Learning Communities,
Background Experiences,
Cultures, Literacy,
Language Learning,
Modes of Communication.

 
Welcome to the Lessons and Activities home page, your gateway to language-related resources for pre­-service and in-service language teachers and teacher educators. Here you will find lessons related to building a learning community, discovering the background experiences of students, exploring cultures, and enhancing literacy skills. Also featured (or planned for future days) are traditional lesson plans designed around the four skills of language learning — listening, speaking, reading, and writing — and the three modes of communication — interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational.

An outreach of Planet Gnosis, the Special Methods web is an open access, non-commercial, collaborative initiative dedicated to the development of education and teaching. Our lesson plans, features, and activities can be copied, distributed, adapted, and transformed as needed for you and your students. We encourage you to participate by contributing your favorite lesson or activity. We believe that information should be shared for the common good and the intellectual delight of all learners, so let the lessons begin!

It’s oft said that poetry is the language of the heart, and that French is the language of love.  How appropriate, then, to teach the language of love through the language of the heart.  Judith M. Michaels offers teachers the opportunity to do just that with the innovative lessons in her three-week unit, La Poésie Française: A Progressive Integration Plan for the Teaching of French.

Judith’s lessons begin with a pretest to assess and inspire the creative side of the language learner.  She frames the unit by asking students about the fundamentals of poetry: the poem, the poet and the poetic form.  Then it's off and away to the realm of creative learning.  Over the course of the progressive lessons, students practice oral fluency, read and write poetry, and analyze text.

Have you ever read Humpty Dumpty or Jack Sprat in French?  (It’s fun.)  You can find these classic poems in Judith’s lessons, along with handouts, assignments, and rubrics.  La Poésie Française is a well-planned, standards-based, and highly engaging unit on French poetry.  The material can also be adapted by the creative teacher into plans for stand-alone lessons.

A T T E N T I O N    T E A C H E R S :
La Poésie Française is a work in progress. Judith has written lessons for 15 days of instruction, but we haven't completed preparing all of them for publication. We are currently working on Jour 1. Our goal is to have the entire unit online before the end of the spring semester. This note was posted on Wednesday, March 9, 2011.  — The Editors

Descriptive vocabulary is a challenge for students who are just beginning to learn a foreign language.  In this level-one Diamond Poem activity, students create a five-line poem in the shape of a diamond.  It's a great way to reinforce prior learning and challenge students to learn new vocabulary words and have fun doing it.

Submitted by the Planet Gnosis staff
 

E D I T O R ' S    N O T E :
The redesign of the Special Methods web was published in early February, 2010. One of our goals is to develop the Lessons and Activities section to meet the expectations expressed in the introduction to this page.  We will be adding new lessons as quickly as we can prepare them for publication.  We encourage you to contribute, and by doing so to provide teaching resources to your peers.

To find a language — for that matter, all words being ideas, the time of a universal language will come! One has to be an academic — deader than a fossil — to perfect a dictionary of any language at all. The weak-minded, thinking about the first letter of the alphabet, would soon rush into madness! This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, scents, sounds, colours, thought attaching to thought and drawing it out.
      — Arthur Rimbaud, Lettre à Paul Demeny: Charleville  (The 'Voyant' Letter), 1871