French story and poem: un amour qui finit mal !

My French students are now learning the passé composé in class and I am looking for ways to help them acquire this new tense without doing the traditional grammar approach.

The first text which came to my mind was Le déjeuner du matin which is actually a poem widely taught in French classes because the language is quite simple and repetitive.

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acquire50 acquisition65 breakfast13 comprehensible100 cultural10 culture246 déjeuner du matin1 Education20 food154 French41 guidelines2 literature92 love81 Martina Bex11 meal10 miming1 MovieTalk14 passé-composé227 perfect tense4 poem71 poet16 Prévert4 questions74 reading263 repetition42 script201 story46 storytelling39 target language12 target structure20 teacherspayteachers11 TPRS71 youtube67

Personalized questions in French: l’étoile du jour.

This morning, I was reading the Active learner blog post about “Café y conversación” and it inspired me to share about an authentic conversation I had last week with my French students. As mentioned in the post: “When we have authentic conversation about topics that students want to talk about,

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Reading activity for French learners (beginner level).

Yeah!!! I am back to blogging! I had a very good excuse though for not posting for such a while: I had my fourth boy on the 24th of September. His name is Antoine and he is a lovely baby boy doing well 🙂

Whilst recovering from the birth and taking care of my precious little boy,

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Resources for English learners: shopping and the issue of being a shopaholic.

Last week, I was writing about my new “job” which is to teach online private lessons to Spanish students who want to improve their English. (via Google hangout or Skype). For now, it is going very well and I am receiving positive feedback from my students which is always good!

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Resources for English learners: superstitions.

Although I am taking a break from my school and “formal” teaching, I have not really quit and I have now started to teach online (via Google hangout or Skype) private lessons to Spanish students who want to improve their English. It is actually very different from teaching a whole class and my students have a good level of English but they are not confident enough.

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activity13 comprehensible100 conversation311 culture246 Education20 engage161 fluency107 fluent57 language45 learning15 personal13 practice33 questions74 reading263 teacherspayteachers11

How to use a mini story in a Spanish beginner class

I have become a fan of TPRS because I do believe it is the most efficient way so far to help students develop both fluency and accuracy in Spanish. However, I am new to the techniques and although I read the Big Green Book: Fluency through TPR Storytelling,

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Spanish story: El chico cansado

This story comes from a French story on The Task Magic blog: Bob est fatigué. I wanted to recycle the structures “debe”, “tengo que” which my students already learned with Los niños prisioneros de Bolivia and I also wanted to use “está cansado”.

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cansado1 comprehensible100 debe2 debes1 Education20 input47 key structures8 obediente1 personalized16 practice33 questions74 reading263 script201 Spanish33 story46 storytelling39 teacherspayteachers11 tengo que1 text4 TPRS71