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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French culture: celebrating la Chandeleur !

Candlemas is around the corner and I have prepared some fun activities to do in the French class to celebrate this special event. In fact as the activities are mainly centered around crepes and how to make them, you could also use them to celebrate Mardi Gras (which is on the 9th of February this year) or if you are teaching a topic on food.

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acquisition33 activities5 bundle1 celebrate4 celebration5 communicative7 comprehensible41 Cooking17 cultural5 culture22 Education8 food13 French20 grammar6 infinitive1 input39 logic1 logical2 numeracy1 passé-composé2 past5 perfect tense2 recipe12 song10 story34 teacherspayteachers11 TPRS34 tradition1

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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Reflection on Comprehensible Input

I haven't updated my blog for a while now, and as I am taking a break due to my fourth baby coming at the end of September, I wanted to reflect on my last school year. I was teaching Spanish from grade 6 to 12 and I decided to turn to comprehensible input and TPRS since I was never fully satisfied with the traditional way to teach languages.

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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 comprehensible41 comprehension31 debe2 debes1 Education8 input39 key structures7 obediente1 personalized13 practice17 questions19 reading36 script10 Spanish27 story34 teacherspayteachers11 tengo que1 text4 TPRS34