Read some of their feedback. It speaks for itself:

I think it was great using garage band for the orals. It was a lot easier because I shake when I talk in front of audiences.

I think that working with garage band and Voki is good because you don’t get quite as nervous as going up in front of a class and doing a oral.

I thoroughly enjoyed presenting the French oral on Garage Band, because there was no pressure from the rest of the class and we could rehearse our speeches several times. I hope that next time I don’t have as many problems with my usb and iMac!

I really enjoyed doing the oral presentation on a computer. It was something new I never did before. Of course there were some problems, like this weird echo on the background, because of which I had to restart my presentation 3 times, but overall I had lots of fun with Voki and the Garage Band.

Really enjoyed doing the oral on Garage Band because there wasn’t as much pressure as doing it in front of everyone. It was really good apart from the background noise. It is also interesting hearing yourself speaking.

The oral was interesting and the first time I have done a French oral through the computer. At times it was hard to hear because of the background noise. Other than that, it was a good and fun assignment.

I really liked doing the Voki oral. It was interesting and fun because it was different. It was sometimes annoying because of the problems I encountered, but overall I enjoyed the assignment very much.

Parts of the body

Teaching the parts of the body can be a short term , quick reward activity because students tend to remember body parts quite well. They still need help with remembering ALL of them though and that is quite a list. StudyStack has some flashcards to get started with. You can also go to Lexiquefle and download the sound practice for body parts. You can also do the practice online. The downloaded files work on Windows but I cannot seem to open and run Mac version on the Mac. I am using the Windows version under Wine.

Les parties du corps

In less than 3 minutes there is some good practice on the body parts. Saves teacher wear and tear! Language teachers need to remember to look after their voices.

J’ai mal

I like to teach grammar and culture. This teaches avoir and body parts and then a good functional use by being able to say you are sick. It also introduces you to a great singer Keen’v. Download the slide presentation to get links to the sites.

Lokua Kanza — Le Bonheur

One of the francophone countries we are looking at is Le Congo. We have had students from the Congo and their contribution to our knowledge of life in the Congo and what it means to be un Congolais was without doubt a very moving and important experience for us all. Lokua Kanza is singing this song about happiness in Lingala but the chorus is in French and the views and images of the Congo are just beautifully presented. The lyrics are here on LyricsMania.

Oui, le bonheur
Juste un sourire, un regard

Denver le dernier dinosaure

My beginner students last year just loved this song when I played it to them and couldn’t get enough of it. For a number of French children this is a well loved cartoon series which they remember fondly when they are older. The words are here on animez-vous.

Shopping in French

The French Linguistics site has two good French shopping lists for vocabulary and expressions. If you then scroll tot he bottom of the page you will find some good links out for other materials for French like flash cards and wordfinds. You can then expand the functionality of these lists by going to the BBC French site and listen to the shopping videos and get some practice on the partitive articles du de la and des and well as some authentic material to teach French shopping.

Le Conjugueur

Le Conjugeur is a very handy application for students who want to practise their verbs. The students love it and learn to use it very quickly. There are versions for Mac, Windows and Linux so nobody need feel neglected.

Une vie de chat

We took some students to see this at he Adelaide French film festival. It’s not too long and the time passes very quickly. it is a cute little story which the students responded to very well and they liked the humour. The good things is the sound track is something they can feel some success with and they can understand some of the French quite well. That gave them a good feeling. it is important students feel a sense of competence when they listen to authentic material. It is a film we shall buy when it comes out on DVD. With a bit of classroom support it is a film you could get students to understand quite well. Well worth the trip to town and has done wonders for morale.

Une vie de chat site pédagogique

The official site for Une Vie de Chat is well worth a look because they have gone to a lot of trouble to provide some good teaching materials to support the film. The extra information in electronic form will help my students discuss and write about this film. Can’t wait to get my own copy on DVD. From all this information I have been able to construct some useful activities for the students who have seen the film. If you are looking for some good cat paw print clip art to decorate your work then I recommend this blog, Clipart for Free.

le futur simple

I am teaching my year nines the futur simple. We have already done – je vais manger une pomme because that gives them immediate flexibility with their language. I have been creating a slide show as I am teaching. I can type as fast as I talk and teach and the students seem to like that especially when I add the colours for ending and maybe some cosmetic improvements. One of the reasons I do that is not every students can do things on a computer . If I create something as I am talking, then they do pick things up very quickly and I can often catch them out the corner of my eye trying to mimic what I do or take notes if they have no laptop. So we have done avoir and then how you form the futur simple and a few of the irregulars. We did some good practice and I was pleased how they picked it up. So now I shall go to Ortholud.com for some practice. Les dix commandements de Dieu are also in the futur simple and many students like to know this:

Tu adoreras Dieu seul et tu l’aimeras plus que tout.

Tu ne prononceras le nom de Dieu qu’avec respect.

Tu sanctifieras le jour du Seigneur.

Tu honoreras ton père et ta mère.

Tu ne tueras pas.

Tu ne feras pas d’impureté.

Tu ne voleras pas.

Tu ne mentiras pas.

Tu n’auras pas de désir impur volontaire.

Tu ne désireras pas injustement le bien des autres.

This is a good practice exercise with sound.

le futur simple

Even though these explanations are in French, it is a good example of how to teach the target language in the language itself!

Real life doesn’t have subtitles

This was made in 2008 and it doesn’t take much research to verify we are even more global and multinational now. Our companies are increasingly global companies and our jobs are even more anywhere in the world. The video is American but the message applies to us all. Languages are an essential form of communication in a global society and real life does not have subtitles.

Moyens de transport

Imagiers never fails to provide really useful materials for use with a whiteboard or on a laptop. This flash card set of transport is colourful and helpful when teaching the names of vehicles. The europschool site has pictures, vocab and pronunciation. This German site helps students to test their knowledge. “Auswerten ” means verify. Sometimes it is good to learn two languages at once! Finally , About.com offers a good, basic list of vocabulary with pronunciation and an interesting and challenging quiz!

Catastrophe Vocabulary

Unfortunately , it is becoming more and more important to develop our accident and disaster language and for some of us caught up in these events worldwide then we need to know the language for our own safety at times. Here is a useful list to start with from the University Of Tasmania.

Joyeuse fête de Pâques

Hakuna Matata (French)

Most students will know this film and this song and so it is good to show it to them. They respond warmly to it. The subtitles make it so much easier for them to pick up the language.

Et toi aussi – Françoise Hardy

This is a lovely SlideShere presentation of a song by Françoise Hardy. Students may not necessarily like this song as much as others but Françoise Hardy sings so clearly that she is a very good singer to use when you are trying to teach French. In the end, students will sing along with her! You can find the slide presentation with the words here.

Apprendre le français – Learn French

I cannot think of a more helpful way to get people to learn French. You show little vidoes, you provide them with reasonable checks of their comprehension and then other things to do to make them know they are learning. Apprendre .tv is designed to help learners learn and achieve quickly. I am not suprised. TV5 has had a long term commitment to providing quality materials for those people who want to master the language of Molière and their experience at this is now expert. The material is well paced and comprehensive.

ProVoc vocab trainer for Apple

ProVoc is one of the most useful apps I have on my MacBook for teaching new vocabulary and even verb tenses and custom expressions. There is nothing more mind numbing than having to learn a heap of vocabulary like today, when we had to learn all the classroom vocab. It was easier to put it all into ProVoc and run it from the whiteboard. I could add other expressions and then the students found some which were suitable that we could add as well, so they participated in the list making and that made it more interesting for them. We could run through the vocab on screen and then I could set different ways of testing their knowledge and we could even guess ahead to see if we knew the word before it came up on the screen. They love it and they learn vocab and grammar quite easily that way because they are screen students. They have been brought up on screens. I hope someone else will feel the need to further develop ProVoc because it is a must have classroom tool. I fully understand those who have developed it finding that they just don’t have the time anymore. We all have to prioritise. Hopefully someone prioritises into keeping ProVoc current. As it stands it is VERY easy to use.

Johnny Hallyday Nashville Blues

You can’t learn French and not know about Johnny Hallyday. He is a legend! This song is an oldie but a goodie because you can sing along with it and it is not hard to pick up the words. A video clip with the lyrics is here. C’est trop cool!

FrenchPod

One of the advantages of Facebook is you can “like” certain pages and then they come onto your daily newsfeed and as a teacher it means you can constantly get some good infromation updates in your areas of interest and expertise. I “liked” the French Language page and now I have discovered FrenchPod. It is not a site for everyone because there is paid content, but they do let you see what you are subscribing to and I guess if you signed in, you’d get more information. The little goldfish podcast for newbies is very cute and very enticing. it allows you to become involved very quickly and easily with French. The forum allows the FrenchPod team members to interact with the subscribers and that serves some good purposes. it creates a sense of belonging and friendship. It encourages learners to try writing French and make quick progress with that because it is facilitated by native speakers. It then allows the world to connect and develops a sense of internationalisation which is critical for today’s lifestyle and job requirements. I liked what I saw and heard. You can go there too and judge for yourself.

Telling the time in French

Speak French! covers all the basics of telling the time. If you click on the French you will hear it.

Vite, vite à vos claviers!

Bonjour de France is offering an opportunity for 25 French teachers to go to France. I have just received notice of this under my “About” column, so you have a few days to answer those questions and get yourself in the running for one of these trips.

Bonne fête des mères!

Jolie Cartes has a lovely selection of cards for Mothers’ Day and for other events. Bonne fête des mères!

La station spatiale Mir

I have been doing transport with my year 9 students. It can be very boring learning all the words for transport so we have looked at the Concorde, Ariane and then Mir and the students have enjoyed this and have been willing to learn all the vocab for space as well. There is a good French teaching site on la station spatiale Mir. The song is an old one but Bénabar sings clearly so it is easy for students to pick up the words. It gives an indication of just how important Mir was in France.

Les séjours linguistiques

There is no doubt about the benefits of staying overseas with a family so that you can learn their language. In my experience it is the best way for a student to become bilingual which is becoming increasingly more important in the world of multinational and global businesses. Students also seem to have a passion for travelling now since the world has become smaller and air fares cheaper. This video encapsulates the way Australian students seem to involve themselves with a homestay family in France.One of the biggest advantages is they come to have safe and reliable connections overseas when they want to travel again, as does the family who takes care of them.

Séjour linguistique à Paris

My students are inventing an imaginary exchange trip to Paris. It is the theme of the new unit in their book and we are learning iWeb to present their information. They actually will have to do an interview with me about their stay in Paris. 3 of the class actually did go on exchanges to France last year and I have two international students in the class from Germany so studying exchange trips is an important part of learning French or any language these days. It creates a high level of motivation and it is fun so that students whose families are not able to afford a trip while they are at school feel as though they are still part of the experience.

Big numbers

Big numbers in French can be a bit of a chore so you have to find ways of learning them and reinforcing them. The audio approach works because students can repeat them. You can use your white board to write in numbers on this site and then show the answers at the bottom or students can use the site on their laptops to practise large numbers before you test them. If you go to this site you can practise the numbers and then do the puzzles and worksheets to reinforce them.

Quelle heure est-il?

The UK Language Resources site has numerous , really useful resources for language teachers of French, German and Spanish. I am currently teaching time to my beginners and there are plenty of resources here to make my life easier and add to what I already have to teach time in French.

Madeleines

We are doing cuisine française and this video shows you very simply and well how to make the classic madeleines. My beginners’ class this year is very appreciative of French cuisine and they have thrown themselves into discovering the joys of French food. This video is sure to be a hit! I am encouraging them to try these things out at home to see what they think. We are in winter now so it’s a nice thing for them to share with their families if they feel like it.

Marble Desktop Globe

Earth Globe X which I blogged about yesterday has proved to be popular with my students even though I am not a geography teacher. They are fascinated with the fact it is a real time satellite picture of our planet. The Marble Desktop Globe is a KDE initiative . The software download is available for all platforms. It is a 3D spinning globe which you can twist and turn to see any country on the planet. You can also search for cities. It provides a much better idea of where things are than a flat map and is a very handy, nice looking desktop tool. I have it running on Ubuntu at home but I downloaded it onto my Macbook for school and it is the perfect tool for showing students where the Pays Francophones are because they don’t know where to find places like Senegal and the Antilles. it makes it so much easier for me !

Teaching prepositions

Yesterday I was doing prepositions with my beginners : dans, entre, devant, à côté de , sous, sur, derrière…We had been making up sentences and I ended the lesson with an apple and a worm. The students really lit up. So today when we were in the computer room I let them make an apple and worm picture with one good French sentence. This girl decided to practise her adjectives as well and colour code them. Sometimes a spontaneous , easy task captures their imagination and then you can use it to push the tough stuff home!

Construction of the Eiffel Tower

It is actually interesting to watch this and to know that it was created without the benefit of modern technology. There are times when you see buildings in other cultures and it seems extraordinary. La Tour Eiffel was built from 1887 to 1889. This video gives quite a good idea of how it was built and completed at the time.

Big numbers

Big numbers need to be taught in a pattern to make the best use of student cognitive skills, so I tend to teach them in a pattern like this:

2

200

2000

2 000 000

202

2002

2 000 002

222

2022

2 000 022

2222

1000

60

70

80

88

1988

1960

1965

1945

1922

1992

1932

1710

234 678 982

deux cent trente-quatre million six cent soixante- dix-huit mille neuf cent quatre-vingt-deux

je suis née en Angleterre en 1910(mille neuf cent dix) mais j’habite maintenant en Australie depuis 101 (cent un) ans

555 555 555 555

cinq cent cinquante cinq milliard cinq cent cinquante cinq million cinq cent cinquante cinq mille cinq cent cinquante cinq

7 heures du matin – Jacqueline Taieb

Even though this is a chanson yéyé from 1967 , it was a big hit in class today. The students loved the beat and the fact the French was slow enough for them to understand. We went through the lyrics and practised some of the vocab and grammatical expressions. They were motivated the whole time and really enjoyed it. We shall be following it up with their own piece of writing on 7 heures du matin.

Paris s’éveille – Jacques DuTronc

This song is ageless and a complete classic. It suits older students who are learning French and teaches some good and useful grammatical forms. The version I have put on the site has the song, the lyrics in French and someone has translated those lyrics into Chinese. We live in a wonderful world. To take our multilingualism a step further , here is the link to the French and English version. I am using this song to complement the one by Jacqueline Taieb in th previous post.

French Food

french food

Enchanted Learning is a bottomless pit for learning ideas on French food. You can start with the vocabulary here but if you click on the hot links (the blue words) for each vocabulary word it will take you to a new and different learning activity to reinforce the learning and sustain interest. Great site!

The Cat Empire – L’Hotel de Californie

This L’Hotel de Californie is a firm favourite with my students. The Cat Empire is a Melbourne based group which is now enjoying international success. Their French version of L’Hotel de Californie is not perfect French but the fact it is such a massive success is testament to the fact that they embody the belief La musique est le language universel. They have played at L’Olympia in Paris and will be in Rouen in October for their French tour this year. Their French site is here.

French Pronunciation

This FLC site works well on any OS and so when you are first learning French or you wish to work on your pronunciation skills you have a very organised approach to the sounds in French and you can hear and pronounce them. Forvo will help you with the pronunciation of individual words and is going to become an invaluable tool. French at Online is also very helpful for pronunciation but not if you do not have flash or your network blocks it.

Clothing

I automatically go into my classroom with ideas of how I am going to help my students manage the technology and learn their French. Today was no exception. We are doing clothing in French. We have learned quite a lot of vocabulary. We have been working on the placement and agreement of adjectives. We have looked at how to describe clothes and say whether they are in wool or cotton. Last week I took in some French fashion magazines and I took them on a 10 minute tour of Vogue.fr fashion parades. They were alive and alert. When I explained that most top fashion designers were men and the fact our own Colette Dinnigan had managed to make a hugely successful career for herself in Paris the students were even more interested. Then we looked at the top models and Australian girls featured well. As we looked at the clothes and practised our vocabulary the boys were having trouble identifying. The assignment is to make a mini fashion parade in iMovie with 3 French sentences for each image from a top French fashion designer. They had to find 5 images they liked, one they hated and one for the boys if they were a girl and vice versa. About 10 minutes into this the boys were looking very glum. “There must be something in you boys which can connect if the world’s top designers are men!” is all I offered at the time . I could see them try harder. 10 more minutes passed. I could feel the pain. So my laptop was hooked to the white board. I showed the boys if they searched for a designer and then an item of clothing – Balmain pantalon (trousers) they would find pictures they could relate to. Success! The girls by then had found some more images and were suggesting things to the boys like the streetware section of Vogue.fr. Everyone was at home. We have since worked on the sentences. They are very comfortable with iMovie because we have worked on it a lot. I suggested they might like to record their sentences and make a voice track. Their eyes lit up and I may well see that. They have loved the fashion. They are learning their vocabulary well because we did some spot quizzes today just quickly and they know just about all the words. Their presentations are coming along and they are looking forward to Friday when they will be sharing them.

Clothing

You can start with this nice little video because it builds visual memory and good pronunciation. These mean confidence in learning. There are then some good clothing lists and terms here at French Linguistics UK. Enchanted Learning then has plenty more vocabulary and some good exercises for the whiteboard or worksheets. You can cap it all off with a défilé on Vogue.fr.

Visite guidée d’une maison

My students are going to do a guided visit of their real or imagined home. They will make a slide or video presentation and I shall be talking to them about their home in French. The lady in this video speaks slowly and clearly so it will help them. There are other videos on youtube if you search for visite guidée de la maison or maison vocabulaire. There is a longer video here which is also very good for older students. There is an extensive house vocabulary list for French here. My students also like using Floorplanner because they can make a floor plan of their home and label the furniture in French. Floorplanner operates online so it doesn’t matter which OS you are using on your computer.

Quebec

My students really like finding out about Quebec. My other post with links is here. They love the images and the official site has a good video to show them. It gives them a different look at French which they appreciate. An assignment I have created is here and they can do the questions in a double lesson (100mins) and become totally absorbed. I let them answer in French or English if they are junior students. This site kindly allows teachers to use their pictures for assignments.

iPad apps for French

Is there an app for that? Sure is! Verbe2verbe has an app. There are some lovely French cooking apps. There are French dictionary apps, learning French apps, French travel apps and things like preparing for the bac or the brevet. There is also France24 and other French news apps and then apps for French radio . There are plenty of things to choose from and many of them are free. You need an iTunes account. I got 200 dollars worth of paper dictionaries for 11 dollars. I carry them on my iPod Touch. IPod Touches have the advantage that they are really portable like iPhones. iPads are easy to read, easy to store and can make good classroom items if you can afford them. The apps give some good French practice and students find iPads to be really cool so it does increase your coolness factor as a teacher. They do not replace computers but you can type sideways on an iPad to take notes. For French they are good for incidental practice, grammar practice, reference material and easy research. They can lighten up some heavy duty work and the students stay absorbed.

More French iPhone/iPod/iPad apps

Jules et la foret d’Hallowe’en is a cute story app with sound, word and pictures. As a language learner you can hear an authentic speaker and read along with it and look up the words you don’t know in the word reference app or a dictionary app. There is also the Histoires HD app which offers the first story free and then you can purchase others. The stories are well illustrated and read very clearly and well. These sorts of audio visual apps are perfect for improving your comprehension and accent. There are also the Gratis Anglais flashcards which are much more than simple flashcards. They are for French speakers to learn English but they do a wonderful job of teaching English speakers French! Then you can learn french with 7 jours sur la planete from TV5 Monde. You hear short videos of the news and then there are vocabulary and language building exercises. Perfect for more advanced students. The Speak Easy French Lite is a good audio themed language builder for beginners. There are plenty of apps at your level both free and paid.

Montez la Tour Eiffel!

This is amazing. You can climb all 669 steps of the Eiffel Tower as though you were there.

French iPhone/iPod/iPad apps

As I said, I have been taking an iPad2 into my year 11 French class just to see what happens so I can make better ,educated guesses about how I might use iPads in class. The way the students use it is interesting and intuitive. They automatically work in pairs, not singly on the iPad. Some put it down on the desk and lean over it together. Others are very mobile in their use of it and love the kinetic screen and will change it around, hold it up with the screen facing them and touch the icons that way and then move it around again and then put it down on the desk. They love its mobility. Not once have they done the wrong thing. Not once have they been off task and not once have I had to ask them to get on with their work. They are totally absorbed. They leave the lesson asking me to be sure to bring it back next lesson and could I please find more apps. I have loaded apps for French at different levels and have just asked them to try them out and tell me which ones they like. They have automatically settled on the ones for their level and then have worked hard and enjoyed learning French that way. If there are sound files they have plugged in their ear phones. I have not had to “manage” them at all. It has all been self regulating. The sorts of apps I use and have downloaded for students are things like the word reference.com app, Busuu , which has been a huge hit, The Odyssey Translator, Larousse dictionaries,27/7 French Lite, Best of French Cuisine, TV5 Monde, le Figaro.fr, France24 which streams live, mon guide ecolo,cote maison ,24/7 French vocab and verbe2verbe. There are others like Coffee Cup French. You just need to look and a lot of them are free or have a useful free trial version.

Paris

Année 9 Paris

Due Date:

1. You are studying the city of Paris

2. Research information from people, books, internet. List these as resources.

3. Present a PERSONAL report of 3 minutes on Paris. It will take the form of a slideshow/video which you will present to the class and you need to embed one French song to go with your slides/video You can use iMovie, Powerpoint or KeyNote. You do not actually need to talk with your presentation. This needs to be your personal view of Paris.

If you are unable to play the song as an embedded file, be prepared to play it separately.

5. At the end of the slideshow/video you will read a half a page review about what you discovered, learnt, could have done better, found interesting and enjoyed….
This is section worth 10 marks.

Criteria for assessment:

1. Slide show/video is logically presented
2. Visual aspect included….maps, diagrams, pictures..
3. Title page
4. Song is appropriate
5. Review is factually accurate , informative and personal.
6. English is correct and fluent
7. Information is accurate
8. Sources are cited
9. Personal involvement is clear
10. Presentation is neat and original

I converted this assignment from a print one to a digital one . It works really well and I got some really good feedback from my students on this on twiducate They enjoyed finding their images and their version of Paris. They loved using iMovie once they got used to it and they had made a real effort to find a good song. The power of the assignment came through when they read their reviews. I asked the class to comment on the presentations as well in terms of what was done really well. That worked! They learned about technology, interpersonal skills and Paris all at once.

I have learnt that you can use iMovie very effectively for an assignment. I liked Sally’s the most because I think, even though she did the same as John, it was different and she was the only person to put a video into her presentation.

I have learnt that pictures and music can make a lot of difference to how good the presentation is. The presentation that I won’t forget is Kate’s because it is such a different topic and she had really really good pictures.

Looking at the video’s of other people it seems that we have all seen a different side to Paris, as we’ve gone from restaurants, to gardens, to monuments and even things like parkour.
I liked Tim’s the best as I can remember his music and transitions working well for the information and photos.

So I asked them how they could improve their next presentation:

1.Have a good balance of pictures and info.
2. Get pictures that show different aspects of something, for example, side view, birds eye view, at night and during the day.
3. A suitable song which goes well with the presentation.
4. Good information that is not well known and is very interesting.
5. Find a good balance between a long presentation and a short presentation, not too long not too short.

1. Not crowding the screen with information, but enough to suffice
2. Playing appropriate, easy listening music behind the presentation
3. Have visually alluring pictures to draw in the audience
4. Visually entertaining effects
5. A positive, keen attitude

Le Corbeau et le Renard

Le corbeau et le renard

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Tour guidée de la maison

My students have just completed a guided tour of their house – real or imagined. They could complete it in several ways. The one featured was completed in floorplanner and the student who did it really enjoyed using the site. Others video-ed their own homes , a couple built SIMS houses and either took screenshots or made a video of the tour with the SIMS programme. A few used Minecraft and did the same thing – took me on a tour within Minecraft or did screen shots. Most imported their pictures or video tour into iMovie and then recorded a sound track. One boy recorded a sound track in Audacity and then took me on a tour of his home in Minecraft. Two girls made the video and then completely talked their way through the tour in person. So I had a variety of ways students responded to the tour and they were performing according to their interests and strengths. I had given them 20 questions about homes and surrounding areas in French. They could use those to build their tour and had to be able to answer those questions if I asked. To prepare we had done a revision of house and region vocabulary because these are senior students. We then watched two YouTube videos of Tour guidée de la maison. The students really liked those and went back to listen to them again. I found the best way to deal with it was to give them words or expressions to listen for to anchor their comprehension. They all succeeded very well. Being able to record the sound track took the pressure off the oral work so they spoke comfortably to me when I asked questions. The feed back I have received from my class is that this was a really good assignment. I thought so. I was really pleased with how well they did. The only things they could bring to their interview with me was their tour and the questions I had given them. Nearly all those who made a video had put a French song to play softly in the background. It really was enjoyable marking!

Le passé composé

Le Passé Composé

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E-Lesson Template

My e-lesson template for French

Distilling what I do in a classroom in order to teach French is not an easy task. Personality and involvement have a lot to do with it and a real enthusiasm for whatever it is I am doing. Teaching has to be well considered but it has to be spontaneous too.

I generally cover two topics a term . Within that I teach vocab, grammar and sentence structure.

First things first:
1. Roll – students have 3-5 sentences to write or a simple exercise while I am doing that.
2. Explain what is in the lesson and what it will do for them
3. Teach content simply with slide show
4. Teach content in a more complex way with slide show
5. Use a short video to reinforce content
6. Do some exercises to practice

Follow up lessons:

1. Exercise to practise what we are learning – whiteboard
2. Ideas and examples about how they can improve – whiteboard
3. Look at the technology involved – whiteboard
4. Set the assignment and explain it
5. Examples of what I want them to achieve – whiteboard
6. Include other short videos which reinforce vocabulary ,content and presentation skills

Follow up lessons:

1. iPad apps to reinforce what we are doing
2. One to one help and tuition
3. Group input about how we can improve
4. One to one help and tuition
5. Specific quick exercises to reinforce and further develop content
6. Leave them alone to work
7. Respond to specific requests for help.
8. Negotiate deadline and presentation requirements

Homework:

A long term assignment which will practise the skills we are learning in class and then I alternate between an oral and written presentation.

Feedback:

I collect it informally along the way but ask them to report back in writing on Twiducate. I generally ask them questions so that the feedback I get is specific.

Materials:

I create a folder with the short and long term assignments relevant to the topic
I collect the slide shows relevant to the topic
I collect the relevant sound files
I make sure I know which exercises I am doing in the course/activity books and when.
I collect videos and video links relevant to the topic and make sure I have book marked video links and created a text file with them.
For students without laptops I make the necessary computer room bookings each week according to our needs
I ensure everyone is comfortable with the technology aspect and spend at least 3 lessons on that.
I bookmark sites which will help them learn and get started or further develop their knowledge
I upload tasks and files to LMS or put in network folder.

Video French

Everyone knows YouTube. Not everyone knows Daily Motion. The Daily Frenchpod had quite a number of videos which teach French very effectively and will boost student confidence.

Le café

La chanson de l’alphabet

Frenchtasticpeople.com

Frenchtasticpeople is a very enthusiastic and comprehensive site created by an instructor at the University of Minnesota. There is so much to help you learn French and everything has a sound file. It doesn’t matter whether you are trying to learn French ,brush up on your French or you just want the chance to hear some French to keep up your accent. There is a lot to choose from so be sure to check the pages and the tabs. The site supports you as a learner and offers every possible way of helping you to do your best to be better at French.

Aimer

Aimer

View more presentations from Sally Smith

I have designed this as a follow up to teaching verb conjugations. Digital students are not learning conjugations as easily as before so I am trying everything! We have been through them in class but I am coming back to them at t he end of the year. I shall use the original PowerPoint presentation to start with and use this ppt video as revision. The video can also be used by other students as revision. Why not?

Aimer

I can now report the Aimer video I made to teach verb conjugations has been a big success with all my students. It is now a format I can use to teach digital natives. My year 8s (beginners) picked the verb endings up very quickly and then could translate that information into sentences of their own. The year 9s (one year of French) could write several sentences and easily follow the pattern of the oral presentations at the end and introduce themselves comfortably. They could even add sentences of their own confidently. The year 11s (four years of French) really enjoyed the presentation and grasped it all as revision very easily. They could appreciate the songs. Their oral presentations were very confident and accurate and that was the biggest gift to them. They felt really good about talking French today. With the year 8s I started first with my PowerPoint version of the verb aimer which I had converted to this video with the extras. I think if I can make one of these every so often then I can have a bank of them for teaching which I can update pretty easily if I need to.

La fête d’Hallowe’en

Image:Teteamodeler My year nines wrote a combined story to practise their passé composé. We are still working on their Comic Life Story from the previous post, but we need to come at the passe compose from all sorts of angles. It is a lot to master. Their story isn’t bad considering we did it in 15 mins and everyone had to contribute a sentence. They seemed to really enjoy it.

Petite histoire non-compliquée

Lundi soir il y avaient 3 filles – Amélie, Aurélie et Sylvie. Elles sont allées dans la rue pour la fête d’Hallowe’en. Elles ont vu une citrouille et une sorcière.Elles ont mangé la citrouille et la sorcière aussi. Puis elles ont mangé des bonbons au chocolat. Ensuite elles ont regardé un match de netball et puis elles ont joué au netball.Après le match de netball elles ont été kidnappé par des extraterrestres. Quelle horreur! Elles sont presque mortes! Elles se sont échappées.Elles ont marché très vite et puis un loup a failli de les manger.Un fantôme a mangé leurs âmes .Elles sont devenues gravement malades. Elles ont baladé dans la rue. Puis les trois petites filles sont rentrées à la maison. Elles ont mangé des bonbons bizarres et ont grandi . Elles étaient énormes! La FIN

Les Langues

Ma France Cours has plenty of short videos on YouTube like this one which you can use to enhance learning. They can be used as a basis for a lesson or you can use them to reinforce what you have been teaching. Short videos are often a good way to start finish or break up a lesson. All the ones I have seen are good quality and well worth watching. They have good interest and pedagogical value.

Liven up lessons with sticky notes

It took a little while to set up but LinoIt was a lot of fun today and got some good French practice going. We were practicing the subjunctive, but you could practise anything. I had to email my year 11 students an invitation to the Year 11 group I had set up on LinoIt. I used my study lesson and their school email addresses. Then in the lesson they had to access their invitation and follow the instructions. Some couldn’t access their emails and had to get tech help. Two emailed a copy of their invitation to a friend in the group who couldn’t access the invitation and then nullified their own invitation so I had to reinvite them. All this meant time and patience but they had tried to trouble shoot themselves and they had told me immediately when it went wrong and what the problem was. In the meantime others were seeing their sticky notes land on the canvas (pinboard ) and were very excited. I can edit the notes or they can so it kept us very focussed on the language skills and what we were trying to learn. One girl found a nice picture of the arc de triomphe to put up. It lightened up the heavy duty intake of the subjunctive and gave them some good practice. You can move the notes around or delete them. You can add hotlinks, videos, documents. It really is a very handy site for gathering and/or creating study information. I am going to use it regularly.

Comic Life

I trialled Comic Life last year on my MacBook. The trial version is very fair and you get ample opportunity to see what this programme can do. For that reason our school purchased it to install on the student laptops. it runs on Mac, Windows or iPad. The students really enjoy it once they get into it and their capacity to create and be inventive in French is enhanced. We had just learned the passé composé. We had practised each part of it and we had made sentences along the way. I then decided they could use Comic Life to create a little story using 20 sentences and asked them to focus on the passé composé. Some have taken pictures of themselves on the laptop and are making great little stories. Others have found images and are using those. Others are inventing their own little characters. It is a programme which allows students to develop some good technology skills but it alos allows them to work with teir interests and strengths. The French has been very good. Today I was looking at what the students had chosen to do and I was more than happy with the level and accuracy of their French.

Bûche de Noël

There is another nice recipe here for a Bûche de Noël. There is also a really nice desktop background to be found on this site. There is a variation on the theme with worksheets at tête à modeler.

Madame LeChat – histoire en 15 minutes

Il faisait nuit. Mme LeChat est allée dans la rue car elle a entendu un bruit étrange. Mme Chat a trouvé une inconnue qui chantait aux enfants. Elle s’est promenée le long de la rue. Elle a vu une voiture et a mangé des pommes d’urgence. Il faisait froid et elle avait tellement froid. Dans la rue il y avait un autre chat à côté d’une porte. Un autre chat plus grand est apparu et a dit:

“Bonjour, Mme LeChat. Vous etes miam .”

Elle a entendu un bruit et c’était une sirène. Mme LeChat a sauté en haut. Mme LeChat a trouvé un poisson.Elle a mangé le poisson tout excitée. Elle était très fatiguée après cette aventure. Elle vivait heureuse longtemps après.

30 myths about bilingualism

Got this via morsmal.org. They are looking for people to translate it into other languages. Certainly worth reading and then some thought:

1. Bilingualism is a rare phenomenon
- More than half the world’s population is multilingual. Bilingualism is found in all parts of the world, at all levels of society, in all age groups.

2. Bilingualism leads to cognitive and linguistic delays
Bilingual children are neither less nor more intelligent than monolinguals. On average they start to talk a bit later than monolinguals but still within parameters of normal variation.

3. Bilinguals will never be able to master either Language properly
- There is no evidence whatever for this claim. On the contrary, studies show that bilinguals learn additional foreign languages faster than monolinguals.

4. Bilingualism leads to linguistic confusion
- Language mixing (or code-switching) is not a sign of linguistic confusion.

5. Bilingualism is “genetic” and happens spontaneously when parents are native speakers of different languages
- Being native speakers of different languages is not sufficient – providing enough input in both languages is also necessary. Learning languages require opportunity and the motivation.

6. Bilingualism is always possible and easy during childhood, no matter when it starts
- An early start during the first 2-3 years of life is necessary to attain the same results as monolinguals, especially for accent and pronunciation, but also for many aspects of grammar. This does not mean that it is impossible to become bilingual after age 3.

7. Bilingualism is useful only if both languages are useful languages
- The non-linguistic advantages resulting from bilingualism are independent of the languages involved. Studies show that bilinguals are protected against the deterioration of cognitive abilities in old age.

8. Attitudes do not influence linguistic development
Children are very sensitive to people’s attitudes towards language. It is important for the child to realize that both languages can be used in all situations and are used by many people also outside the family.

9. Bilingual kids can only be raised by bilingual parents
- There are different methods and education programs allowing also monolingual parents raising bilingual children.

10. Bilingual kids are not Good at Math and Science
- The only evidences for this myth are from studies conducted with recent immigrant children of different socio-economical backgrounds compared to local children.

11. A child should learn one language properly first and then start learning the other
- There is no evidence supporting this myth. Children who learn two languages in a supportive environment learn them both well.

12. A child who learns two languages won’t feel at home in either of them
- Children who feel accepted by both their cultures will identify with both regardless of being bilinguals.

13. Bilinguals have to translate from their weaker to their stronger language
- Bilinguals think in either of their two languages. They do not think in one language only and immediately translate into the other language.

14. Children who grow up bilingual will make great translators when they grow up
- Being bilingual from childhood offers no advantage or a disadvantage over those who became bilingual as adults when it comes to translating.

15. Real bilinguals never mix their languages. Those who do are confused ‘semi-linguals’
- Semi-lingualism is very rare and may be resulted by a stressful environment when trying to learn two or more languages with very little input in any of them.

16. Bilinguals have split personalities
- The change in language cues a change in cultural expectations and behavior. However bilinguals are fully aware of that and are not splitting to another personality when it happens.

17. There is “only one way” to raise bilingual children
- Studies show that children learn both languages regardless of the pattern of exposure, as long as that pattern is reasonably consistent.

18. People really can’t learn a new language properly after a certain age
- Language learning is easier the younger you are when you start. However, people can learn valuable language skills at any age.

19. The home language will have a negative effect on the acquisition of the school language
- The home language is an important linguistic base for acquiring aspects of the other language. It also gives children a known language to communicate in while acquiring the second language.

20. Bilinguals express their emotions in their first language
- Emotions and bilingualism produce a very complicated but also very personal reality that has no set rules. Some bilinguals prefer to use one language, some the other, and some use both of them to express their feelings and emotions.

21. Mixing languages is a sign of laziness in bilinguals.
- Language code-switching and borrowing is a very common behavior in bilinguals speaking to other bilinguals. Many expressions and words are better said in the one or the other language.

22. Bilinguals are also bicultural.
- Even though many bilinguals are also bicultural, many others are monocultural (e.g. multilinguals in Switzerland) and vice versa, thus being monolingual and bicultural (e.g. the British who live in the USA).

23. Bilinguals have equal and perfect knowledge of their languages
- Bilinguals know their languages to the level that they need and use them. A very few bilinguals have equal and perfect fluency in both languages.

24. Real bilinguals have no accent in their different languages
- Having an accent or not in a language does not make one more or less bilingual. It depends on how early one has acquired his or her languages.

25. Parents should speak in the majority language to their children for improving children’s school achievements
- When parents force themselves to speak the majority language at home even though they are not proficient in it, it may actually lead to delaying of language development and hurting their children’s chances for academic success.

26. The more exposure one has to a language the more quickly one learns that language
- Simply being exposed to a language is no guarantee that one will gain in-depth knowledge of it. Language learning requires as we will be exposed to language input that we cannot understand.

27. Bilingual Education has been proven ineffective
- There are different models of bilingual education in different countries. Some are known to produce better results (eg. immersion programs). One should also take to account the different socio-economical backgrounds of the bilingual learners.

28. Special language education required by new immigrants is an economical burden for the society
- Multilingualism can boost the economy. According to EU rapports it is estimated that 11% of small and medium-sized businesses lose contracts due to a lack of language skills.

29. Older generations of immigrants learned without all the special language programs that immigrant children receive now
- The level of education needed to get a job and technology has changed. When immigrants came earlier, they were able to get industrial jobs with relatively little language skills and education.

30. Immigrants don’t want to learn the majority language
- Evidence from research show that immigrants are actually very motivated to learn the majority language.

French Demos

Supermemo site has some trial examples of the sorts of language materials they have on offer. There are some nice ones for beginners’ French. The pronunciation is clear and easy to mimic. You control how fast you go so as a learner you will never feel as though you are being pushed too fast. The site is worth exploring to look at the sorts of online material now available and when you get a proper demonstration of the materials you at least get a good idea of how practical they might be for your situation. If you go to the Supermemo news site you’ll find a link to the free iPhone app and then if you go to the downloads section of the toolbar you can download the Supermemo programme for Windows. it has been designed to help you learn better and the news site gives you information about how successful that has been.

Apps for advanced French learners

There are plenty of apps for people who want to begin learning French and for beginners who have a little bit of French. At the moment there is less choice for those who have some good skills in French and want to move on. Both TV5 Monde and RFI specialise in helping others to learn french by using authentic materials. 7 Jours sur la Planète is available for iPod, iPad and iPhone and works well on all of them. I use iPod and iPad versions and my students can further access the iPhone version. Perfect! There are little videos which are supported by vocab lists and written exercises which make good use of the i mobile capacitive screen. Students just love using the capacitive functionality of those screens. It means they are more independent with their learning and have a chance of doing something quite advanced with some teacher support. Students like to be independent on their computers and mobile gadgets so constantly tethering them to a teacher can be off putting. 7 Jours sur La Planète has a nice balance and covers the sorts of things I can further support in class. Click the previous link to access it in the iTunes store. The other app which helps students to be more involved with their own learning is Learn French with the News an Rfi/TV5 Monde initiative. There are mystery stories to follow which are run bilingually and students can feel really comfortable using these because they are enticed through narrative to follow their French!

Who speaks French?

On the site for the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie you can get a very nice map with the francophone nations.There is also a game to play. That site always has the most up to date information. Then you can go to The World Speaks French and get some lovely promotional materials to help promote your French language learning.n There is some good information at France this Way. E-zine then has a good article putting it together here. As a teacher it can be a bit hard putting that all together. French is an a official language, it is a second language and then it is a language which has been widely shared across continents. Some times you would not be aware someone is French speaking because they are multilingual and may be using one of their other languages. It can then become further confused by having French speaking nations , francophone nations and then observer nations. Hopefully these sites will help you clarify that. I have yet to find one site where all the information about French speakers is put together accurately and kept up to date.

QR Code Art

This is a wonderful video showing just how amazing QR Codes can be both as inspiration for artists and gallery goers.

Elle me dit – Mika

This is a big hit with students but with over 15 million hits on YouTube it is a big hit full stop. The lyrics are here.

Cartes de Vœux Noël

You won’t go into cognitive overload trying to make sense of these lovely little electronic cards even though your french may be limited at this stage of your learning . You’ll be able to work it out and the site has met you half way with some English. The card left is cute. Hover your mouse over each character and they will sing carols to you. Look around the site because there really are some good and original cards to send your friends and family for all sorts of occassions , not just Christmas. There are more Christmas cards here.

Auberge de la Reine Blanche

Auberge de la Reine Blanche
Daily Motion has a lot of short video restaurant reviews. Some have commentaries in French and then you get one like this with an iconic French song and an opportunity to take in all the delicious dishes and atmosphere. The ones with French commentary would be useful in class because they are not intense French and go at a reasonably relaxed paste. With the focus on food and plats français it’s a sure fire way to enthuse students. Food is at the centre of any language and cultural experience. A very good way to share French language and food with your students.

Les Mini-Livres

mini-livre

Students love making miniature things. There is something about it which is very attractive and engaging to them. I wouldn’t want to be marking too many mini-livres but I think it would be a good thing to teach to get some good results in learning French. The mini-livres A6 site has complete instructions and support so that you will be able to get your students to produce some good quality mini-livres.

Bonnes fêtes de fin d’année!

Joyeux Noel

You can find some lovely virtual cards for Christmas on the Dromadaire site. They have plenty of choices for the rest of the year too.

Il était une fois… les technologies du passé

Trop mignons ces enfants qui découvrent les technologies du passé.

Espace enfants

TakaTrouver is a French Canadian site for children with a wealth of information, games, activities and ideas to extend their knowledge and linguistic skills. I am thinking it would be useful to enhance and maintain language skills of students with native speaker skills but I am also thinking it would be a good site for those students who have a good knowledge of French. Either way it is a non threatening and pleasant way to engage students in linguistic development in another language. The cybercartes are good for this time of the year.

Coco Chanel

It never ceases to amaze me how timeless an inspiration Coco Chanel is for my French students. I have been teaching for a very long time. Each year the new students discover Chanel, her clothes , her style and her life and they are transported into a realm of wonder and inspiration. They want to know everything about her. The find her life so different from theirs but compellingly interesting. They love the fashion and they look for very particular designs in her clothes which they love. Any time I set a background assignment on fashion and the students report back on it with a presentation in class it is always something both moving and deeply creative. By contrast Karl Lagerfeld means nothing to them in this new generation. They discover who he is and what he stands for and respect him for that but it is Coco Chanel who gets to them. It makes teaching French very easy. I can use the fashion words and we learn about clothes and clothing vocabulary. One of my best tricks is to get the boys to pick an outfit they think the girls will fall in love with and vice versa. The students take it very seriously and learn the words quickly for what they have chosen.

Bonne année 2012

Cartes personnalisées Je souhaite à vous et à vos proches une bonne et heureuse année 2012.

Easy French Apps

Nest your apps into groups!

I have been sorting my iPad apps and the easiest thing is to put them into nested groups. Now I can tell you what I have loaded.

1. French Language Suite
2.French
3.WordPowerLt
4.iSpeak FR
5.iTooch français CM2 Lite
6. Premiers Mots
7.French Flash Cards
8. Des Chiffres
9. Anglais
10. busuu
11. Speak in the City
12. Gender
13. 24/7 French vocab
14.Time to Learn
15. Learn French
16. French
17. Flashcards
18. Learnbots

Organise your resources with Livebinders

I have just started work on my first Livebinder for La cuisine francaise. This is a senior school version so it is taking some time to put together. I am really happy with Livebinders, though. There are plenty of resources for French and I am staggered with the amount of good work teachers have put into this site and concept. I shall be playing my part by putting French binders of my own online. This way we are helping ourselves and each other. La cuisine is something I teach usually in the junior school so I shall be doing a binder for that. This year my senior students asked if we could please do it as a topic. Why not? it has been fun finding suitable resource materials and now Livebinder is the place I can store them . The added advantage is my students will now have access to my binder. Fabulous idea! So easy! This is a work in progress. So far I have mustered recipe sites, You Tube cooking videos in French, vocab practice and little conversations and a song. I am still looking for suitable senior material and have yet to add my own worksheets.

Respire – Mickey 3D

I have done a lot of work with my senior students on environmental issues so that they know the language. They have really enjoyed it. Now I have found a song I can do with them this year and it will bring all of that vocabulary back into focus. The version with the lyrics is here.

L’alouette en colère – Félix LeClerc

This is a pretty powerful song by Félix LeClerc, a Québecois. As such it is suitable for older students and adults because even though it comes form the 70s there are still some very pertienet issues who are treated in this song. Worksheets and lyrics are here. L’alouette is the song we all know and can sing in French.

La cuisine française

I am doing la cuisine française with senior students this year so I am really having to sort things out. It is normally a background topic my beginners enjoy. The challenge of getting a unit of work together for senior students has been interesting. I have started my Livebinders but now I have found there are some very good resources on TV5.org. You can get worksheets here for the 25 minute video in French here. When you get to the page with the video link there are even more videos and resources for cuisine!

Intermediate French apps

There is a hole in hte market where intermediate French apps are. It is easy to find apps for beginners and easy to provide apps for advanced users of French. When it comes to those students who have some French and are still needing support in their learning , then there is not enough. It is too easy or too hard. I am not totally comfortable with the apps I have put in this category:

1. TV5Monde
2. Lucky Luke BD
3. iTooch Maths CM2 Lite
4. French ( intense vocab training)
5. Diabolo cherche une famille (runs in French and English)
6. Histoires HD
7. Jules et la forêt d’Halloween
8. Tu sais que t’es un Geek quand…
9. wordreference.com French -English
10. Odyssey Translator
11. AlloCiné
12. Hachette dictionnaire illustré

French Radio

Cheriefm has a choice of 26 web radios. I listen to Cherie Frenchy because it plays French songs and it is a good way to keep in touch and keep up my skills. The site itself keeps you up to date with French music news. I also listen to RFI because it brings French, Francophone and international news and then information on other topics. It actually runs in several languages. The direct streaming offers choices as to the sort of listening experience you might want. If you look on the red tabs at the top there is also a section dedicated to helping people learn French and improve their French. It also offers tools for helping teachers to teach French.

Advanced French Apps

So what do I have in my advanced French category?
1. Le Figaro
2. Le Figaro.fr
3. 7 jours sur la planète
4. Mon guide écolo
5. Pensées positives
6. Potager
7. Idées déco
8. Bédé Musicale
9. Côté maison
10. Le livre du calme
11. France 24
12. Brevet français
13. Astrosanté
14. Turbo.fr
15. Vogue France
15. Trucs et astuces de grand-mère
16. Vogue Automne-Hiver 2011
17. Mon quotidien

I also have the Hachette dictionnaire illustré, the Larouse French dictionary, AlloCiné and Word Reference apps. As far as advanced French reading material goes I have Le Kiosque so I can access magazines and newspapers, QuickRdr FR, AudioLib, FrenchReader, Livre Classique, Fables de la Fontaine , Peintre BD and Ganesh French.

Aïcha – Cheb Khaled

This song has been huge and is still popular. Cheb Khaled is Algerian and lives in France and the song is supposed to be about his daughter. Not certain about that last bit. Judging by the number of versions and the number of translations into other languages then this is a song which has global appeal. The lyrics are on the site with the official clip but there is another version here on YouTube with the lyrics in French and German. They are shown as he sings them so it works quite well. I am glad to find the German lyrics as well since I often get German international students in my French class.

Verb training

verbs-online isn’t cool, it’s not fun, as such, but it is a well designed , very practical online approach to learning verbs. At some stage you just have to get them under your belt and into your head. The site practises various tenses and it allows you to work it out logically. It will provide you with hints and has even thought to supply an accent typer. A 10 minute stint on this effective site will do much to get you good at your verbs and stop you from making the same mistakes time after time.

I love Languages – especially French!

I am always excited when I find a whole swag of online resources for french. It is like an Aladdin’s cave. The I love Languages site has so many links to online resources it is hard to know where to start. It obviously caters to many languages but I have linked you to the ones for French. You will be familiar with some of the sites because I have blogged about them here. I am fascinated with the multilingual horse dictionary. Have fun!!

Il pleure dans mon coeur – Verlaine

It is important as a teacher these days that you not only teach the text but show students how that text has been interpreted in its own culture. Il pleure dans mon couer is a classic poem all French students should know. Students who learn French as a native language are taught it quite early and then it has become a strong part of their literature and culture. There is a text version read here. It is a poem I have always done with older studnets and they like it and the story behind it. A copy of the text and its translation is here.

Managing combined classes

It is quite hard teaching two different year levels at the same time in the same classroom. It requires all your teaching skills and then some good co operation and input from students. Many language teachers have to teach combined classes for reasons of cost effectiveness and staffing formulae so the trick is to find the things which make it a pleasure for you and your students. This year I have 9 year 11 students and 11 year 12 students in the same class and a high level of co operation. The courses are quite different as are the time frames. So this year I need to really think this out and make it work as I literally haven’t done it for years. Before it was easy because the courses were similar and so I could adjust requirements for the lower level. I started off by teaching one class for half the lesson and then the other class for the other half a lesson. The class I am not teaching then needs work they can do purposefully alone. I have used little texts, small videos, podcasts and questionnaires. That has been quite good but not really engaging as such. So today I went to my graphic organisers and printed up 2x A3 versions of a concept web. The lower level has been working on La neige. We are working up to a piece written by Théophile Gautier – La première neige. They have watched little videos, slide shows, we have built vocabulary up around la neige. Today I said they were working in petites équipes – petits groupes and they would work on the concept web for La Neige together and then type it up onto their electronic version. That would reinforce their learning. Then with the older group I could get on with the slide presentation on agriculture biologique because we are doing La Cuisine. The year 11s threw themselves into their concept webs and were talking it through quietly and then there was silence as they typed it up. My year 12s and I got through the tough piece on agriculture biologique and they were very focussed. Somehow my plan had really lifted the game and we were all working hard for the entire 40 minutes of our lesson. At the end I looked at the concept webs my year 11s had done and was thrilled with their efforts on their champ lexical. I asked them how they felt. They all said it was much better that way. I could see the pride on their faces and the feeling of a job well done. That is what we all need. I need to keep working on this. Tomorrow I have a double lesson and will see how that goes with our petites équipes, our whole year level work and then some one to one. As teachers we need to share how we manage combined year levels. We’ll struggle less and come up with some good plans!

Text analysis with Word

I have always known you could comment on docs in Microsoft Word using the comments feature but my attitude was – Yes, and? I could see it might be a useful feature but I couldn’t see how it would be useful to me. I now have a combined year 11 and 12 French class which is doing two different courses so I am turning to technology to help streamline my approach so I can be really effective in a classroom. One of the things we have to do is text analysis. How was I going to do that with only half the time on one year level and then an active class and a passive class at the same time so I can teach the course work for each year level? The comments feature of Word came into my head. Time and place stuff, I guess, and necessity being the mother of invention. My new approach to text analysis with a combined class is to give them a copy of the text in English and then a French one which deals with the same topic but is not the same as the English one. The English text gets them on the right track and then they can tackle the French text and do the analysis. With the French text I use the comments feature of Word to offer a French synonym for a word they might find really difficult or one I would normally explain. I can see this is going to be very handy and I will develop and grow it as a technique as the year goes on. The feedback from my students was very positive and the thing I liked about using the comments feature was it made a nice, tidy looking assignment. . When you go into Word, look along the ribbon/toolbar and find REVIEW. Click on that and you will see NEW COMMENT about a third of the way along the ribbon. Highlight the word or words you wish to address and click on the NEW COMMENT button. A box will pop up to the right of the screen and you can type what you wish in there. Very easy! It prints neatly too if you want a print copy.

Le croissant maison

Very effective, drole and efficient message here from artisanal boulangers. The video is a good one to show in class because it is so well made, is very French, has some French worth learning and is about the iconic croissant. No way should it be under threat!

Slow French

When you are learning another language it can always seem that native speakers are speaking horribly fast and it can be off putting. You learn a language by a mixture of using slow speakers and normal speed speakers. News in Slow French is a site which recognises the need for learners to have speakers speak more slowly so they can process the new language. The site also offers help with grammar, expressions and quizzes so it’s a pretty good site for giving yourself a chance to get much better at French. The site offers a weekly podcast so there is regular material for you to master.

Interactive French resources

Hallo-World has some good online French resources which enable teachers and students to find materials to learn French. There are little cartoons like the one features which present dialogues for practice but there are also plenty of other things like flash cards, theme based lessons for learning basic French, memory games, worksheets. There are plenty of activities to help you master the basics.

Connect across the globe with Twiducate

There was so much excitement in my year 11 and 12 class today. Finally we had the French classes on Twiducate. It was time to take Twiducate further. I use it to help students formulate ideas, practise their French, give me feed back on what we are doing, but this year I wanted them to branch out and make some authentic connections in a safe environment. I know the teacher. We spent a while working out how we would do this and then we had to wait for my students to get back to the new school year and then her students to get back to class on March 5th in La Gironde. Her students are younger than mine but if today is anything to go by it’s a nice connection to have. My students are on as individuals but we have put hers on as whole classes and then they can write individually within that group. My student teacher and the French teacher are also members of my group. My students were so pleased to find people from France on their class space and then enjoyed reading and responding. Her students are practising their English and we are practising our French. So now we can find out how to develop this kind of asynchronous learning for our students. In terms of motivation it has the thumbs up.

Classroom blogging adventure

french blog

I have been working with my year 12s on their laptops since they were in year 10 and we have built up some good skills. They are also students who are willing to take a risk and put themselves out there to learn. They are in the combined year 11 and 12 class I have for French and as I have blogged before I am trying to find ways of making good use of our time and ways to help them learn more effectively given I have two year levels and two different courses in one room. The blogs are off to a slow, but sure start for most students. I cannot teach all that I want to in class because some features are blocked by our web filter. It is not really a problem because I explain what I want them to do and then it’s a good exercise for them to go home and remember! Only one student has not taken up this opportunity for an online adventure and does not seems to like it. The others are very enthusiastic and are finding it a good challenge. We are doing cuisine for our major research so that is one feature of the blog. Then we are working on poetry so I have found that the students are happy to share what they have done in class on that . I have just spent my first session marking their efforts. Prior to that I spent a lesson looking at their blogs one by one to try to help them improve. It would go faster and better if I just had one year level but as it stands this slow approach is having some good results. They need to create their blog rolls, they need to get better at tagging and some of them need to get a better visual aspect. The other thing which currently needs to be done is the “About” page. I have set them some tasks which they have presented as homework which then go on their blog and then they have found things of their own or have creatively engaged with what we have done in class. At this stage we are only about 3 weeks in and each of the blogs has its style and flavour. I aim to address the learning gaps by the end of term so that next term we can look at drawing in some traffic.I am thinking also I need to create a checklist of what they need to do and what needs to be achieved. I have previously worked successfully with individual students on blogs but his is the first time I have tried a class approach. I have a dozen students. I don’t think I would want to be doing it with more.

N’oubliez pas de vous fraiser

A lovely little song where you can hear the words clearly. They are also written on the screen and this link provides the lyrics as well because it has been designed to help others learn French. Nothing like taking one thing and exploring the language around it. You can also take a visit to La Fraiseraie in Pornic which is one of the most successful strawberry places in the world. They do offer products with other fruit but strawberries are their thing. You can then go on a petit tour of la criée de fraises in Belgium and see how they are sold and the sorts on offer. Then when you want to find out everything about strawberries and get information and ideas of how they are culturally absorbed – go to La Fraise. Take one thing and explore the language learning exposure and possibilities.

La truffe du Tricastin

The truffles from Tricastin are world renowned and the area where they have grown has turned them in to a voyage of discovery for those who do not know them. It is a good way to celebrate and preserve local produce. I am going to do the video La truffe noire du Tricastin with my senior students. Those who learn French find the discovery of truffes quite fascinating. The video is about 25 mins, narrated by the famous chef Guy Martin, so easily completed in half a lesson and then some vocabulary support which will fill the rest of the lesson. There is a work sheet available at the link on the TV5 monde site but I have adapted it for my learners because, as it stands, they would find it daunting. I am looking forward to seeing how they go!

Madame goes to Paris

One of the things you have to be able to do in a classroom is change the ambiance so that the students are ready to embrace the new culture and language. This little video by Durosier makes you want to learn French and creates a lovely atmosphere in just a short space of time.

Henri 2, Paw de Deux

If you haven’t met Henri, time you did. His little videos create a wonderful French atmosphere for your classroom! The first Henri was entered into the Seattle 3 minute video competition. The creator of these videos graduated from the Seattle Film Institute. They are just charming.

French Flashcards

I went to the app store on my Macbook. You click on the Apple logo top left of the screen and Mac Store comes up as an option in the menu. I found a really good flash card programme for French and it was free. It is set out really nicely and will look good on my whiteboard. It comes preloaded with some basic vocabulary and then it is easy to create your own lists. So try the French Flashcards BASIC. I don’t think you will be disappointed.

Apps for French cuisine

So what apps have I got loaded on my iPad for French cuisine? Cuisine.tv is a very good site but if you go to iTunes U you can download videos for free of 50 recipes under the cuisine.tv app.I also have the Recettes de cuisine by Thierry Rousillon. You can go to the webtv de l’académie de Versailles on iTunes U and they have some cuisine videos. The other apps I have for cuisine from the app store are not all free but most of them are:

Marmiton
Elle à table
Bio cuisine
Cuisine française
Mes recettes
Sud-Ouest
Best of French cuisine
Toquades

Hard not to get involved!

Show me how to write a letter in French

Write a letter in French

ShowMe is a relatively new site where you can share teaching and learning activities, it works just as well on an iPad as it does on a computer and to contribute activities you can join the site. It means teachers and students can contribute learning activities which would be helpful to others. So much potential in terms of differentiating the curriculum. The more that people contribute the better chance there is of finding something which will suit your teaching and learning needs. You can like items if you want to to build up your own personal favourites. You can also share items on social media and blogs. The iPad app is really easy to use and it means you can easily contribute no matter where you are. As you will see from the examples there are typed and handwritten lessons and the language bank is growing the more we contribute. I say we. I need to get going on this as well!

Tu parles trop – René La Taupe

Cute little clip which goes slow enough for someone learning French to try and sing along! René La Taupe is a very popular petit personnage.

Learn French with Voice Reader app

Voice Reader is a very handy app for iPhone or iPad which will enable students of French to master accent and fluency faster but at their own rate. It actually runs in a number of European languages. You can download voice synthesisers to run offline for 99 cents in Australia but you have access to all of them online. I downloaded André. He’s pretty nice to listen to. Students can type as much or as little text as they want and the voice will read it back to them in pretty good French. It is not perfect native speaker but it does a good job. The text can be slowed down or sped up so the students are totally in control of their learning.

Bonne fête de Pâques à toutes et à tous

Image: Cuisine simple

Bonne fête de Pâques à toutes et à tous .

Learn French and translate the web!

Well, what a novel and innovative concept this is! Learn a language of your own choice and help, as a native speaker of your own language, to translate the web. I already do this as part of my FaceBook experience. I help with the language development on FaceBook because I signed up for it. DuoLingo means you can learn French but how motivating is that , that you can then use your mother tongue skills to help others learn your language? I like this world and the way the internet allows us to work together as a planet to facilitate good things for ourselves. I also know form my Facebook experience that it really is a good way to improve , enhance and share your language skills.