On Tuesday the 22nd, our students will go through Ellis Island (located for this occasion in our B Gym). Students should come dressed-up to play their part. Boys can wear dark pants, preferably dark shoes, white shirt, a dark suit jacket or a vest, and mostly a hat / cap. Girls can wear long skirts and a white blouse, chals or scarves. Hair can be braided or in a bun. Anything that will remind late 1800's or early 1900's. Don't foget to bring a piece of luggage. A big basket, a very old leather looking suitcase, a sac made of cloth, or just a small blanket rolled-up and held with ropes or belts. If students need to dress-up at school, they should come a little early to do so (8:40ish).
Our first term is about to end (7 more school days). Students will work hard on revising their 4 letters for their journal, finding a few interesting documents to illustrate the writing and of course creating a cool cover. Most students are using Google Docs to write their letters. It is a great way to stay organized and to learn how we tend to communicate today. Of course as with all tools, one needs to learn its pros and cons.
Pros: hard to lose a document, yet possible if one pushes the wrong key! Command Z (or undo) is the most useful key when a text suddenly disappears. Document can be edited from any computers as long as there is internet access. Teacher and/or peer can view your document and add questions/comments to help elaborate the writing, and possibly mess-up your text. It is therefore important to choose wisely who you want to share your work with, and what role you want to give your peers (can edit / can view only). Sharing/communicating via Google doc. will be very interesting when we do our Cultural Festival project. Students will be asked to gather information about family or community members.
Cons: Google docs is not the fanciest word processor around, yet it has a French (and other) spellchecker (accessed through FILE). True, it is not the best and at times doesn't seem to read well language being used. It is possible to add a picture to the text, but hard to add margins around the pictures. When printing, it is important to use the icon (top left), it will generate a PDF file to be printed. So in short, it might be at times necessary to transfer the final version of a document onto a better word processor such as Pages or Word.
Also, students should not think that because they wrote their texts on Google doc, that they have submitted their work. It is important that they print their best version and/or communicate to me that their work is ready to be assessed and graded.
Grammar: After working on nouns and adjectives (masculine / feminine / singular / plural forms), we are working on verbs : indicative present / passé composé. Verb conjugations are what division tables are to Math. It is crucial that students at some point can recite / sing them effortlessly. It will free their working memory to accomplish harder tasks. Although several computer programs exist, paper and pencil is still the best method (plus it will free computer uses for other members of the family). I will give students a small booklet (red cover) with the conjugations of the main verbs they need to know. Students should drill themselves orally and by writing, identify verbs they know, and those that they don't. Then they can spend more time only on the latter ones.
Speaking French in class: I do not always lead the class, and students are often asked to work in pairs and groups. Although students are very good at speaking French to me or to their peers when clearly working on the assignment, many of them quickly turn to English when socializing. Some students (mostly the very chatty) are big offenders. I will instate a strict rule of French only in the classroom, and in next term grading period a rubric will be created to recognize the effort of those who try hard to keep French the only spoken language during our 63 minute class period.
