Classes

Classes are going well. I’m still surprised at how regularly they occur…having to come up with lesson plans are just never ending…I had to turn in a plan for the semester—what I would teach each class…as though I had any idea. But we’ve started (of course).
In first, second and third grade I thought to start at the beginning: the alphabet and pronunciation of the letters, then colors and numbers. So we are rotating those through and then doing them again because repetition is never a bad thing…Some of the kids seem to be getting it which is nice. The third grade had already had colors as shown by the quick way they picked it up. We started playing a game putting the girls against the boys…each person gets a chance at a card with either a letter, number or color on it, if they say it correctly in English (key point) they get 10 points for their team. If someone else gives them the answer it is -5…So far I think the girls have won every game but the boys are slowly but surely starting to pay better attention and getting closer.In fourth, fifth, and sixth grade we did lots of vocabulary (4th-house vocab and things in a kitchen-I brought in examples or drawings of what I could; 5th-feelings, daily rountines, and greetings; 6th-vocab from a reading text) and we tried to play BINGO. Something we are all familiar with but not so much here. For one thing they had to make their own board. This also doesn’t sound so hard but I guess if you’ve never done it…the directions were to make a big square on a piece of blank paper. Inside the square make 4 horizontal lines and then 4 vertical lines and fill in one English vocabulary word per box. The frames that came out of those directions, I just don’t know where they came from…but eventually we got most of them with the right board…that took at least 2 class periods…I never would have imagined. So for the game, we said the word in French, they had to know the translation and mark it on their English board…once we got started it was fine and they had a lot of fun with it. Maybe the next time we do it, more of the kids will be able to do it correctly, especially since we had candy for the Bingo’s. We’ll have to wait and see.