Happy Friday!
I hope you survived a week of rain, wind, a full moon, and Halloween excitement! I've been struggling to get over my first cough/cold/etc of the season and I am definitely looking forward to sleeping this weekend. I am probably over-excited for that extra hour of sleep we get on Sunday!
This week we practiced our verbs of the week and used them to focus on new sentence starters. I used to keep my sentence starters in a pocket chart, but now I keep them on my whiteboard so that we can build sentences with them. When we start a new set of vocabulary, I always copy a second set of flashcards and put them up on magnets so that my kids can grab them off the board if they need them during their writing. Having both of these on magnets means we can use them to practice making sentences!
My students are really comfortable with "il y a" and "je vois", so we've moved on to "je mange", "je porte" and "j'aime". I've been reading the "C'est l'automne" book from my fall pack every day. I read a sentence and have them repeat it after me. It's a LOT of repetition, but it works :) As we talked in September about the importance of repetition, I haven't had any of them question it or complain about it. They actually get really excited once they know the book well! When they're really familiar with it, they like to show off and read it as a class without my help, while I just hold it up and turn the pages.
Building sentences - starters and word wall cards:
I normally keep my sentence starters off to the side of my whiteboard. As a class, we read each one together as we go through the list of starters we've learned so far. Then one student picks a starter for us and I slide it over. Then we go through the words that are part of our current word wall (it was classroom objects, now it's fall themed). I say each word and they repeat it after me (usually we use different silly voices too, to make it fun!). Then a student chooses a card to complete our sentence.
Sometimes we also use mini whiteboards at the same time, so they can write (or "dwrite" with words and pictures) it out and then "bump up" their sentences with colours and numbers. Then they read their sentence to a partner.
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