French Update

We've slowed down in working through Barbier from the plans I posted last time, but lots of learning is going on.

Little girls: We're parsing and construing our way through their homework assignments, one sentence at a time. This is slow going, but I really think it's going to give them the best foundation for continued learning. We work on only about five sentences each day, so each exercise takes about four days, but this gives us time to continue with French Phonics, Madeleine, and their paradigms.

Older girls: We've slowed down here, too, but as we work through each sentence, the girls' understanding is growing by leaps and bounds.

I type up each homework sentence in Pages on my iPad (one at a time, so I don't have to work ahead). Then we go through and discuss each word, its part of speech, its job in the sentence, the various elements of each word (person, number, tense, mood, and voice for verbs; person, number, and gender for nouns; number and gender for adjectives and articles). We also color-code each word as to its job in the sentence and adjectives match the color of the noun they modify, but in italics.

We haven't really done any English grammar in quite awhile, but they're learning so much that I think we'll be okay. Even though we're not really discussing English grammar as a separate discipline, we do discuss it lots in their composition assignments.

An additional help: I let the girls change the colors of the words in the iPad - they think that's pretty cool! The touch screen is still pretty new for them.

SDG!