J'adore Halloween & Me encanta el día de los muertos, también!

J'adore Halloween! I don't know why, but I adore this season. I love apple picking, the beautiful colors of the fall leaves, and pumpkin farms. I enjoy dressing up and decorating the house with handmade drawings my kids make. This year, we are hosting a family costume party for a few close friends. We have spent the past month putting up spider webs, garlands and dreaming up spooky treats for the event.

I also love the celebration of Day of the Dead. Although, I have never formally celebrated it, I always spend time around this time of the year thinking about loved-ones who have passed. I really enjoy teaching this holiday to my students. I absolutely adore teaching more French with AIM this year, however, I am sad that for the first time in over 15 years, I am not teaching Spanish right now and therefore won't have the pleasure of sharing my love for this holiday with my students. After learning about the holiday, I know they would have enjoyed making a picture with picmonkey! Here's one I made of me and my groom as a sample for my students last year. 

I also can never have enough pins on my DoD Pinterest board. I currently have 415 pins, and by tonight, I'm sure there'll be more. I love the colors of this special celebration. Here's the link to the pinterest and here's an image of some of the pins:

If you see one of your resources on my board, thank you! I love following others and collecting great pins from other educators from around the globe!

I also have a public Edmodo folder for El día de los muertos, where I've collected a few project ideas and posts from Twitter and Edmodo friends. You should not need an Edmodo account to open the folder. Just click on this link to open and then navigate through the resources on the left hand side of the screen. Click on a resource to view. Here's a peak:

Since I am not currently teaching Spanish, and therefore unable to share my love of this colorful holiday, that's perhaps why I was inclined to start creating something new in French for Halloween. Since I don't have the chance to celebrate Day of the Dead, then I must find something cultural for this time of year...after all, it's my favorite time holiday! France has recently begun celebrating Halloween, so there we have it...a great reason to learn about Halloween en français!

First, I created this symbaloo, which you can read more about here.

I also updated my French Halloween YouTube playlist and my Halloween pinterest.

Then I started teaching "C'est l'Halloween" to my children. We have the entire left hand side of the symbaloo above dedicated to this fun, catchy Halloween song. Both my children adore this fun Halloween song by Matt Maxwell. We have our friend +Sylvia Duckworth  to thank for this great video which helped us learn the song. Both children sing along to the song, but my eldest (6) has done especially well, learning the words even better than me! There was one section in this where I had forgotten (La lune, elle est pleine)...luckily she started it off because I didn't remember. Bravo! Hear us here:





Next, I started creating a SMARTboard file full of fun French Vocabulary, drawing from this fun interactive Halloween activity by the amazing Jeanne de la Lune (+nathalie bonneau).

Then I realized that the vocabulary I was teaching could use a story. So I wrote one! This is not the first children's story I've written, but it's the first one that I'm really excited about. I have already begun uploading the various story files and activities to my TpT store. Between now and Halloween 2013, everything related to this story is available for a discounted price! Here's a link to the PPT file. Here's a link to the SMARTboard file. Here is the digital story video file. Also read to the end for an opportunity to win these resources!

If you're not interested in spending a few dollars, then I'd love to give you a sneak peak, so here you go:

I especially enjoyed having the chance to collaborate with Nathalie (a.k.a. @JeannedelaLune) again. Her images and voice bring this story to life! She is somehow able to speak slow enough for beginner learners, yet with expression in her voice that provides compelling comprehensible input. With her combination of awesome visuals and expressive narration, learners of all ages and levels will enjoy this resource. 

I also enjoyed collaborating with new and old Edmodo friends; Fabienne, Adeline, Amanda and especially Rebecca who was an immense help! Rebecca and I even collaborated across the miles in real time using a google doc! Fun! :) I also owe a shout out to several facebook and twitter friends who have helped me with feedback and sound advise...you know who you are...Merci beaucoup, mes amies!

I have also created an English version and plan to create more resources to go along with both versions as I create them! I have put together price-saving bundles as well for those who'd like to use a variety of different resources for the same story (more to come). Everything is available with this link. I hope to create a Spanish as well, at some point. In the meantime, here's another sneak peak into this story:

This project was so much fun...and it has really only just begun. Now that I've written one solid story that packs a punch of language learning, I want to write more! I am looking to connect with people who are experienced in this field...I am searching for options for future digital publishing and to expand beyond TpT. 

I will also offer a free download of the resources by random choice from the names of people who comment to this blog post by 9PM EST, Monday October 28th. 

Another AIMazing Day!

Yesterday was a magical day in my AIM-world! It was the first time we used the paper puppets. I honestly did not think it was going to be earth shattering...but boy, was I wrong! The students volunteered to come up in front of the room and hold the puppets. They moved them around to act out the play as we practiced saying it together, with my gestural support. 

The students really got into it and made their puppets act in such a funny way....it was it hilarious! First, before we started, they asked me why the dog puppet was so enormous. The play calls him a "petit chien" but really, they're right, the puppet is enormous in relation to the people. We had learned the word "dinosaure" for one of the hats we used in a previous lesson, and one of the kids said something like "Yes, the 'little dog' is like a dinosaur." I am always amazed when students ask me questions in the target language. They are not always perfect, but after just 6 weeks of French, they are comfortable enough to create questions on their own about things that we have not really talked about before in class. It is so cool! Thank you, AIM!!!!

As we started acting out the play with the puppets, I realized I was missing some props. I was missing a bag for Henri to hide the dog in, for instance. I grabbed the closest thing I could find to give to the student holding the puppet for Henri. It was the wolf puppet, which when turned upside down, actually did work like a bag. The kids really got a huge kick out of using the wolf as a bag...I think it's one of those things  you'd have to see to truly understand just how funny it was...it seems there's a bit of this happening in my classroom as I said something similar in last week's blog post. At any rate, the students really blew me away with this puppet activity. Everyone was reciting the play even faster than I could gesture...and laughing all the while as some of them moved the puppets around in funny ways to match the words. What a great way to start our lesson!

After our first attempt with "Put the words in order" (which they picked up on really fast), we played a review game. I had told them in the beginning of class: "If you work really well and really hard in class today, we can play a game at the end." Well, actually I was gesturing it and they spoke it for me...there is rarely a moment when the class is not speaking out loud in an AIM classroom...one of the many reasons that AIM truly is an "Accelerative" method! 

Playing this game was one of those moments where you just love life, love your job, your students and you are extremely sad that the bell is going to ring and end it. I have to admit, though, that I am getting this sort of positively-good feeling about teaching more and more now with AIM than ever before. Watching my learners grow like never before is such a wonderful experience for all. They are doing so great and I simply cannot wait to see how far we make it in one year. I know they are feeling good, too...I can see it in their faces and eyes when we take a moment to talk about everything we know so far!

So back to the game...here's my quick AIM Forum description of the activity, along with the link to download the game. Please note that I used this template created by Arik Durfee. Arik, if you ever read this, THANK YOU! This was a hilarious, engaging review game. The amount of giggles and belly laughs was more than I've ever heard in my classroom! Here's some screen shots:

The part they loved the most was the random bonus rounds that kept popping up here and there. They would have to read the clue, that would pop up after the message you see in the picture below. It told them to do things like: 

1. Stand up and dance Gangnam/French months Macarena/Le twist/etc.

2. Stand up and jump three times really quick

3. Come up to the smartboard and touch Frankenstein's head

I'd love to hear your ideas for more bonus rounds! If you think of anything, please let me know. The bonus part, I feel, was what kept them on their toes and it also made the game even more fun and unpredictable. They just never knew when the bonus would pop up and they were all on alert for it. I was amazed at how fast they were able to read and comprehend and then act out the request.

Later in the day yesterday, the Peace through Language club and I were able to volunteer in a first grade classroom. We did AIM's hat lesson that I mentioned earlier. The kids really love this lesson...whether they are first graders or middle schoolers! I think I have collected over 20 hats now. I need to update my picture, but here's some of them:

So basically, this activity teaches the little linguists about counting in context, the opposite verbs of "put on" and "take off" and the verb "fall" once again, in context. The lesson is just plain, good fun! By the end, there are students all over the place putting on and taking off hats and then they give them all to me. Once I have them all back, I stack them on my head, one at a time saying: "I'm putting on one hat now...Now I'm putting on two hats...etc. They get piled up so high that they start to fall. This caused quite a uproar in giggles with these little ones! AIM has you pre-teach the verb for fall so the students are hearing it again in the same day. The giggles that this activity got were the perfect opportunity to teach the verb "to laugh" so of course we learned that, too. We reviewed the expression, "Ça, c'est fou" as well! (That's crazy!)

There was a birthday in the first grade class this week, so we moved to the smartboard for some birthday fun with this symbaloo I created called "Joyeux Anniversaire." It has birthday songs and other fun goodies for little French linguists...but middle schoolers seem to find it amusing, too!

After singing "Bonne fête" and allowing the birthday boy to choose a link from the Birthday symbaloo, we decided to have a little Halloween fun. We used my other symbaloo: "C'est l'halloween" and we chose +Sylvia Duckworth's video of Matt Maxwell's song "C'est l'halloween." The children learned to sing the chorus and the parts with all the "oui, oui, oui's" and the "non, non, non's." Here's more about my Halloween symbaloo and here's what it looks like...you 'll have to scroll right to see everything:

We also used +nathalie bonneau's "Un costume pour Halloween" which is one of the symbaloo buttons, and one of my all time favorite French resources for Halloween. 

They loved touching the buttons on the smartboard and seeing the boy's costume change. I was able to ask them some total questions, AIM-style, like "Is this a boy or is this a girl?" and "Is the boy a ghost or is the boy a pirate?" We did this all in French, of course, with complete sentences for answers. The little ones are also doing so great with AIM!

All in all, it was simply an AIMazing day! With such a great start of the year, I honestly wasn't sure I'd be able to keep up the excitement in the classroom...but so far, so good!

Listening to the laughs and seeing all the smiles yesterday just reinforced my passion for AIM Language Learning. Not only was it fun for the learners, but they were speaking in full sentences (and reading as well for the middle schoolers) from bell to bell. It is music to my ears. It makes my heart sing. I even hear from parents on a regular basis that their children come home speaking and singing in French...it doesn't get any better than that! 

C'est l'halloween

I just created this "C'est l'halloween" Symbaloo Here is the direct link.

I had so much fun making this. As I created it, I pulled from this amazing resource from +Sylvia Duckworth (Resources by theme). I also had fun trying out all the links with my own children. It was really interesting to see their reaction to some of the videos. For instance, my four-year-old son could not get enough of the "C'est l'halloween" song by Matt Maxwell. You can find all those links down the left hand side of the symbaloo. I also created a blubbr triv game for "C'est l'halloween. It's an interactive quiz that makes you listen more carefully to the lyrics. Find the interactive quiz here.

My children also really love the second row of resources which are mainly from +nathalie bonneau and LCF. I have learned that children of all ages enjoy Nathalie's animation website! Here it is...check it out! An all-time favorite from LCF's Babelzone is "La chanson des squelettes" that is wonderful for teaching verbs and the time! It is so awesome, that I created a blubbr game for this video, too! Check it out here.

Additionally, the third row is always a winner, as the kids adore Boowa and Kwala! You can read more about our adventures with them here. It seems that they simply cannot get enough of this one where they have to listen carefully and choose the proper ingredients to get the magic potion correct. I, personally, adore this song...I don't know why, but it's one of my all time favorite Halloween songs! If you'd like to hear that song while reading the lyrics, go here, and press on the little "P" to see "les paroles."

The kids got a kick out of "L'atelier des monstres". I was disappointed by the lack of audio, so what I did was narrate to the children what they were doing and I asked them questions as they were playing. Ex: "Qui veut choisir le nez/la bouche/les yeux/les oreilles maintenant?" They also really loved this eCard, but it is in English, so I narrated en français and told them what to click en français.

This was indeed a fun-filled project! Please send me any links you think I should add and I'd also love to hear your feedback! Merci beaucoup!

Le voilà:

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