Friday Celebrations

One of my favorite routines is the Friday routine in my classes. I got this idea from Noah Geisel at an ACTFL conference years before I even made the switch to CI, but he mentioned getting it from someone else.  At any rate, here’s how it looks in my class.

I have papers with each letter of the word VENDREDI (Friday, in French) and a few with exclamation points. We spell out VENDREDI as a chant.

I hand students the letters and say “Give me a V!” in French.  They say, “You’ve got your V, you’ve got your V!” and the student holding the V runs to the front and then we continue spelling the word in that fashion.  When we finish with the final exclamation point I count down ‘3, 2,1….!!!’ and we yell ‘Vendredi!’

Here’s what it looks like at the end (well, sans emoji faces):

I love it because it’s a super calming routine to fall into on a day when everyone’s tired and because there’s lots of opportunity for PQA and playing with language. Today, in fifth grade classes, I asked students what letters they wanted. I held up each letter and said things like ‘Do you want this letter?’, ‘I bet you want this letter because your name starts with this letter!’, or ‘Of course you want the exclamation point, you’re so happy it’s Friday.”

At one point a student who got the exclamation point noticed that another student REALLY wanted it. We’ve been targeting the verb ‘give’ a lot in the first couple of weeks and so mini-stories of kids giving letters to each other started emerging and others started to give letters and it was such a beautiful moment. A bunch of baby French learners giving each other papers saying ‘merci’ and ‘de rien’. Kindness and language!

Another class has a joke where we call Vendredi ‘Frite-redi’ (literally FRYday) in class and everyone laughs.

It also targets things that other people seem to be interested in ‘getting around’–like how to teach the alphabet, days of the week (you can talk about what days are in the weekend, or any day’s relationship to Friday, etc.)

Here’s my Friday share.  Hope this is helpful to you and that you enjoy it with your students!

Bon week-end,

Blair