TpT Cyber Smile Sale

Hope everyone had a lovely holiday weekend! Let's keep the celebration going this Monday and Tuesday with a Teachers Pay Teachers Sale. It's a great time to check off those items on your wish list!

Why I Taught Parts of Speech in French Class

Has this ever happened to you: You’re helping students during a writing activity. You see one of your kiddos writing a lovely sentence but their adjective doesn't agree. So, you say “Excellent! Mais, fait attention à l’adjectif”. And they stare back at you. Blankly. Almost bleakly. Suddenly the writing process is disrupted and you find yourself going into a grammatical explanation for the 10^th time this week.

This used to happen rather frequently in my room. I was torn: I wanted to give the students the tools they needed to monitor and correct their own writing WITHOUT disrupting their workflow. (Also, having the same conversation about French grammar rules over and over was getting a little old.)

This year I thought I would introduce the parts of speech in French. I figured if students had a better understanding of the parts of speech, I would be able to direct their attention to certain aspects of their writing easily. To my surprise, the kiddos responded really well! I just uploaded the products I used in my TpT store, if you’re interested.

First, I assigned this graphic organizer for homework. I gave them a couple of nights to do it, since I assumed they would need to use the Internet to look up some words. I asked them to find the English equivalent of each, the definition, and some examples in French or English. When we went over it in class, our conversation was mostly in English, but I think it was time well spent.

Then, we worked on the parts of speech foldable. On the inside flaps, I had students write the English equivalent and a couple examples in French for each part of speech. You can find that here. When I do interactive notebooks, I like to have examples in several different stages of completion. I hang them up on the board for reference. It makes the direction-giving and assembly process go so much smoother.

Have you ever had a similar dilemma? What was your solution?