Salut!  I can’t believe it’s almost time for school to start again!  How in the world did we get to August 1st already?

This year, I need to miss the first full day of school to move my sophomore daughter into Colorado State (Go Rams!). Our first day of school is a regular 50-minute class period day.  I have been a little worried about my French 1 students especially on this day.  What could I possible give them to do??   I am not sure if my students will have their iPads yet and if they will be able to access my Google Classroom.  I never have a French-speaking sub and sometimes we don’t even have regular subs.  Other teachers in the building many times have to cover classes, so I didn’t want them to have to supervise anything difficult or to have to mess with technology.

I came up with the following activity to introduce new students to school supplies.  It uses a series of steps to have them guess the meanings of words.  Deducing meanings of unknown words is such an important skill when learning a new language and I hope this will be a great introduction on how to do that.  I do similar activities when I intro vocabulary throughout the year.  After taking them through the steps and eventually letting them check their guesses, I have included 2 puzzles for them to practice the new words.

Since I cannot be the only teacher that has to miss the first day, I hope this can be useful to others.  This can also be used as a sub plan any time before students learn school supply words.  It can also be used as a guide for any language on how to set up a “Guessing vocab” sub plan.  The link forces you to make a copy, so feel free to edit as necessary to suit your own needs.  The first paragraph also explains why I am missing the class, so you may want to change that as well (unless you too are bringing your daughter to college 😀)

Bonne rentrée !!  Kelly