Like many of you, I spend a lot of my summer trying to get a good head start on my planning for the following school year.  This year I began by revising my first unit for my French 2 students, which focuses on the theme of discussing a typical day.  As I mentioned in a previous post, the theme of “Daily Routine” is often criticized by proficiency-based teachers.  This seems to be because many textbooks have used this theme to present reflexive verbs without adequate authentic context. While this may be true, as I was previewing the French children’s magazines I recently purchased this topic came up again and again.  Many of the articles that I chose for their cultural content included information about a typical day in the life of the children who were interviewed for the article.  As a result, I have chosen to begin my French 2 course with a unit on “A Day in my Life.”

Can-Do Statements

As has been my practice, I began planning this unit by choosing/modifying the NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements that I wanted to address. Because the targeted proficiency level for my French 2 students is Novice High, most of my Can Do’s are based on that level.  However, since my students have excellent reading skills, I chose an Intermediate Low Can-Do Interpretive Reading Can-Do.

Interpersonal Communication: I can exchange some information about my daily routine.

Presentational Speaking: I can tell about my daily activities using phrases and simple sentences.

Presentational Writing: I can write about my daily activities using practiced material.

Interpretive Listening: I can understand simple information about a character’s daily activities in a cartoon video.

Interpretive Reading: I can identify some information from an article about someone’s daily routine. (Intermediate Low)

Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA)

The next step in my planning was to prepare the IPA for this unit.  I began by choosing an authentic magazine article in which Francophone students discussed what gets them up in the morning (previously shared in this post) and creating an interpretive task according to the ACTFL IPA Interpretive template. I then created interpersonal and presentational tasks based on the types of information included in this article.  In addition, I included an interpretive listening task based on a cartoon video in which the character is taking a bath—a typical daily routine activity.  Although this video is not closely integrated to the interpretive reading task, I think it’s important to assess both reading and listening skills in each IPA.  Therefore, I’ve sacrificed the integrative aspect in order to include an authentic text which is appropriate to the proficiency level of my students.

Lesson Plans

Having created the IPA, I turned toward creating the lessons that would provide the students with the necessary skills to perform successfully on this assessment.  Each of these lessons is based on an authentic written or oral text and includes corresponding interpretive, interpersonal and presentational tasks.  Because the Can-Do’s at this level clarify that students at this level are highly dependent on memorized speech, I have included a few additional activities designed to help the students memorize the words and phrases they will need on the IPA.  These “non-authentic” activities include:

1. Educational daily routine videos that will be used to reinforce vocabulary and as a springboard for personalized questioning. (See agenda below for links)
2. Guess Who  game  which requires students to ask and answer questions about daily activities.
3. Matching Activity in which students will describe what the people in images are doing.

The last lessons before the IPA will be a series of learning stations in which the students prepare a rough draft of their presentational writing task, practice their interpersonal task (with different partners), listen to similar cartoon videos, and read an additional authentic article.

Here are the materials I created for these lessons:

1. Unit 1 Activity Packet (Requires this article: Mama p. 1, Mama p. 2
2. Unit 1 Learning Stations (Requires this article: Nadine p. 1, Nadine p. 2
3. French 2 unit 1 agenda
4. Unit 1 IPA (Requires this article: matin p. 1 matin p. 2 matin p. 3 , p. 4)

As always, all feedback is welcome!