French - Olders

We're reading Les Oeufs Verts au Jambon (Green Eggs and Ham). This was a great book to start with because of the sheer amount of repetition. I went through the book and listed out the vocabulary and grammar my students would need to know to puzzle out and understand each section. I pulled paradigms from the verbs in the book and homework assignments were transformations of sentences in the book or the composing of original sentences and questions using the grammar, vocabulary, and paradigms we'd already covered. We're almost finished. So far, here's the grammar we've covered:

basic -er verb conjugation and subject pronouns

negation with ne … pas (Je n'aime pas ce Sam-c'est moi!)

masculine and feminine nouns and articles

singular and plural nouns nouns and articles

making questions with est-ce que …

making questions by inversion

negative questions and subject pronoun placement (N'aimes-tu pas les oeufs verts au jambon?)

elision and liaison

using an infinitive with another noun (J'aime manger les oeufs.)

introduced direct object pronouns (les, en, me) and their placement

future tense

faux future

introduced passé composé

All this will continue to be reviewed as we come across it in our next book: Histoire de Babar.

Our paradigms, so far, include

aimer

vouloir

avoir

aller

être

The transformations I mentioned above were my friend's idea - I'd take a sentence from the book and have the girls re-write it according to a pattern. For example:

Je n'aime pas les oeufs verts au jambon.

The assignment would include:

make positive

change the subject to second person, singular

use est-ce que to make a question

make question with inversion

make the subject plural

make the subject third person, singular or plural

change to false future

change to future

change to passé composé

Sometimes we'd do it as a chain, after one change, the new sentence would become the basis for the next change. Sometimes we'd change the original sentence over and over. This is how the above assignment might look upon completion:

Je n'aime pas les oeufs verts au jambon.

positive: J'aime les oeufs verts au jambon.

2nd person: Tu aimes les oeufs verts au jambon.

question: Est-ce que tu aimes les oeufs verts au jambon?

inversion: Aimes-tu les oeufs verts au jambon?

plural subject: Aimez-vous les oeufs verts au jambon?

3rd person, s: Aime-t-il les oeufs verts au jambon?

false future: Va-t-il aimer les oeufs verts au jambon?

future: Aimera-t-elle les oeufs verts au jambon?

passé composé: A-t-il aimé les oeufs verts au jambon?

I'm stunned at how much we've covered in only six weeks and am looking forward to Babar. Since it was originally written in French, I think we'll all learn a lot! And we're having fun, which means we're actually doing it!

SDG!