March 15th, The Final Day

For our final week at blue ash elementary, we decided to scale back our lesson plan and keep, what I call, simple. Last week, we divided up the regions that speak French based upon which continent they were on and each chose one. I myself chose the great North America, and talk mainly about Canada. I chose to talk about Canada mainly because I felt that since we lived so close to Canada that the kids should at least know were it was located at. I also thought since the winter Olympic happened not to long ago that they would at least know that. So, I had them color a flag, and if we had time I would look at a map of Canada, but must of the time we didn’t get to the map. The main thing I tried to enforce to the kids that Canada is a French speaking country and really isn’t that far away.
Overall, the attendance was down this past week and that surprisingly made the behavior worlds better than the week before. I was kind of sad the some of the kids didn’t to come to the party. Oh yeah, after our lessons we had a party in which we served French style cuisine (bread, cheese, cookies etc…). The kids really enjoyed this part, and were surprisingly well behaved. I think it was because we had the power to take the food away, but unknown to them we had no intention of doing that. We had planned to may give out a certificate or something like that but we forgot. We gave them their books and C.D. and said the final “Au revoir” and sent them on their ways. Hopefully it made a difference.

For the final time, Ben signing off.

March 8th

This week at Blue Ash Elementary, we tried to teach the kids about basic food Phrases, in French, as well as basic clothing phrases. I say tried, because I feel that we didn’t get through to the kids week. I feel that I spent most of my time this week just controlling kids and making sure that they didn’t play in the bathroom. Darn kindergarten Bathroom. This week we all decided to abandon the stations and just engage the kids all at the same time. To me, this was one of our biggest failures because we all were teaching the same thing at the same time so that we ran out of things to teach. I feel that the group rotations would have made the whole day better. I hope that nest week they will be a lot better behaved because we are going to bring food and the last thing that I want to do on Monday is have to extreme clean the whole kindergarten room. I also think that we didn’t plan enough to do this past week and that came back to bite us in our face. I was also disappointed that the fashion show didn’t turn out better.

March 1st

This past Monday was a whole different experience. I found that the student had a lot of excess energy that made it hard for them to focus on some of the less interesting topic. This past week we choose to teach month, days, and weather. I particularly choose to instruct the students in the art of weather. I found that this week they had a harder time paying attention to what I was talking about. I think that it had something to do with the fact that it was the end of the day. The way I tried to teach this topic was through the use of cut little artistic renditions of the weather that I made in my spare time. I also decide to have them do a rain dance in order to get some activity into the lesson plan. During the rain dance, I found it very hard to keep the students attention, because they were focused more on how all of their friends were acting. One thing that I noticed when I was performing the rain dance was how the other groups became distracted by our activity. So what I was think was maybe we should try to incorporate a second game that they other group can do at the same time I think that this will help limit the distraction on the other group if both groups are doing something interesting.
Ben signin' off

Feb. 08 2010

So, I survived the second week of Oh La La La Stundent scholars.
This week my focus was solely was to teach the Kids about La Famille.
The Plan of Attach:
I orginally envisioned that we would play a game where we would match up the engish words with the french Words, but I found that this game was as "fun" as I orginally thought. So about half way through the game with my first group, we did rotations the this week I'll talk about this later, I came to the realization that it was a flop; I then decided to scrap the Idea. The second part of my lesson was to have them draw a family portrait of their family in there book; this part of the lesson went over great. Also Periodically I would ask them about their families and I would get varing responces like: "my sister's MEAN!" "My family has hair" (yes i really got that as an answer) etc... I would also engage them with small talk like: " Who are Drawing in your book?" "Can you 'guys' tell me what grandmother is in french?" And of course I would get a couple of grumbles as they were trying to say "la Grand- mere", But little did they know they were actually learning French. Mohahahahahhaha.
Behavior of students (not adults):
I found that the kids were very well behaved. I only had one instance where I had to Keep one kid's attention by asking questions everytime I noticed him getting destracted, but other than that it turn out to be a fairly "smooth" day.
The Rotations:

Successes:

1. I fealt that rotation between the group was amazing.
2. I thought the group Arrangement work out fairly well. I deffinitly saw difference between the groups that I was surprised to notice.

Failures:

1. Time. We spent way to long with the first group.
2. Didn't get enough time with the third group.
3. Over all i feel we need to improve this section of time managment because we had similar problem last week. I like the idea of having a eggtimer that will ring when we need it to.

Oh well that all I got for this week.

Ben signing off....

The First of Février 2010

The first day was an interesting experince to say the least. Our intended goal for the day was to talk about Introduction (Hello and Goodbye), Colors, ABC's, and Body parts. We were also planning on playing twister to in order to tie all the themes together, but like so many other things in life things, it didn't go exactly as we planned. We ended up only having enough time to teach the kids their ABC's and the colors. I am sure that we will difinitly try and put twister in some time maybe next week or something I don't know.
I fealt that the kids were very well behaved considering that it was after school and they are only K-2 graders. I do think that working in small groups was a very effective ways to teach these children, but next timeI think we should have a station to set and have them rotate around the room. It's just a suggection .
I was supose to be in charge of the twister game, but unfortunatly we didn't make it that far :(.
So in order to just summaries my ideas for next week I suggest:

1. We set up stations and have the kids rotate between instructors.
2. Groups of three- four kids.
3. Add some sort of activity to tie all the themes together.
4. Have a better plan for our time so we don't feel that we just all of a sudden our out of time.
5. Come back to twister. :)

Well thats it for this week.

Ben signing off....

The Pre-Assignment

So for the pregession of the lessons that we are going for the classes

1. Greetings, Names, Basic Conversational French.
2. Days of the Week, Months and seasons of year, Numbers
3. Colors and clothing (I was thinking that a cool game for colors would be a game like Twister but not exactly the same)
4. Weather and Holidays (I thought that a cool thing to do with the kids for the Weather is to do like weatherman thing. where we have kids control the weather. Or do what we say with the weather)
5. Basic Body Parts and Sports( the body part song in french would be a good idea for the lesson)
6. Food and Money ( i don't know about this last lesson but i feel that is will combined alot of the Stuff that we learned in previous lessons.)

I feel that this progression is very optimistic for the age group that we are going to deal with but i feel that it is important to have an agressive plan so that we can atleast be prepared.

Ben signing out!!!

French Service Learning

The start of the fun.