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Communication through music
Read more: Communication through musicMaking the transition from teaching a list of vocabulary words to teaching students to communicate on a topic can be challenging, especially when teaching novice students who learn through memorized chunks of language. This March for the Manie Musicale or March Madness bracket of songs, I was a little stuck on using one approach over…
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Story Script for a song you may have missed on restaurant vocabulary
Read more: Story Script for a song you may have missed on restaurant vocabularyThis is my third and final post on writing story scripts for music videos. My intention in explaining story scripts in this blog post and then offering two examples (one in that same post and another here) was to give our community of French teachers a start into the practice. I am hoping you will…
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A story script for a powerful video on Immigration
Read more: A story script for a powerful video on ImmigrationI have blogged before about Story Scripts. Immigration is a timely theme in the World Language classroom and I was pleased to be able to address it with my 8th grade French students in March with the help of materials from Catherine Ousselin’s unit Que suis-je et d’où viens-je? Mes origines and mon identité. In…
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Story Script for a Music Video
Read more: Story Script for a Music VideoIn this blog post I want to share an activity to make authentic songs comprehensible. The idea is not mine– it comes by way of Kara Jacobs. She has created examples of the technique in Spanish and I am hoping I can bring the community of French teachers on board. Kara writes a script to…
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Music to share with students
Read more: Music to share with studentsWe are back to school and I am trying to connect with my students and one way is through music. I play music for them because I believe it is a way to understand culture better, but even without that I would share music because I think it is powerful to use the arts in…
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Teaching language through songs: Reacting to the music
Read more: Teaching language through songs: Reacting to the musicCurrent practice for teaching language using songs seems to be word clouds and cloze activities. A word cloud is a jumble of words and the student circles the words that are heard in the song. This is a solid listening activity as are cloze activities, where the students fill in the missing words in the…
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My students’ favorite French music
Read more: My students’ favorite French musicMy Level 1 French students have songs to recommend. These are songs where they like the tune and we have listened to them a few times since I introduced them. The first time I play the song we do Interpretive activities, which you will find below. Later we listen to the songs while we are…