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 10th 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?
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