Practicing telling/writing stories

We have worked really hard all year on creating sentences with lots of details. My kids are really comfortable now adding details to make longggggg sentences, with colours, numbers, sizes, etc.

Now we are shifting focus to more functional sentences! We are learning to tell short stories in French. We've been practicing together following a general format.

I ask one student to give me a sentence and then I write it on the board. I draw a picture to match their sentence. Then we close our eyes and imagine what else we could see based on that sentence. Another student contributes a sentence and I write it on the board in a different colour, adding to our picture as we go. 

To start, we practiced with a model like this: 

There is an X.

The X is (colour, size, etc).

The X likes.... 

The X is (place, gender, etc).

We practice this quite a bit last week in partners. We also shared stories and wrote stories together. Then once they seemed to get the hang of it, I had them write their stories on whiteboards. 

A few students also moved to their journals or to large folded paper, as they were running out of room on the whiteboards. 

We will continue to practice this next week, and then the following week we'll be assessing them on their stories! They've been having fun making silly stories and love sharing them with their classmates. It's the best feeling to hear one of them make a "joke" in French, and hear their classmates giggle along with them!