8th Day of Class

Monday, September 27, 2010

Wore: Dad’s pearl necklace, Marilyn’s coin pear earrings, pinky baggy blouse with black crochet detail on the back, black pants, J Crew Wedge heels. Hair: Straight, make-up: pink and burgundy, yet subtle.

Adjectives…

So yes. I deviated from my lesson plan.  After grading all of the tests, I saw some consistent errors on negation and professions. Students kept saying: “Je suis un étudiant,” instead of dropping the article and leaving the un/ une away from the profession.  I think that’s a hard grammar point for students to grasp, so it was definitely worth going back over.  Also… negation.  Time and time again I see : ne plus pas, or ne…pas jamais, or ne allons or Je ne vais à la bibliothèque pas.

So, as a class we reviewed this and I had them jot down in 4 sentences off the top of my head, in their notes.

1. Nous allons au cinéma

2. Elle adore étudier.

3. Je veux partir à la maison (A sentence from Le Chemin du Retour)

4. Ils travaillent tous les jours.

Then we underlined the conjugated verb (because in a couple of the examples, there were two verbs: adorer + étudier, vouloir + partir).

Annie (another language teacher who was my colleague at the last university I instructed at) used a smiley face for the ne… pas.   (ne and pas are the eyes that you circle, then you join them with a smile)

I use a sandwich metaphor which works really well with direct object and indirect object pronoun placement in a sentence.

Then as a class, we made each sentence negative with alternating negations (ne…plus, ne…jamais, ne…pas encore…)

After seeing that I printed out the incorrect cultural project (dates were 2009, and not 2010), I decided against the embarrassment of stupidity … Hey, I’ll pass this out next lecture without any mistakes!

The rest of the hour and excess time went directly into adjectives, BAGS (beauty age goodness and size), sentences and all adjectives on the board.  By the time we were done, I had neatly filled a vast number of adjectives on the board.  Of course, adjectives are one of those special elements of language that can get out of control because of sheer number of them.  I cut us off after bavard/ bavarde, parresseux (-euse) and hope that they’ll memorize the forty or so adjectives on the board.

On Wednesday we have 2 birthdays to celebrate, so I figured we would do the skittles game so everyone can use colors (adjectives) long before they appear in Chapter 5.

In addition to everything we finally did numbers past 59 and stopped at 81.  I directed them to page 86, where they can find numbers greater than 59.  Maybe an extra credit question on the quiz? Oh perhaps… perhaps… perhaps…

Loving this French Blog !