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To all my grade one teachers out there… How have you been finding your students’ French alphabet knowledge since the pandemic? In my case, I have had to review the alphabet with my grade one students each year so far. Even though they are *supposed* to know all 36 phonemes in French before coming to grade one, they haven’t had a full/normal school year in years. So, each September since 2020, I have KNOWN my incoming students would need alphabet review. But, in grade one, we just don’t have time to do as intensive an ABC bootcamp as I do in maternelle. So, I created a really simple (but effective!) routine to add to our literacy block the first few weeks of school. (If you teach maternelle, you might want to add parts of this to your ABC bootcamp too - as always, do what works for you!) This routine will allow your students to practice the French alphabet in about 30 mins a day (I also do a morning message before we begin). The lessons focus on letter sound a...

Have you ever had any of these problems with your maternelle French writing centre? You send your students and they just… don’t write! They draw, they chat, they are silly, they make crafts, etc. etc… but, no writing! You spend ages setting up an adorable, Pinterest-perfect writing centre, with vocabulary cards clipped to a clothesline, a variety of writing paper choices, and tons of popular writing utensils. The centre either stays neat and tidy (read: functional) for a day before it’s all messed up, or you lose stamina partway through the year and can’t keep up with switching it out regularly. Or both! I’ve had both! I’ve spent tons of time modelling how to write during the writing centre, only for students to show me drawings when their time is up. No matter how well they did while supervised, once I start pulling small groups, they just seem to forget about the whole “adding words” part of the writing process! I’ve also spent lots of time setting up really ni...