This is what I did:
1. After we read a text several times, circled, practiced the vocabulary, and I was sure that students had a good grasp of both the vocabulary and story sequence, I had them put everything away except for a piece of paper.
2. I instructed each student to write 5 sentences about the reading, in their own words. They could write any 5 sentences they wanted. I only required that they A.)wrote sentences that spanned the entire reading (I didn't want 5 sentences about the first paragraph), and B.)each sentence had to have at least 6 words.
3. I went around to each student as they completed their sentences and made corrections. This took a little time in French I with 27 students, but not much time in French III with 18 students.
4. I had students pair up and choose 6 sentences between the two of them. So, out of 10 possible, they chose 6.
5. Students copied their corrected 6 sentences onto a strip of paper: one sentence per strip.
6. Students illustrated each sentence on a sheet of 8x11 paper.
7. Students bundled their strips and pictures together and passed them to another partnership.
8. Each partner had to match up the pictures to the sentences and then, put the sentence/picture combo in order. When they finished, they mixed up and re-bundled their sentences/pictures and passed them off to another group.
Observations:
1. The prep time for this activity is ZERO.
2. The activity provides A LOT of repetition of structures and content.
3. The first matching and reorder took the kids about 3-4 minutes; subsequent efforts took less and less time as students became very good at reordering and matching.
4. I really liked doing this with the kids. The only thing that bothered me was the time to correct the initial sentences. I don't like taking class time to do that, so perhaps if I had kids prep their sentences the day before, I corrected them, and then we did the rest of it the following day, this would cut down on the "down time" while I'm running from kid to kid.
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