Halloween Activities in the Language Classroom

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to provide fun activities so that your students can celebrate Halloween and/or enjoy spooky characters and legends.

The Social Studies department was the Flinstone Family and I was Baby Pebbles!

I LOVE Halloween sooooo verrrry much. I know that there are a lot of reasons not to celebrate it in schools, though the schools I’ve taught in have gone whole hog into Halloween, with costume contests (for students and teachers!) and a big dance thrown by the Student Council. In my classes I’ve always made the activities optional, though I realize in hindsight I could’ve been more in tune with how the ‘opt-out’ formula doesn’t work when kids are afraid of being different than their peers. When I return to the classroom, I think I’ll have different stations set up with equally-as-fun options. Also, probably a lot more discussions about cultural appropriation and stereotyping when it comes to costumes!

In a language class, depending on the target-language and the cultures that speak it, Halloween can also be a rich topic of discussion about how traditions change over time (see resources for advanced learners below), as well as attitudes towards the dead. Even if Halloween isn’t your thing, there is some fun in telling spoooooky stories at any time during the dark winter months.

In the interest of my target language, did you know that there is a France connection to the origin of Halloween? France and Belgium have traditionally celebrated All Saints Day, but have adopted more and more of the North American Halloween. There are many Halloween traditions in Quebec, much like the rest of Canada. Haiti has La fête des Guédé, a voodoo Day of the Dead, though I’ve read that many Haitian Christians participate as well.

Halloween Activities for Beginners:

Truly one of the best pumpkins I’ve ever carved… Jacques O’Lantern!

 For beginners, vocabulary is really the name of the game. Usually I start off with a ‘vocabulary scramble’ where I post pictures around the room with numbers on them. Students then walk around the room and write the number (and translation if they need it) on the lines. It gets everyone up and walking around, and if I have a particularly competitive class I’ll make it a race to the finish with a prize.

RESOURCE: Halloween vocabulary scramble

Vocabulary can then be reinforced with a vocabulary sudoku. This can be adapted to any language: just “search, find, replace” the vocabulary words so that “la lune” becomes whatever a moon is in your target language and then the whole thing works!

RESOURCE: Halloween Sudoku

I then add grammar practice to the newly gained vocabulary through a Halloween graphic. Again, this can be adapted to any new language if that language uses comparisons, superlatives, and/or prepositions. It’s just a Halloween-based image that has students making relationships between things (the bat is smaller than the witch; the bat is to the right of the witch). There’s a blank space in the middle for students to draw whatever vocab they want to add to the picture.  

I found this example in a book, took a picture, and wish I could attribute it to the original author. Does anyone recognize this? I think it was by the same publisher that does “Les 10”

RESOURCE: Halloween Prepositions & Halloween Prepositions Key

RESOURCE: Halloween Comparisons and Superlatives (this one I ended up hand drawing horns on the bald guy to be ‘the devil’)

I’ve always wanted to do this activity, but never got around to it, but having students create “wanted posters” for spooky characters would be, I think, a lot of fun. It’s especially helpful to reinforce descriptive vocabulary.

RESOURCE: Strange Creatures Wanted Poster

This is only for the ELL teachers out there, though the discussion question part could be modified for any language, and perhaps even the listening part if you were very keen, but I really enjoy discussions with students about UFOs! I feel like I learn a lot about them from how they would react to strange beings appearing on Earth. And if you really want to further the lesson, there’s a lot of interesting discussions to be had around modern immigration attitudes.

RESOURCE: ELL Aliens Activity

This is only for the French teachers out there, but I couldn’t let this list be without mentioning that the classic “C’est l’Halloween” by Matt Maxwell is on YouTube. It’s great for beginners as it has simple vocabulary, clear voice, and a chance to practice counting 1-18!

RESOURCE: C’est l’Halloween PPT (made by eTools for Teachers) & C’est l’Halloween lyrics 

Halloween Activities for more advanced learners:

Campfire stories with an iPad fire

Speaking: CAMPFIRE STORIES! Obviously, you can’t light a fire in a school, but my solution to that has been to borrow an iPad cart, put all the iPads to a campfire video, and we sit around them and tell stories! I’ve done this with legends and ghost stories I’ve given to students to read as a group, and then adapt into a quick skit to share the legends with the rest of the class. You could also do vocabulary improv prompts and have students present. Or a one-word-story… see how long you can keep the story going around the campfire!

Reading/Speaking: The history of Halloween is very interesting. As mentioned above, there’s also some interesting debate topics for students to hash out: should Halloween be banned from schools? What costumes are and are not appropriate to wear? What’s scarier: killer clowns or giant spiders?

RESOURCE: French history of Halloween

Listening comprehension: watch a video in the target language about the history of Halloween or particularly spooky stories in the target-language

Specifically for French teachers, did you know that TV5Monde has an amazing collection of Quebecois, Acadian and Indigenous legends? For a spooky vibe, you can use two of their ghosty legends: La Dame Blanch or Le beau fantôme du capitaine Craig.

RESOURCE: TV5Monde’s teacher’s guide or the worksheet I’ve adapted from those resources (Dame Blanche)

RESOURCE: TV5Monde’s teacher’s guide or the worksheet I’ve adapted from those resources (Capitaine Craig)

Writing: This is more spooky than directly related to Halloween, but I personally am a big fan of urban legends such as Big Foot, little green men, Loch Ness monster, weird crop circles, haunted dolls, etc. One assignment I’ve done with more advanced students is have them read newspaper and blog articles and then analyse them for style. Their assignment is then to write an article (EXAMPLE: Big Foot Article written by a student).

RESOURCE: Information sheet about the structure of an article in French (not my resource, created by Marie-France Rachédi)

RESOURCE: Urban Legends article assignment explanation and rubric (I will caution and say that this is an ooooollllldddddd assessment, so I do not assess exactly like this anymore, but it might be a helpful starting point if you want one)

RESOURCE: A list of blog sites (again, this is old, so they might not all exist anymore) of various urban legend phenomenon

Let me know in the comments what resources you like using around this time of year! Do you avoid Halloween, embrace it, or put your twist on it? Feel free to share!

Quickwrites!

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to encourage students’ creativity and writing skills, as well as lessening their anxiety about making mistakes, by using quickwrites.

Have you ever given students ten minutes to write, only to realize that they’ve only written three lines? It’s not that they’re being uncompliant, they just “don’t have any ideas”, or, for many students with negative language-learning experiences, they are scared to write anything if it’s not perfect. This is where getting into the habit of doing a “quickwrite” is useful!

I love starting a class with a quickwrite, especially if we’re not starting with a sharing circle. It eases us into the day, and gets us in that French mindset. It’s also a great reminder for students, because I repeat it again and again, that it’s about communication and not about being exact! If students don’t know a word, they don’t stop and look it up, they just put it in English between brackets or virgules, and look it up or ask after the quickwrite is done. The whole idea is fluidity of thought, not worrying about mistakes, and realizing how much you actually know when you’re pushed for time!

If we’re going to be talking about specific content, it’s also a great way to get the students thinking about ideas. For example, I do a technology unit, and there are A LOT of great discussion questions: where measure of privacy should we expect? how should we treat robots when AI inevitably become sentient? Is the use of parental controls fair? And on and on.  For the students who don’t like spontaneous discussions, and need time to ruminate before speaking, putting it all down in a quickwrite is a way to put them at ease.

So what are some good quickwrite prompts?

• An ethical conundrum or serious question (see above)

• Put up an interesting photo or meme, ask students to describe it (adjectives!) or create a story around it (tenses!)

• Watch the first three minutes of a short film, have students finish the story. Then, when it’s over, watch the rest of the film and compare in small groups how their own stories were similar or different. Most of the time, students’ stories are equally as good or better!

• Do a quickdraw first where students draw a picture. Then, after exchanging the drawings with a partner, describe or narrate the other person’s drawing

  • It’s not technically a quickwrite, but something similar that I love doing is the Telephone Pictionary It’s always fun, quick, and makes for a great opening to class filled with laughter.

  • Also similar are other ways of generating visual ideas for students to inspire each other (and have some kinetic fun!). For example, students can make shapes or mini-scenes with pipe-cleaners (thanks Vanessa Drew for this idea!), found objects in the class, or even with play-doh. You’d be surprised how much senior students get into this, having not had the opportunity to play around like this since elementary school!

• Pull three to five unit vocab words from a hat that students need to use in a story

• Literally anything that gets them writing!

• NOTE: A lot of prompts that work well for improv scenes work equally well for quickwrites! Check out a list of creative prompts here.

What do we do with them when the ten (or however many minutes you choose) are up?

• A question prompt can be a lead-in to a discussion, and it lets students know where the gaps in their vocabulary are so they can look up words before they start talking

• Students can be given time to edit and then reflect on areas they need improvement on

• If you gave students explicit instructions of what to include (for example, they need to use as many transition words as possible and they are allowed to use a list of transition words if they need it) you can have a competition where they count them and you see who had the most of whatever it was. RESOURCE: French Transition Words

• Exchange with another student for them just to read or for them to edit or give feedback

• SUMMATIVE FEEDBACK FOR/FROM ME

  • Often, I’ll have students focus on one thing only and I’ll give them feedback only on that one thing. This is good for me, because I don’t need to do a lot of marking, just looking at one aspect of students’ writing. They are less nervous because I don’t care about anything else they’re writing (this can be hard because when I see an error that is unrelated to the one thing I said I would look for I just really, really, really want to correct it. However, I refrain, because I want students to trust me and not feel constantly judged). I will ask students to highlight or underline that one thing, for example adjectives, and then I can also see that they know what they are supposed to be doing (if they also highlight adverbs, then we need to revisit definitions!) and then give feedback just on those things. IF I have time, I’ll also respond to their writing itself, like commenting on the story, but this is just a ‘quickmark’ for me!

  • If there is a concept that students are struggling with, having TWO highlighter colors can be a great communication between you and the student. For example, they highlight or underline in yellow all the adjective uses that they are confident in, but highlight or underline in green all the adjective uses they think might be wrong. That way you see where the common issues are, but also where students think their issues are! This also gives them permission to make mistakes even on the things you’re looking for. If they’ve been scared to use the adjective “vieux” because they’re unsure where it goes or how it changes, now’s the time to go for it! (This is a true story for me… I still prefer “agé” so I can think less about it!)

  • For this purpose, I have students do their quickwrites in a journal that they use just for my class. A lined student notebook will get half-filled over a semester with quickwrites and other activities. Some students keep the journal over a few years of French and it’s really cool to see that long term progression! Once I’ve looked at the quickwrite I will put a sticker or a stamp (I have a large collection of stamps). This way if there’s no corrections to be made, but I don’t have time to personally respond with a sentence, students still know that I’ve looked at it!

• I even will use quickwrites prior to the writing sections on tests where there is a long writing component. Students get draft paper to get all their ideas out first, then they write on the official test paper. In these assessments I use a rubric that we’ve used to self-assess our previous quickwrites so that it’s not unfamiliar. RESOURCE: Legends Quickwrite Quiz (In this example, students choose one writing prompt to respond to. They are all types of prompts that we have practiced in class).

How do you use quickwrites in your classes? How long do you usually give students? Feel free to comment!

PART II: GENIUS HOUR 3-steps to success!

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to engage students in their L2 throughout the year by doing genius hour projects.

This is Part II of my two-part entry on using Genius Hour Projects! Part I can be found here, which explains why I love these projects so much!

Note: I exclusively did these projects with my senior students as a way to showcase their five years of language learning. This was because French 12 was an elective, so students had chosen to be there, students were capable of doing self-directed work, and their language ability was such that this was possible. However, I do think there’s a way to adapt this for lower-level language classes, if you’re willing to try.

Step One: Introduce the project to students

This was done in the first couple of weeks of class. I had a powerpoint where I would start with a turn-and-talk about the idea of ‘genius’ and how it’s all in the eye of the beholder, and include one of the most well-known teacher cartoons of all time:

Tout le monde est un génie. Mais si vous jugez un poisson sur sa capacité à grimper à un arbre, il passera sa vie à croire qu’il est stupide – A. Einstein

We would then watch a video explaining genius hour, and some other YouTube inspirational stuff. Sometimes I would do some creativity exercises (I’ll post some soon). Then, I would explain the project and have students start to brainstorm what they’d like to do. I’d explain to students that this was in lieu of a final exam, and a chance to showcase everything they’d learned in French.

Students would submit an ‘application’ for approval of what their project would be. Once approved, they would write their inquiry question on a piece of paper which we affixed to a bulletin board on one of my walls. Since I had multiple classes, it was cool for them to see what other people were working on! I could also put up any updates or messages about the genius hour projects on that board.

RESOURCE: Project hand-out/application: Genius Hour Proposal

Step Two: Work on it throughout the semester/year

This was the hard part, as I always felt like I had too much curriculum to cover, and not enough time. However, the more time I gave for students to work on the project in class, the better their projects would be. Moreover, the more time I had to check-in with students and see how they were doing, guide their project, and do small, informal conferences, the easier it was for me to mark the projects! Giving students a heads-up was invaluable, as many of them had a lot of material they wanted to bring in to work with (I loved seeing students, for example, pull out a block of wood and start carving!)

There was a lot of ways to incorporate current lessons, such as starting the class with a chance for students to chat about their project’s progression using, for example, four adjectives or in the past tense. Mostly, though, I just enjoyed seeing them do their thing!

Some students used blogs, which was a great way to keep an eye on what they were doing if I didn’t have time to check-in during class

This was also FANTASTIC if I knew I was going to be away for a meeting. I’d tell students that they’d be working on their genius hour projects on X day, and then my substitute plan was just an explanation of the project and directions to supervise so I didn’t need to worry if my replacement spoke French or not.

I would also do goal-setting and check-in dates to keep students on track.

RESOURCE: goal-setting form: Genius Hour Goal Setting

RESOURCE: check-in form (mid-way through project): Genius Hour Check-In

Step Three: Presentation time!

At the end of the semester I was lucky in that we ended up doing these HUGE half-day classes (2.5 hours) in the last week so everyone could present. Before that, I would do 3 rounds of 20 minutes in an 80-minute class. So students would be at “stations” (usually 5-6 at a time) and the other students would wander around to check it out and ask questions (see below). Then, they would ‘switch’ and new stations would be set up, so the focus was only on 5-6 students at a time, usually talking to 3-4 students at a time.

RESOURCE: Questions prompts for students to use in a variety of tenses: L’heure de génie questions

A few times I invited other classes to come check out the projects. This was great if I could get grade 11 students since a) it was good advertisement for taking French 12, an elective, which meant I got to keep my job and b) it allowed the students to present to an audience that hadn’t seen the progression of their project. I also invited the administration (as a new teacher, great to showcase cool things you’re doing) who were allowed to ask questions in English or French. My favorite, of course, was when students would bring their pets or bake yummy things to share!

Student presenting to peers; me spying and taking pictures

During this time I would go around eaves-dropping and interacting with students so that I could give them a speaking mark based on their fluidity and vocabulary use. I found that I had enough time to get a good sense of students’ abilities during the time we had, though another option would have been a 1-on-1 scheduled appointment for an oral interview. I run a pretty interactive class to begin with, so I had also heard students speak daily for the entire semester.

Then, I would do a mad scramble for evaluating the written part before submitting my marks. I also had students do self-evaluations. Depending on the students I would have certain criteria (demonstrate certain tenses, use vocabulary from our musique mercredi weekly assignments, etc.) Because I wanted in-depth feedback, students had the option of doing their self evaluation in English or in French.

RESOURCE: Genius hour evaluation: Genius Hour Rubric

RESOURCE: Genius hour self-evaluation: Genius Hour Self-Eval

PART I: GENIUS HOUR Why I love genius hour projects

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to engage students in their L2 throughout the year by doing genius hour projects.

This is Part I of my two-part entry on using Genius Hour Projects! Part II can be found here, which explains my three-step process for doing these projects, along with all my rubrics and hand-outs.

What’s a genius hour project you ask? Well, this video does a pretty great job explaining it. Basically, it’s a project that lasts the entirety of a school year/semester and is (somewhat) self-directed. Students choose an inquiry question (and some teachers are stricter on the definition of an “inquiry question” than others) and spend the time allotted to answering the question. It’s ‘supposed’ to take 20% of class time, but I’d say what I did was more of a 10%.

I have students brain storm some things they would do if they had the time

Since my goal is language use, I’m pretty open to ANYTHING students want to do. The way I present it is: what is something you would want to spend your time on if you were given extra time in your day? So, I’ve had students teach themselves coding, learn ASL, design jewelry, make a comic book, and research the best type of pet habitat for a hamster and build one for their new pet!

Student planning her dorm for college

There’s always a research component to the project (or a science-fair aspect). So, one example of a project was a student wanted her family to eat together more often. Her goal was to cook a meal for the family to share once a month. First, she surveyed them on their likes and dislikes. Then, after each meal she elicited feedback (quality of the meal, improvement for next time). She also had “personal testimonials” from her parents and brother about the experience of doing these family meals together, took pictures, put them on a poster board, and then presented about her experience. Another student wanted to have the best dorm for when she went to college the next year. So she found pictures of the dorm she was going to, created all these vision boards of design features, got a budget, priced out what she was planning on buying, and presented on what her dorm would look like. Another student loved magic-realism books so she wrote a magic-realism short story! First, she researched what features made the genre, read books she liked (for me, I didn’t care what language she read it) and then wrote a story! I gave her an option: write the story itself in French OR write the story in English but reflect on the story-making process in French. Because she was a super-star, she did both!

Bakes sales for the children’s hospital

Some projects, because of their free-form nature, can be incredibly personal. One student wrote in a gratitude journal every day (in French) which she later shared. Another student wanted to start a school club for female gamers because she felt excluded from the current (all-male) school club. Her project was about reflecting on that journey (in French) though the club was an English-language club.  Another student was currently in a (at that point, year-long) fight with our school board about an anti-bullying policy for LGBTQ+ students (he wanted one), and I gave him the option of reflecting on that process as his genius hour project. A group of two students (I eventually opened up the project for pairs to do bigger things together) used their two original ideas (becoming better at baking, volunteering at the children’s hospital) to fundraise for the hospital through bake sales.

Some projects don’t go so well. Students who imagined writing, producing and filming a short film end up just submitting a script that was never filmed. I’ve seen a half-finished tesla-coil and five-seconds of a stop-motion animation film that was supposed to be a minute (it made me think of this clip from Parks and Rec!). I’m very much a “it’s about the journey, not the destination” person, so I truly don’t care that your tesla coil failed, just that you wrote about the experience and are willing to talk about it with me and your peers in the target language.

Some more examples:

Language Revitalization Activity

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get students thinking about endangered languages and their preservation.

I think a lot about language revitalisation. In fact, I have a whole blog post (in French) here.

Obviously, I think it's an important conversation to have with students as well. I was volunteering with foreign exchange students during COVID, and developed an activity package and facilitated a very interesting session where we discussed this issue! I've decided to post it the blog(it's more of a social studies resource than a language one, but it can be adapted! Or left for a sub who doesn't speak the target language!)

The activity has four parts, along with multiple extension activities:

1. individual exploration, using online resources for and against language preservation, of the question: Should governments and international organizations be willing to spend money and time on language preservation efforts?

2. individual exploration, using UNESCO's online atlas of endangered languages, of the question: What do endangered languages look like in your country? (This was for exchange students so the students were from all over the world, but could be fun if students have international connections, or focus on Spanish-speaking or French-speaking countries).

3. individual exploration, the video Marie's Dictionary, of the question: Do the last speakers of a language have a responsibility to preserve it? (There's also a part about students' host families' locations on Indigenous land, which can be adapted to where students currently live in the US or Canada).

4. Important vocabulary clarifications

Feel free to pull whatever you'd like to use, personalize it to your students, or do whatever! I've used the Marie's Dictionary video with my language students and had GREAT discussions. I'll let you guys know if I translate this into French!

RESOURCE: Language Preservation Activity 2020

La revitalisation des langues

Your language teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to reflect on how language revitalization impacts your own language teaching practices.

Today’s post is in French, but if you’re interested in an English language revitalization resource that can be adapted into any language, you can find it here.

Je suis fascinée par les efforts de revitalisation des langues. Je comprends que la morte d’une langue est naturelle : comme les animaux, les langues évoluent. Cependant, je comprends aussi que, comme les animaux, la globalisation tue les langues plus vite que serait naturelle. En fait, par la fin du 21 siècle, la moitié des langues du monde sera éteintes ! Je pense que c’est important que nous préservions ces langues en voie d’extinction pour beaucoup de raisons, mais de toutes les raisons, celle que me touche la plus, c’est comment les langues traditionnelles tiennent la clé pour accéder à chaque culture unique et permettent des voix uniques à être entendues. Comme Claxton Baker, un locuteur de la langue hul’q’umi’num’, l’a dit : « For myself, I feel that it’s very important as a First Nations person to be able to express myself, my identity and my land in my own language ». ·Les langues traditionnelles peuvent être un moyen d’interpréter le comportement humain et les émotions qui ne peuvent pas être exprimées par une langue dominante, comme l’anglais. Par exemple, la langue cherokee a un mot, « oo-kah-huh-sdee », qui représente le plaisir qu’une personne ressent en voyant un adorable bébé ou un chaton. De plus, des informations culturelles importantes peuvent être trouvées dans les langues elles-mêmes. Ainsi, la perte de la langue peut signifier la perte d’histoires et de lignées ancestrales connues uniquement par la narration orale, ainsi que la connaissance des plantes et des pratiques médicinales. Les locuteurs du lulamogi en Ouganda, en fait, craignent que leur peuple oublie la pratique culturelle importante de manger des fourmis blanches, et avec elle une dizaine de termes spécifiques au lulamongi. Ou, dans les mots de Richard Littlebear, un linguiste et une citoyen Cheyenne qui a rencontré la dernière locatrice de la langue Eyak d’Alaska, Chief Marie Smith Jones : « I felt like I was sitting in the presence of a whole universe of knowledge that could be gone in one last breath ». Malheureusement, cet univers a disparu quand Marie est morte en 2008. Alors, le plus je me penche sur les langues en voie d’extinction, le plus je me demande si j’ai le droit d’avoir une opinion. Je me sens mal à l’aise, en tant que locatrice de la langue majoritaire, de dire aux autres qu’ils DOIVENT préserver leur langue. Il y a beaucoup de raisons qu’une langue n’est pas parlée : la honte ou la peur, un manque de temps ou de ressources, ou peut-être un véritable désir pour l’assimilation. J’écoute un excellent podcast (« Stuff the British Stole ») et une citation de cet épisode m’a vraiment marqué : « It’s an important dynamic within imperialism, that you have a constant nostalgia for the thing that you are in the act of destroying. So at the same time as you disrupt local cultures, and seek in fact to destroy them in order to dominate, you are mourning the loss of those cultures and trying to act in ways to preserve them » (à 20:50). En tant qu’une personne fascinée par la préservation de la langue et qui pense que c’est un objectif incroyablement important, je me demande dans quelle mesure, pour moi, c’est de l’empathie et dans quelle mesure c’est la nostalgie d’une colonisatrice ?

Quelles sont vos pensées? N’hésitez pas à les ajouter dans les commentaires.

Les sources:

Baker, C., & Wright, W. E. (2017). Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (6th ed.). Multilingual Matters.

Fennel, M. (Executive Producer). (2020-present). Stuff the British Stole [Audio podcast]. ABC Radio National. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stuff-the-british-stole/best-named-dog-ever/12867932

Nuwer, R. (2014, June 5). Languages: Why we must save dying tongues. BBC Future.  https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140606-why-we-must-save-dying-languages

Ouellet-Dumont, C. (2018, February 22). Les langues menacées de disparition. Quel mot t’a piqué? https://quelmottapique.com/2018/02/22/les-langues-menacees-de-disparition/

Paetkau, J. (2019, December 16). Elders and great-grandchildren share the legacy of learning  Hul’q’umi’num’. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/originalvoices/language/halkomelem/

Riehl, A. (2019, November 8). Why Are Languages Worth Preserving? SAPIENS.  https://www.sapiens.org/language/endangered-languages/ 

"Picture Stories": Using YouTube Videos for grammar practice

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to use YouTube videos to engage students in grammar practice.

A quick and easy way to use a YouTube video is to show and respond to it (no prep needed). However, if you're willing to put a little time in before hand, you can jazz it up for some fun times. All you need is a word document and the ability to take a screen shot (on Mac it's command+control+shift+4).

Step Zero (before students): find a YouTube video (either in the target language or one that is mostly silent, like Mr. Bean). For this case, we're using Le Grenouille Qui Était Un Prince. Take screen grabs of some interesting looking scenes. Make a word document, like this one: Le Grenouille Qui Était Un Prince Picture Story

Step One (with students): students make up sentences (using the grammar structure you want to practice) based on the pictures that they see (DO NOT show the video yet).

You can project the screen captures using a projector if you can only print in black-and-white (as I could only do). That way students can see detail. Encourage students to really stretch their imaginations, don't rely on stories they already know. For example, the first screen grab is of the king giving his daughter a golden ball, which she will lose, and a magic frog will save for her. Looking at the photo where father and daughter are hugging, we instead decide the sentence will be "La princesse (qui est un zombie) vole un bal d’or en mangeant le cerveau du roi." (The princess, who is a zombie, stole a golden ball while eating the king's brains). So, some imagination + using the present participle.

This is a great activity to do in pairs, or groups. Also super funny to share out, since they'll be unique (unlike the 'real answers'). You can even have students do a jigsaw activity, going around the room writing down their responses to each photo, and then go celebrate/correct their sentences before the second part of the activity.  I like this because they get immediate feedback on the grammar structure before reinforcing it further in step two.

Step Two: Watch the video. Stop after each scene that the picture represents and have students write a sentence that describes what 'actually' happened. For example, "La princesse dit « merci » en embrassant son père." (The princess said thank you while hugging her father <--- told you it was less exciting than zombies!). This can be done as an extension/homework if students have access to computers to watch the YouTube video.

The sky is the limit, and once you've go the template, it's easy to replicate. I've done this with all sorts of stories, including, as mentioned above, Mr. Bean videos! (RESOURCE: Mr. Bean Picture Story with Si-Clauses) When I'm in a real rush, sometimes I'll reuse the stories for other grades/units, just swap in a new grammar concept. While ideally the video is relevant to the unit we're doing, sometimes you need to plan something for a substitute teacher at 1am, and this is an easy thing to create!

Idioms: A Dime A Dozen

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to teach students idioms to expand their knowledge of the target language and culture.

Teaching idioms is an absolute gong show. How so? Well, if you are not a native speaker of English, I would have to explain to you that the first sentence was expressing the chaotic nature of idiom instruction. Then I would have to explain that the Gong Show was a game-show in the 1970s, and that idiomatically, in Canada and the United States, something described as a "gong show" is something that is disastrous, but in a charming way.

Yet, why do we persist in teaching idioms? Partly, it is because it is a marker of fluency, to understand not just the translation of a sentence, but the idiomatic sense of a sentence. It is also seen as intercultural proficiency: to understand a culture is to understand its idioms. What "there's more than one way to skin a cat" or "let the cat out of the bag" tells foreigners about English's treatment of felines is probably best left unexamined, but idioms are a great way to examine cultural mores. And lastly, idioms are fun! It's the best of language: playing with sound and meaning to create vivid images that stick around, sometimes for centuries.

Teaching idioms is one of my favorite things to do, though I think it's important to be careful that we don't "otherize" or make broad assumptions about the target culture (as in "what weirdos: all English-speakers mistreat cats"). In French, I've got some go-to resources that I've created, which can definitely be recreated for other languages!

Word of the Day:

I would start each day with an idiom from the below powerpoint. Students would guess the meaning, and then I would reveal its use. When I started having students keep a journal in the class at all times, a routine would be to find your journal, and write the mot du jour inside on a special page. Then, with a partner, write an example sentence. Prior to that, I would have a big sheet of paper on which I would write all the idioms of the day. Idioms are, by the way, a great improv prompt for inspiring a scene!

RESOURCE: Mot Du Jour (Most recent update: October 2021)

Idiomatic Fairy Tales:

it's a fairy tale that uses 40 idioms (which are explained in the footnotes with both their literal and figurative meanings). The final project for my fairy tale unit is a twisted fairy tale (Idiomatic Expressions Fairytale), and one variation has students needing to include idioms (either from the unit vocabulary or found on their own).

I created two versions for you to use if you’d like: I have one version using passé simple (the literary past) and one version that is less 'correct' but easier to use for students who have not yet learned passé simple (or you can use the two versions to compare passé composé to passé simple):

RESOURCE: Le Roi et Le Pêcheur - Passé Simple

RESOURCE: Le Roi et Le Pêcheur - Passé Composé

Matching idioms:

This is a fairly simple guessing activity where students try to match the idioms to their meanings. It’s a lot of fun to have students guessing the idiom’s meanings, and making connections to idioms in their L1. A great followup can be an improv scene or writing their own stories that incorporate these idioms. I also have a worksheet where they can practice inverting questions while using the idioms from the matching activity.

RESOURCE: Matching French Idioms Worksheet & Matching French Idioms KEY

RESOURCE: Inverting French questions using idioms worksheet & Inverting French questions using idioms KEY

I do need to note that most of the idioms that I use/teach are from France or Quebec (there's a significant overlap). It's a goal of mine to expand my idiomatic repetoire to include idioms from other Francophone countries. As I make my French courses more culturally inclusive of all the varied French speaking nations and cultures, I hope to update this page.

Please feel free to share how you incorporate idioms into your language classes!