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Let's talk about reading decoding and comprehension today. Now that the Science of Reading is becoming more and more popular, and we are learning more about how our students’ brains work as they learn to read, we know that we need to better teach our French primary students to decode. We want to make sure we are no longer encouraging our students to look at the picture and guess words. But, so far, I have found two problems with this… Problem number one? Not enough books! I have TONS of levelled readers at my school, but… no decodables at all. Problem number two? Students who can decode anything you give them, but have no idea what they’ve actually just read. In this blog post, I’ll explain a resource that I’ve made to help me with both of those problems. Make sure you read all the way to the bottom, because you’ll be able to grab a free sample to see if it works for you, too! Once I realized that my shift in reading instruction would mean that ...

In today’s blog post, I want to talk a little bit about French morning messages. I don't know about you, but since the pandemic, I have learned to do a lot of things digitally. For some things, I was happy to return to not doing digitally when restrictions eased. But, some other things have been surprisingly enjoyable to do digitally instead of how I was doing them before. One of these things? Our morning messages ! I know many teachers, me included, like to start the day with a morning message. I especially like to do morning messages when we are learning and reviewing the letters of the alphabet. Year after year, I find having a morning message about the letter of the day is a great way to kick off our literacy block. I hand wrote and then typed these on chart paper for MANY years. Then, when the pandemic hit and we weren't allowed at the tapis, I switched to videos. In this blog post, I'll share the pros and cons to both so you can choose wh...

If you're a French teacher, I bet you've have had the same struggle with la communication orale as almost every other French teacher I've spoken to. It is important to have a bunch of fun ways to teach French to your students! Getting your students to speak in French! Getting our primary students to speak in the target language can be a huge challenge. Our students are young! It's hard to sell them on the idea that learning a new language is a great thing. Why would the want to?! They can already communicate effectively in their first language! There are many tips and tricks and ways to teach French out there for encouraging our students to speak in French. I'll give you a couple more in this blog post ;) When you're looking for ways to teach French and to help your students speak French, I think there is one big thing to keep in mind. Our students like doing things that they feel that they are good at ! So, if a student doesn't feel...