Following on from Jose Picardo's blogpost about this a while back, I had a look at using Wordle with my Lower 6th class today. We are looking at l'amitié/la famille, so I started out by giving 3 groups of 4 students a Wordle to discuss, and elicited from them (en français, bien sûr!) what they thought its provenance and content might be. Thsi brought up some useful media vocab. It was interesting how even a group of relatively high achievers like these took a while to look at the Wordles in any depth, although pleasingly some very good suggestions started to come out eventually once they got the idea. Here's how the lesson went:
- I made 3 separate word clouds from different sources - one from a forum on friendship, one from the fr.wikipédia entry on le divorce, and one from a forum about reasons people start divorce proceedings. Each group had a different cloud.
- The students were tasked with working out a) what the article was about and b) what media they thought it came from
- after time to work on this with access to wordreference.com, we looked at each one in turn on the projector and discussed key vocab - issues such as register, opposites, groups of words and internet terminology came up
- Students then were given a link on a Word document to a web forum we had used for one of the clouds, and asked to find certain key phrases to describe what a true friend is.
- Having done this they were directed to the forum I had already set up on our VLE and their homework was to post a reply to my opinion on what a true friend is, using new vocabulary from today's lesson.
Many thanks to Jose for the inspiration for this. There are refinements I would make to what was a quickly prepared lesson, but the students responded very positively, were motivated by it and specifically said they preferred it to some of the other approaches we use!
Recent Comments