We've been studying adjectives in my Grade 9 Academic French class. I found this great activity over at the Farnsworth Family Blog, that they use at church as part of their youth activities and thought it would be perfect to practice using adjectives to describe each other. I put my students in friend groups so that they would actually be able to describe each other. Together they had to brainstorm a minimum of five adjectives to describe each person. The person being described was not supposed to contribute any suggestions, they were only allowed to object if they didn't agree with what was chosen for them. And the rest is self-explanatory. It involved a chair, markers, a whiteboard behind them and all the words written around their head. Oh yes, and the best part was the berets that I made them wear. There were a few, ok, make that a lot of groans and mumblings of "Oh gross, we have to wear that?!", but it was like the cherry on top! We took pictures with our phones and they were all emailed to me. My idea is to put them up in class. I think the activity could use some tweaking, such as, adding more adjectives, five adjectives seems to be too little. Perhaps next time I'd throw in a couple of sentences? What do you think?
I like to start with a small unit on Music with my Grade 12s. It's a fun way to start off the semester, and it hooks them right away. A few of the things I do is start with this short Powerpoint (the links are not working currently, but the videos are below)
I start off by having them tell me about music in their lives related to instruments and types of music they listen to. We then watch the Intentalo video by 3Ball MTY.
They have to tell me if they noticed anything interesting clothing-wise. Usually the answer is the short dresses, and then the funky boots! So, we then start to talk about them and lead into this mini documentary.
To end of this lesson, I have them design their own boots, so out come the coloured pencils and off they go drawing! Next time we meet, they must explain their boots to the class and why they chose the design they did.
A little bit of the Twitterverse, directly and indirectly incorporated into class today via an activity that Martina Bex put together for one of her classes.
She captured various tweets on the hashtag #LoMejorDeMéxicoEs and created comprehension questions. I tweaked that and borrowed some of the tweets for my 2nd year students. I had them go through them without the use of dictionaries or translators. They did an amazing job at figuring out pretty much every tweet, and were entertained by the statements.
Then I put them into pairs and they had to try to come up with four tweets about #lomejordeCanadá. Some had trouble thinking outside the box, some stuck to some very generic points and some took advantage to throw in Justin Bieber (because what would Spanish class be without mentioning Justin Bieber on a daily basis?), and others needed more guidance, nonetheless, they seemed to have a good time trying to put their tweets together. There were some slower to put together their tweets and didn't get to writing four. I had each pair choose their favourite two that they came up with and write them on the board. I took pictures (see below) of their amazing hand writing. The next day we took a look at what they came up with all together. The tweets allowed us to learn a number of new words and explore some common grammar mistakes. I enjoyed this activity. It was very simple to throw together, fun to execute and even more fun to see the results. I didn't have them actually tweet out their statements as most do not have Twitter, although I had some offers from those that have accounts, to tweet out everyone's work, so perhaps I will have them do that so we can make a little mark on Twitter.
