French and Drama

I have had 2 teaching blocks in Core French, so I know that french and drama go hand in hand. It was good to see other instructional strategies to integrate french with drama from my peers. These are some of the activities that I would want to use in my french classroom.

Learning vocabulary is always a difficult task. Giving dictées are very passé, so it was good to see a new method to help students learn and recall new words in french. For this strategy, you would give students a list of vocab words and have them choose 3 words in their groups. Students create a situation or story that incorporate the chosen words to help them remember the words and their meanings. In the scene, students only say the three vocab words during the scene. After the scene, the audience will guess what words they chose. The goal is to have students see the new vocabulary words in an authentic setting, rather than just have them memorize strange words. This brings the words to life and gives them meaning.

Another strategy that was taught in class was pantomime, or mimed activity, which is when students act out a word/phrase without speaking and exaggerate their expressions. I thought this was a great strategy to incorporate into a french class, because not only does it help students remember new vocabulary, but it is a typical french activity. Students will recognize the stereotypical mime with the painted white face and beret, so you could introduce them to this image as a fun way to get them to use pantomine, or miming.

In my final teaching block, I was at Tapleytown elementary school, in a Core French classroom. I taught a unit on french festivals to grades 4-8, each focusing on a different festival in a Canadian province, the United-States, or in France. Almost every day I would incorporate drama in my instructional strategies or in the activities that I had my students complete. When I teach, I try to instruct mainly in french, to immerse students in the language. To help them understand, I act out words and over exaggerate my gestures to get my meaning across.  For their final task, I had students create a travelogue (video postcard) of them visiting the festival that they were studying. Below is the example I created with a student volunteer, Mademoiselle Turner:

These are the Drama and French curriculum expectations that I incorporated into this task:
Drama:
B1. Creating and Presenting: apply the creative process (see pages 19–22) to process drama and the development of drama works, using the elements and conventions of drama to communicate feelings, ideas, and stories.
B3. Exploring Forms and Cultural Contexts: demonstrate an understanding of a variety of drama and theatre forms, traditions, and styles from the past and present, and their sociocultural and historical contexts.
French:
A3.1 Intercultural Awareness: using information from oral French texts, identify French-speaking communities in Ontario, find out about aspects of their cultures, and make connections to personal experiences and their own and other communities

After learning about their respective festival, students wrote a script about the festival their were visiting and talk about the food, activities, weather, and culture at the festival, and compared it to their own lives. They used a green screen to act out their scene.