Keeping elements of place and time straight over the course of a unit can be complicated. To help, we will create and continually refer to timelines that organize relevant information, anchoring a combination of images and words as well as audio and video clips to geographic reference markers, which will then be anchored to dates on a timeline.
As the unit progresses, we will create a large-scale version of this geo-timeline on our bulletin board; each student will create an individual notebook-sized one as well, using folded 11x17 paper and pasting notable images and keywords as they learn, perhaps adding pop-out features if they are so inclined (which at least a few will most certainly be.) Each day I will show our timeline on a projector and zoom in on the relevant markers, adding links throughout the unit to images, audio clips, or videos that set the stage, describe the landscape of the area and living and working conditions, and bring to light aspects of culture and identity. I will also post this multimedia geo-timeline on my class website as a living resource for students.
To help students develop a sense of time and change over time, as well as to solidify their working application of forming large numbers, all information and activities will be placed within the context of a particular year or span of years. To help students develop a sense of geography and how regions are connected, all information and activities will also be placed within the context of a location on a map, that location's relation to others we have discussed, and indication of migration flow where applicable.
When focusing on a particular time period, the date will be emphasized in many different ways. For example, I will attach an index card bearing the date with Velcro to the timeline and remove them it we are discussing that time period, gesturing with the card and generally making a fuss about it, as well as repeatedly peppering questions about what year we are discussing throughout the lessons.
-
Q:
Quelle année est-ce?
(What year is it?)
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Q:
C'est 1562?
R:
Oui, c'est 1562
and/or
Non, c'est 1910!
Years are often difficult for students to say in French, so we will practice going step by step through each place value of the date. I find that varying my tone of voice and using hand gestures that mimic that voice modulation both help students feel comfortable as they struggle through the task. For example, when saying
mille
(one thousand, the first step to all of the dates we will say unless we reference current time, when we will say
deux mille
instead), before saying the word I draw my right hand into a loose fist and then shoot the fingers out flat to emphasize the single syllable of the word as I say it,
mille.
From there my voice will go up in tone and my hand will follow, going from parallel to the ground to perpendicular to it, while we say the number that goes before the hundred or
cent.
When I say the
cent
I bring my voice back down and with it goes my hand, back to the loose fist. It always amazes me how students latch onto these little voice-gesture combinations as they work through the language. They often repeat the process on their own, using the sensory memory of the sound and feel of the changes in voice and gesture as a support for remembering the steps to saying the year or whatever is being practiced.
Over the course of the unit, maps should be used and relationships between locations should be stressed. Immigration routes can be drawn, shared, and compared, with attention to the landmarks along the way. Notice can be given to places in the United States whose names come from the French. Students can create their own maps with meaningful image and language markers. See
Lesson Plan I – Maps.
See the section called
Music: The Evolution of a National Anthem
for suggestions on how to use music over the course of the unit to thread the theme of national identity into lessons, as students learn about the French Canadian search for a national anthem. These music clips can be added as audio files to our multi-media timeline.