Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

This is an idea from teacher Sophia West, who posted it on Facebook on the MFL Teachers’ Lounge group. I’m sure she won’t mind me reproducing it here. Sophia wrote: ”If you’ve played Cards Against Humanity you’ll know what I’m getting at, but for those who haven’t, I tried a game called “finis ma phrase” with Y10 and Y11 today and it worked really well! Can be done orally or on whiteboards for written work. I did it both ways today with some very patient French exchange students! I just put a simple sentence starter on each slide of a PowerPoint, e.g. “j’adore manger...”; “le français me stresse car...” and divide the kids into groups of about 6. One student in the group reads the sentence starter aloud to the others. The others all think of their response and either say it or write it, e.g. “le français me stresse car c’est trop compliqué/ma prof me donne trop de devoirs/on n’a pas de chats dans la salle de classe...” etc - as sensible or as wacky as you like). The person who read the...

I'm between visits abroad at the moment, having been to Guadeloupe and Florida in late January/early February and soon to spend a fortnight in Costa Rica in March. When I'm home I like to keep frenchteacher.net fresh with new resources, so here are the ones I've added in the last three weeks. Beginner/low intermediate A PowerPoint to introduce simple comparatives. Includes pair work and simple writing. A PowerPoint. Asking for directions. Nine destinations, pour aller au/à la/à l' simple phrasing: just turn left, turn right, go straight on. Built in simple paired conversation practice. This would make a decent starter lesson on the situation. A PowerPoint on shops. 12 shops and what you can buy there. With pair work and some written gap-fill. Usable with Y7 or 8 (near-beginner). A PowerPoint to introduce and/or practise the near future (with pastimes). Built-in sequence with listening, repetition, oral games and translation. Good also for Y8 revision ...

Image: pixabay.com Sentence Stealers is a reading aloud game invented by Gianfranco Conti. I'll describe the game to you, then suggest an extension of it which goes a bit further than reading aloud. By the way, I shouldn't need to justify the usefulness of reading aloud, but just in case, we are talking here about matching sounds to spellings, practising listening, pronunciation and intonation and repeating/recycling high frequency language patterns. This is how it works: Display around 15 sentences on the board, preferably ones which show language patterns you have been working on recently or some time ago. Hand out four cards or slips of paper to each student. On each card students must secretly write a sentence from the displayed list. Students then circulate around the class, approaching their classmates and reading a sentence from the displayed list. If the other person has that sentence on one of their cards, they must hand over the card. The other person the...

Puy du Fou. Image: pixabay.com Here's a resource I uploaded the other day to frenchteacher.net. Tripadvisor is a great source of reading material, once you do some serious adaptation and name changing. This resource combines, reading with other skills to provide the basis of a decent lesson. Apologies for formatting issues when copying from Word. Puy du Fou – commentaires sur Tripadvisor.fr Une journée inoubliable aussi bien pour les petits que pour les grands. Un parc qu'il faut vraiment découvrir. Les spectacles sont grandioses. Nous n'avons pas regretté les quelques heures de route depuis notre lieu de vacances en Bretagne. (Pauline2000) Une journée de découverte du parc qui a permis de voir des spectacles que l'on ne peut voir nulle part ailleurs. Malgré une chaleur suffocante, la promenade dans les allées du parc était très supportable et les services divers (restauration, toilettes...) très corrects. A voir absolument ! (Régine09) ...