The good news

The immersion program is working for five of my eight students. I shouldn't say that.  It's working for all of them, even the three mousquetaires.  I smacked down some rules about the behavior I've been struggling with, and ended the group work.  Some kids just can't handle partner work, and that's sad, but I have to move on.  This week we begin instructional videos about irregular verbs Venir and Aller.  They have three days in the computer lab to build the videos.  This should be interesting.

Writing

Asking my students to write anything is like asking them to perform surgery on their own pet while it's alive.  You'd think I was the cruelest prof in all the land. 

I think the next project will be a podcast, or a video where the students have to teach something in French.  Like the verbs Aller à and Venir de. 

Truth: I spend 75% of my energy in this class babysitting three students.  It's exhausting.  Especially since I put so much time and effort into the actual curriculum.  They are wearing me out.  I never want to teach this level class again.  It's not the class that's wear me out, it's the students that don't want to learn, but want to be in my room becuase I'm fun, but don't want to do any of the actual work because that means learning.  These students need a completely different environment.  I have to allow that I cannot be perfect in every way for every student, and in many ways, that feels like me giving up.  Immersion is great.  The behavior is not.  The work is not.  But the learning is there.  Now what?  I'm too exhausted to synthesize what this all adds up to, so I'll have to come back to it later.

Signing off... one fatiguée mademoiselle.

Collages: Action Research

Here are two collages that students made, which were studied in an action research project this semester.

Here are two pictures which relate to the second activity in my data.

Photos, first quarter

At the beginning of the year we did chalk drawings on the sidewalk to review what we knew how to say about ourselves.

 

This past week the kids have been making towns. 

They constructed the buildings from a website: http://www.yourchildlearns.com/letters/make-a-town.html 

and labeled them with vocabulary from the book.

Today they wrote sentences about which street everything is on.

Tomorrow they will be writing out directions to get to five places from their house in the town.

Then they will test the clarity of their directions with a partner.

One girl brought in 50 matchbox cars, so they all chose a car, and will use it to test out their directions.

French is fun!  :)

I even got my own street!

Exhausted.

Scaffolding.  Scaffolding is my weakness.  I need to be scaffolded in my scaffolding.

And my blog sucks.  The homework blog, not this blog.  I think the kids hate it.  I'm pretty sure they hate it.  I kinda hate it.

I've got to be more creative with it, I've been trying to use more images, more videos, but it poses a problem technologically with school software.  Erk!

That's another problem.  I feel like I've got to be the awesomest awesome all the time, and when I have an off-day, or don't organize something to the last minute, everything derails and is awful and impossible. I'm so very tired.  Halfway through the semester.  Hopefully, focusing on scaffolding will give me a better framework to plan my lessons.  Otherwise, this last quarter might just be my own personal hell: unproductive but incessant work.

Chinup, Sheldon.  You got this.