Year End Review

The end of the year has finally come and I am soooooooooo (maybe a few more o's...) glad it is summer!  I was really blessed this year to have such great students and will miss my 8th graders tremendously next year!  With the end of the year came some great (yet stressful) news!  My principle let me know that I will be offered some English courses next year and this will bring me up to full time!  I am super excited to be full time but also nervous about teaching English classes next year.  I student taught in an English class but have not stayed current on the methodology or the testing that is used in the English classroom...

So this summer I will be researching and working on English materials AS WELL AS perfecting and getting creative with my French materials!

So here is summary of what I really enjoyed about my first year as a French teacher:

1.  The competition versus me and the students to see who could speak more French (I loved the cards they all had to write to me about how great I am because they lost the competition)

2.  TPRS story-telling with the students

3.  BINGO homework (the students hated it, but it really did produce some of their greatest work!)

4.  Oral Proficiency Interviews (mini-OPI's) - Again not a student favorite, but it was great to have an opportunity to just sit and have a conversation with each student in French.

5.  PBL - project based learning - my favorite project had to be the wanted poster project that worked with adjectives, preferences and the verb avoir!  I got some great posters for this project!

6.  Free Writes- giving students 10 minutes to write a story all in French and see the growth in my students!

7.  Freeze Frame - although I only used it once, I LOVED this activity and it really got the students speaking!

8.  End of the year movie trailer project - KIDS LOVED THIS!

9.  Sharing French popular music and having kids tell me they bought French songs on iTunes!

10.  My small class size (won't be small next year....)

11.  Stations - loved having games and differentiation available to my students with station days

With so many great activities and memories from my first year, I also see many places where I need to grow.

1.  I need to focus on quality rather than quantity.  I wanted to try so many new ideas this last year that I often didn't give students enough time to actually benefit from each activity.  Next year I need to whittle down what I do each day and give the students more time to complete activities.

2.  I need to be harder.  I have high expectations for students but I let them get away with too much.  Next year I need to start off harder and stick to my guns so that by the end of the year I don't have so much of a problem.

3.  I need to stick with my classroom management procedures.  I started the year with certain ideas on how I would run my class and then changed those ideas several times when my procedures weren't working out.  Next year I will have my knowledge of my faults and preferences for my classroom procedures and I will need to stick them!

4.  Grading... this year I often got behind and did not keep a regular schedule for grading papers.  I really need to get a system into place and stick with it!

5.  More listening activities!

6.  More culture brought into the lessons.  I don't know that I want to do "themed" units, but I would like to bring in more history and culture into my class with authentic resources!

7.  Give a daily objective to students and do more exit tickets/pop-quizzes to enforce the importance of those daily objectives.

8.  USE MORE TECHNOLOGY!  All students will have iPads next year and I am pumped to find as many ways to utilize these great resources in the classroom!

So here is my goal for the summer.  Each week I would like to blog about one of these goals and how I am progressing in researching and planning for next year.  I will do my best to stay on track and hopefully have a weekly blog!  I also joined a great Google group that will be doing some fantastic sessions this summer and I plan to blog my reflections for each session I attend!  So here's to a summer of blogging and planning (and hopefully house buying!)

 

New Trimester, New Unit Plan

I am so ready for this trimester to be over!  After so many snow days and poor planning on my part, I am done with trimester 2!  So after feeling quite lost after this last trimester at times, I started going through some of my books from my methods classes to look over methods on planning.  After reading/reviewing some of the methods I felt like quite the dummy.  I have been planning by lesson rather than by unit and I have been lacking on the student objectives.  Using the textbook has proven to be actually hindering rather than a help.  Instead of looking at the big picture and figuring out what I want the students to be able to do at the END of a unit, I have been looking at each individual lesson and not thinking about how they all connect.  To say the least the last unit I did felt haphazard and poorly planned.

To compete against this feeling I made a Unit plan for my next unit.  It has helped immensely!  Although I am using the textbook to guide me, I am looking at the big picture more.  In my unit plan I included the following:

1) The main goals (ACTFL language goals) that I plan to touch on in this unit
2) The standards I will be covering in the unit
3) What the expected/desired outcome for the unit is
4) Progress Indicators (what the students should be able to do)
5) The essential skills and knowledge the students will need to accomplish the desired outcome
6) The assessments I will use in the unit
7) Instructional strategies I will use throughout the unit
8) Resources I think will be helpful/necessary
9) And the Performance Task the students will complete at the end of the unit to show they have acquired the desired outcome for the unit

This plan has really helped my daily lesson planning.  I look back at my unit plan often to make sure that my lessons are meeting my own goals and when I look in the textbook, I can decide what pieces of the textbook are necessary to include and which parts are not that important to accomplish the desired outcome (which is often as my book is poorly designed!!!).  The textbook has been my downfall for the last few units.  I felt I needed to cover all material that was in the book, but I didn't like the order or the way that it presented the material so I got lost in how to present the topics in the order presented.  Having the unit plan is really helping me get-over this "drill and kill" rut I was in for the last unit.  I am looking to the textbook for a general guide of when to teach the necessary skills, but because I have the Unit Plan I can now change things up and introduce skills/vocabulary at a time that makes sense.  I lost sight of the comprehensible input method during this last unit and I want to get back on the horse and really try to get more authentic texts into their hands and provide more opportunities to get the students speaking.

I found a blog about a conversation circle that I might bring into this unit a little farther down the road.  Thanks you to amylenord for this great idea and rubric! (Check out her website!  It is FULL of great resources!!)  I have very small classes this year so this could be a quick conversation activity.  Maybe even a warm-up idea.... hmmm  I really hope this activity will help my students speak more.  They just completed their 2nd Oral Proficiency Interview and the problem I am having with some of my students is that they are very hesitant to answer any questions and to speak in the language still scares/worries them.  I want more natural conversation in my classroom instead of goal driven classroom questions/discussions...


FOLLOW UP on previous post about the competition (I talked about it here on another of my posts).  I had students fill out an Exit Ticket on their thoughts of the competition and I was actually quite surprised.  Where I thought students were not liking the competition, I found that all of my students liked the competition but had a few tweeks that I loved!
Tweeks my students suggested that I have incorporated:
1) Have an emergency escape card- student suggested that they have a certain number of "Emergency" cards that they can use in a class period when they need clarification of something in English.
2)  I win a point if someone asks me how to say a word they should already know - I REALLY LIKE THIS ONE!

The competition is going really well.  I lost the first week (my own mistakes....I kept saying the word "blank" in English...grrr) Students told me (via their Exit Tickets) that they really felt the competition was helping them and that it really pushed them to think about what they were saying and figure out a way to say it in French.  The level of French in my students has sky-rocketed!  I am just amazed at how well they can communicate in the TL when they want to!

Now on to planning and getting my next unit complete.  I will write a post soon about how the unit is progressing and how I am incorporating comprehensible input into my classroom!  Leave any comments or ideas you have!  Thanks for reading!