Newsletter September 2018

Besançon, France

What happened the past month in our French immersion class?

I have to say, I am SO impressed! Students have improved SO much, they can understand and follow and interact with me when I explain classroom / work directions really naturally !

A lot of them can say the date of the day, the day before and the day after, they can say the weather, the temperature, how they feel and play it (it is SO funny when I ask them "show me you are sick / You are tired / sleepy / upset, etc....", we have pretty good actors in our class;) ),

Some of them can say the schedule of the day "at 9:30 there is mathematics, etc...".
Basics directions like "we close the book / we tidy our pencils / let's line up for lunch / turn on/off the light are now understood, so we focus more on academics. 

- Speaking of academics, in mathematics, we started the topic 3. These 3 first topics focus on solving addition and subtraction problems, learning strategies to solve the equations, using addition to solve subtractions. Mathematics in French is not a big deal anymore, the majority of the students can work independently on exercises and try to find clues into the words they already know. 

- I make sure to stimulate them in mathematics during the morning rituals as well, everyday we have "the number of the day" that we decompose into tens and ones, we review how to count in French, we even learned how to "sign" numbers. We learned how to count to 70 (about this number, in French the name of it is "sixty-ten" -> soixante-dix, because 70=60+10, when I showed and told them why they were pretty surprised and some of them guessed how to say 71... (clue : 60+11). Somedays we pair work, others we manipulate cubes, others we do games.... 
Asking them the schedule of the day is also the occasion to start to learn how to say hours and get familiar with the clock. 

- In "French", we learned the name of family members, month of the year, days of the week,  seasons, sport activities, body parts. 

- About French Spelling (sounds / topics) and books, you can check what we did on the different sections of the website. 

My feeling as a teacher about the month of September : students opened up and started to really feel comfortable. I feel they really enjoy learning a foreign language, they appreciate the challenge and ask for more ! It is really a pleasure to see them progress everyday and as I said at the beginning I am really impressed of the capacity of learning and memorizing of the two groups. A lot of student volunteer everyday to participate and the result is we have two very dynamic groups. There is really good vibes between the students, the help each other, and everybody is pretty good about respecting each other.

As usual, let me know if you have any questions / concerns / suggestions. 

Ms Botella