September is a month of fresh starts and new learning. I love getting to know my students - learning what they love, what challenges them, what they're passionate about, and their special talents and skills. Our first writing and art project digs into this idea. Each student in the classroom is more than a student. They have so many experiences from outside of school that make up who they are. Students are sharing who they are through a French writing project. We began with a simple brainstorm of words that describe us... things like artist, creator, explorer, athlete, gamer, engineer, coder, friend, and big sister. What an incredibly talented class we have! From this brainstorm, we branched off into adding any details that came to mind. We added words, different experiences related to the original title, and any important ideas. Then, we transformed this brainstorm into our rough copies. We got to read a model (also in Google Classroom), and then set off to write on our own. The ideas the students are coming up with are incredible - totally brought tears to my eyes a few times reading about their passions and what excites them! They learned from each other on this project too - they got to read some model introductions of students who had written in a neat way to begin their paragraph. Check those out here. Usually - we'd move into editing and revising stations, but this time we did something a little different. I want to see where these students are at in terms of their writing, so instead of our editing and revising stations, each student got a little bit of feedback, we did some one-on-one conferencing, and they did a quick edit on their own. We didn't put too much time into editing because... Students are writing out a "good copy" for you to see at Open House next week, but this won't be the end of our project. Through a series of mini-lessons throughout September and October, students will get to re-work some of these paragraphs and see the magic of editing and revising their own work. They'll get to actually visualize the difference of where they were when they started, and where they are now in their writing. Check out a few samples below. Amazing, right? To go with this Writing... we did a really cool art project with a similar idea. The title is "The Person Behind the Student". These don't really need a description... they'll blow you away on their own!
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Bienvenue à notre salle de classe! This blog will be a little window into our French classroom - you'll get to peek at what we're learning. French learning is divided into four interconnected strands: Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking. We will work through these four strands of language in French class, as well as throughout all other subjects that are taught in French. You can access the French as a Second Language curriculum here. To start off, please take a look at this quick presentation (see photo left) that contains an overview of our French learning. You'll find out what subjects are taught in French, what my expectations for Speaking are (Oral French), as well as get access to a bunch of French resources. |
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