Spelling words in English

I have realized that it's actually been awhile since I posted anything about what I am teaching and how classes are going. Well, fear not my friends. Here you go.

For the last 3 weeks, I have been teaching food items. The kids now know how to say the following 14 super exciting words:

• Apple(s)
• Cake
• Candle
• Banana
• Pizza
• Egg(s)
• Sandwich
• Orange
• Orange juice
• Tomato
• French Fry
• Carrot
• Chicken
  
• Cheese

Oh boy. Has doing this for 3 weeks been ever so exciting. I say that with some prety thick sarcasm. However, you can't just teach kids 14 words once and expect them to remember them. It's all about repetition. So, we have been learning how to say the words, how to draw the words, and this week, it was all about writing the words. The kids learned last week how to say "I like, I love, I don't like & I hate". Since the "h" sounds doesn't really exist in French, for my own amusement, I had to make the kids repeat "hate" about 30 times before they sort of got the sound down. It's so interesting to see that simple sounds for Anglophones (such as myself) are so difficult for Francophones. I can litterally see the kids really struggling to make the "h" sound.

Anyway, like I said, this week, all of my kids have been writing out the words. Now many of the words we learned are either written exactly the same in French or at least really close. The notable exceptions are "French Fry, Eggs, Cheese, Chicken, & Apples". My favorite thing to do this week was let the kids come to the board and write the words as they thought they were spelled. This proved to be most entertaining to me. Notable favorite spellings were:

• Cheese: chiz; chese; chize
• French fry: foch fiy; fenc fy, frenc foi
• Eggs: égxc, egz, éjxz

Eggs mispellings were my personal favorite. What was interesting about the mispelling of French Fry was that I could see the kids sounding out the word. This meant that they clearly didn't actually understand the sounds we were making to make the words. Hopefully, after writing the words and seeing the letters, they will be able to pronounce the words better. That was my intention anyway. The kids also got to write full sentences with the terms "I like, etc". I figured it would be a bit beyond their comprehension to teach them the correct phrasing for "I like" + "tomato". So I let them just write "I like tomato" instead of "I like tomatoes". I mean, they are only 2-4th graders. We need not get completely grammatically correct.

I also began the daily repetition of certain things. Everyday I say "take out your namecards" and then ask them what it means. Then I ask "what day is today" and "what is the weather outside". That's fun for me since the kids have kinda memorized that routine so before I finish the question, kids have their hands raised to answer. Soon we will write out everything. For now, I am trying to focus on the oral part since I know once they get into middle school and high school, they will have very little occasion to actually speak the language. It will ALL be written or read, so why not speak it now?

Some of you may be wondering if I taught Thanksgiving. To disappoint many, unfortunately, no I did not. I really wanted to finish the food unit this week in order to start Toys/Hanukkah/Christmas unti for the remaining 3 weeks before vacation. In 2 younger classes, since they were a bit too little to actually be able to write all the words out in a comprehensible manner, we did do the turkey hand outline drawing. You all remember doing that in elementary school, right? Trace your hand on paper and then make it into a turkey. So I did a tiny bit with Thanksgiving but the kids didn't really understand what it was all about. You can only expect so much from 8 year olds in a foreign language.

Your British word lesson of the day (this is actually more Scottish than British but I didn't want to rename this section): greet = cry (greetin' = crying) In a sentence: Quit yer greetin' or I'll call your mum.