Crayons' French lesson for Monday

Today we used a combination of L'art de lire and Trend Numbers Match Me cards.  Those who have been reading the Treehouse for a very long time might recall that we used them four years ago for Crayons' first-grade math class.  Well, the best tools have multiple uses, and these cards are just as useful for second-language counting.

Our lesson went as follows:

I had Crayons re-read the silly "oi" story in the Level 2 workbook.  I'm not going to write it out in French, and that would probably be against copyright anyway, but the English meaning is as follows:  "The King.  Here is the king.  What does he see?  The car.  The mirror.  Three drawers.  The black pepper.  And you?"  All those words in French (miroir, noir etc.) contain the target sound.  Charlotte Mason may have preferred something more literary, but this is purely for phonics practice.  Crayons finds it very funny to mispronounce "le poivre" (pepper) as "le pauvre" (the poor man)...she knows she's doing it now, but she keeps doing it anyway.

Then there were six sentences in French and four in English to translate.  We did those orally.

And there was a page where you had to draw five things from the story, and write out five other vocabulary words.  Crayons...of course...drew both "le poivre" and "le pauvre."

In between all this, we added a small stuffed mouse to our class.  The recurring character in all the L'art books is Mimi the mouse.  Crayons found a toy mouse to represent Mimi, and Mimi helped with the last part of the class. 

Which was:  the number cards.  I picked out cards showing sets of objects from one to twelve, and had Crayons / Mimi  count along with the cards.   Then we scrambled them up and went through them again.  It's one thing to be able to rattle off French numbers, but another to say quickly how many cupcakes or ladybugs you see.

Next French class we'll probably do more with Mission Monde.  I don't mind mixing it up a bit, especially because the goals of the various programs are so similar at this level.  The first unit of our Mission Monde happens to work on a few phonics sounds too, including "oi."  Coincidence?  Whatever--I'm more interested in teaching the concepts than in which book(s) we use to cover them.  And if Mimi wants to help--so much the better.

Postscript:  When the Apprentice was in first grade--thirteen years ago--she was in a homeschool co-op that had a French class for the youngest kids, and they used J'étudie avec Mimi, the primary-level book.  So there's some nostalgia for us there too.