Total Physical Response in online teaching

It is amazing how time is flying and I have realized that it has been way over a month that I have written a new post! As it happened, I have been busy teaching students online face to face. It is a truly exciting time for me because I am experiencing teaching in another way than in a set classroom and because I help learners acquire different languages (French,

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Personalized questions in French: l'étoile du jour.

https://goo.gl/photos/QtQ95BFaxjMXP18X8

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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acquire28 acquisition33 answers8 authentic1 Blogging2 compelling10 comprehensible41 comprehension31 conditional2 Education8 French20 if clauses1 IGCSE12 oral11 output10 personalized13 PQA5 practice17 questions19 repetition11 repetitive5 speaking37 story34

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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Communicative activity for French learners (beginner level).

As well as teaching online private English lessons to Spanish students, I help some French students at beginner level. As you may already know, I am a big fan of Martina Bex and I decided to use her storytelling unit for French 1: Dit.

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activity13 adjective1 cognates3 communicative7 comprehensible41 dit1 Education8 endings1 French20 game8 grammar6 guidelines2 ideas7 input39 instructions3 intermediate5 key structures7 Martina Bex10 oral11 repetition11 speaking37 story34 story asking9 storytelling28 TPRS34 unit3

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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The Spanish alphabet

This is a simple activity to do with Spanish beginners when you are teaching the alphabet: students create their own alphabet page by looking for words which start with each letter of the Spanish alphabet. This is the first year in my teaching career that I do this activity and I have found out that my grade 6 students (11-12 years old) had a lot of fun doing this.

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How to use poems with first year Spanish learners?

I found this lovely poem on Pinterest and I used it with my grade 6 students (11-12 years old) as it was the prefect review for physical description and family.

Listening/comprehension: I told the poem “TPRS style” by drawing the "abuela" on the board little by little,

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description5 family16 grade 68 physical2 poem4 pronunciation2 re-telling1 re-write2 read7 reading36 Spanish27 speaking37 story34 storytelling28 structures6 TPRS34 vocabulary18 write5 writing17