Harry - another French Game show

As you probably know I get bored easily.

I also have an unhealthy obsession with trying to include activities based on different game show formats into my lessons.

You can find my previous game show idea posts here, here, here, here and here.

This week I discovered a French game show, Harry, on France3 which could be used in the classroom to help improve spelling, reading and speaking.

The game is this: contestants have to reconstruct French words which have been split up into syllables and find the correct words as fast as they can to win points. 

Here is the trailer: 

Here are some fruit ones I've made up:

NE   NA   BA

AN   AS   AN

PLE   MOU   PAM   SSE 

IN   IS   RA  

If your students are aware of phonics, breaking up words like this will definitely help with their pronunciation.

You can even sign up to play the game online here.

lawlessfrench - a great resource

I love this website and I can't recommend it highly enough.

It's the work of Laura K Lawless whose work used to be on the about.com site.

Laura now has moved (and improved) her work to her own domain.

Lawless French contains a huge array of different aspects of learning French and would be ideal for any students of French and even for teachers of French, too.

The categories on the site include:

expressions - this includes everyday expressions and idioms

grammar lessons - everything you could wish to know about all aspects of grammar: tenses, word order, adjectives, etc.. Ideal for student revision

listening practice - with scripts

reading practice - authentic texts - ideal for intermediate and higher classes

vocab lists

pronunciation guides

and every French teacher's best friend, the subjunctivisor.

The site is updated regularly and you can even get updates on learning French from Laura on twitter and facebook.

La télé - authentic AS French links

Today, I'm looking at different aspects of la télé.

These could be used for class discussion, comprehension tasks, to practise translation skills, or as extra reading practice for students.

• A Canadian site, habilomedias, which has a great page on the influence of TV on children. This page also has some resources for parents, too.

• A site from the catholic church in France on TV and young people.

• From avenirdelaculture, a page on the link between TV and delinquance.

• An article from Le Monde about young people shunning TV for other technologies.

• From habilomedias, a list of advantages of television.

• Advantages and disadvantages of TV from economiesolidaire.

• Another article from Le Monde about French viewing habits (with lots of statistcs).

• From voyagesenfrance an informative article about French TV.

• Télé 7 jours listings so you can see how bad french television really is...

• A good article: La téle-réalité: plus artificielle que reelle.

• From Le Nouvel Observateur: "La télé-realité fait chuter les notes des ados."

• Pour ou contre la téle-réalité ? a forum on the aufeminin.com website.

• From wikipedia, a list of French reality TV programmes

And finally, the trailer for Les Marseillais à Rio, France's version of Jersey Shore. This is the 3rd series, they've already been to Miami and Cancun...

I hope you find some of this useful.

Internet - AS French links

After the positive feedback from my Binge Drinking links, I've decided to do the next one.

So here are some authentic links to do with the internet:

This first one is amazing. It's from jeunesse77.fr and is called Touche pas à mon poste ! It is a 24 page pdf document containing lots of information and statistics (remember exam boards love statistics!) and is primarily aimed at young people.

From marocagreg.com - a summary of advantages and disadvantages of the internet

From Académie Toulouse - Quelques dangers d'Internet

An article from Le Monde from 2011 about the dangers of the internet, including a comparison between usage in France and other countries.

From internetsociety.org les enfants et l'internet.

sudmédia.free.fr has a page about the dangers of the internet for children including links to posters and a video clip. The posters could be used for speaking stimuli for the speaking exam.

Action Innocence is a site full of child protection  information. The page Préserver la dignité et l'intégrité des enfants sur internet is full of great material and also has some Supports pédagogiques.
An image search for Action Innocence gave me a huge quantity of material for speaking practice.

From lepetitjjournal.com an article about Le cyber bullying 

From Le Figaro, an article with lots of statistics about le cybercrime in France.

This page from Gendarmerie Nationale contains information on how they are tackling cyber-crime.

Here is a link to the TES resources for l'internet.

Steve Smith's frenchteacher.net site also has some fantastic resources in the free samples section but I'd recommend that all teachers of French subscribe to access all of his excellent resources for the price of a text book.

Obviously, I won't use all of these resources with my students inn class but I shall give them a list of the sites for their own independent reading.

Over the years I've found that the students who achieve best are the ones who read independently and there's nothing wrong with pointing them in the right direction.

Beuverie Express - AS French links and resources

Hi. I hope you're enjoying your summer.

In September I will be teaching AS level French again and I'm really looking forward to it.

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post with lots of links to all of the topics.

Sadly, some of these links no longer work or are out of date.

So I decided to update each of the topics with a list of resources and articles.

I'm a great believer in sharing ideas and resources so if you use any of these resources, or find better ones, please let me know how successful they were.

More importantly, if you use them share them with your colleagues.

Today's list, then, is everything good I've found about Binge Drinking or, if you're a member of the Académie Française, la beuverie express.

• From Nice-Matin 

• From pourquoidocteur.fr an article about energy drinks and binge drinking

• An article from Actu Santé which links binge drinking to agression, anxiety and depression.

• This is a good article from Terrafemina which claims that people who drink a lot are more popular.

• A "news story" about american reality TV "star", Scott Disick, who apparently "boit comme un trou".

• An article from digischool.fr about young people and alcohol. This page has some links to similar articles, too.

• Article "Sexe, drogue et alcool" from lematinal.com 

• From Vin et Société, some statistics about young people and alcohol 

• From docteurclic: Alcoolisme chez les jeunes. This has statistics, information and video clips.

• From crioc.be, a 43 page pdf document "jeunes et alcool" with lots of statistics. Exam boards like statistics!

• A page from the Canadian Health Ministry about alcohol abuse and young people

A French documentary about binge drinking.

Anti drinking campaign video


A list of more videos can be found here.

There are free resources on the TES website here and here. There are lots of KS4 alcool resources on TES which you could use to start the topic.

Sutton Academy's Fun with Languages site has some games and activities related to the topic here.

So there you go. Hopefully you'll find at least one useful thing among these links.

Enjoy the rest of the summer break.