The lesson I normally give for Halloween isn’t fully compatible with our school’s current hybrid model of teaching, and I am at a different spot in my curriculum than I normally am right now. Combine that with a bunch of really neat Halloween/Toussaint/Jour des Défunts videos I found on YouTube this summer, and I realized I needed to craft a new lesson. After ten years of teaching 40-minute classes, this year we have 60 minute classes. That means that after I accomplish my initial objectives of teaching students about the holidays in the French-speaking world, there is time to just have some Halloween-themed fun. I am posting this lesson. before I actually teach it in case it gives anyone any ideas they may want to use with their students this year. So, without further ado, here is an overview of what I will be teaching students in the days right before Halloween:
-First, via Nearpod, students will match up French Halloween vocabulary with images using the matching pairs feature. Most of the words are cognates, such as “un monstre.” or words we learned, such as “un chat noir.” I used to use this as an opportunity to review masculine and feminine noun markers, but we have not tackled that yet this year so that will not be the focus.
-Next, we will watch portions of all the videos in the playlist below. For the Martinique video, students will be instructed to turn on auto-translated English subtitles so they can follow along (by the way, for email subscribers, you need to visit the post on my website to see the videos):
-Via Nearpod’s Time to Climb game (which I will be talking about in a future post), students will answer a series of comprehension questions about the videos…in English. I know the use of English here may be a bit controversial, but sometimes, often with cultural lessons, I feel that students would be missing out on a lot of valuable knowledge if there wasn’t any opportunity to discuss the material in English.
-We will sing the song below, but I will have students look at this version with subtitles in English. It’s not culturally relevant, but it’s a great way to reinforce the pronunciation of “C’est.”
-If time allows, we will also watch this video, which is fun since most of the students have seen the movie:
-For the rest of class we will switch gears (using Halloween imagery) and do a bit of review using a shared PowerPoint, where students can drag and drop text boxes to form sentences on their assigned slide. They will see a prompt, such as a ghost asking a happy witch “Comment vas-tu ?” and they have to compose the appropriate response. I talked about shared PowerPoints in this post, but I’ll be talking about this particular activity in a subsequent post.
If you’d like more detailed information about the contents of this lesson, feel free to contact me using this form.
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