Adventures in Acquisition: Week #1

What a great first week....the best first week in my career thus far! Why? It's because of AIM Language Learning! This is the year that I am finally able to fully implement AIM. I cannot wait to add more to may Action Research on this revolutionary methodology developed by Canadian educator extraordinaire, Wendy Maxwell.

In this quick blog post, I'll highlight, in no particular order, the "adventures in acquisition" that stand out in my mind from the first four days with students.

In my first week, students groaned when the bell rang to leave class because we were playing Hachi Pachi CoSiKi. They laughed hysterically as I piled over a dozen hats on my head and they fell to the floor.

I heard from parents that their children are enjoying the class and I heard through the grapevine that there's one student who doesn't like anything about school, but is coming home saying they love French! 

I have never been more thrilled to receive an assessment resource! I'm excited because this will be the first time ever I am providing my students with the ability to succeed on assessments written entirely in the TL! Yay, AIM!!!! Here is the link to the resource below.

With my eighth grade classes, whom I had last year for Exploratory Language class, I was super pleased to hear how much French they retained over the summer. We learned French for a grand total of ten weeks last year. I used AIM, but was unable to fully implement due to the short time frame. The students were speaking in full sentences from day one this week! They remember their entry rap and many of our high frequency questions and answers. Woohoo!!!!

 

With AIM, I am implementing a class rewards system with points for students who stay entirely in the TL during class. They were super excited to see their Class DoJo avatars and they seem happy and ready to start this challenge next week!

My eighth graders quickly remembered our alphabet song with zero reteaching. Read more about this special song here.

That is just awesome as I am a fanatic about students knowing how to spell using the alphabet in class. I feel this one of the ways I help students establish awesome pronunciation. Here's more about how I teach stress the vowels for pronunciation perfection.

Yesterday I started preparing for Monday's exciting lesson. I am introducing our first AIM play! Here are the marionettes as they sit on my desk waiting to be mounted on straws. Notice the awesome paper weight gift I received yesterday morning in my mailbox from my principal! :)

Now below are the marionettes all ready for Monday! I mounted them on the straws and they are ready for action! I am super excited about Monday....it is a momentous event as it is the first time I'm introducing an AIM play to a class! I cannot wait to see how it goes!

What a whirlwind week! I'm exhausted...all this fun with AIM is wearing me out! It is the absolute BEST type of exhaustion I can think of! Bring on the weekend naps...I need to store up some extra energy for next week's adventures in acquisition with AIM!

What are your first week highlights? I'd love to hear!