Bonjour mes parents!
I look forward to perhaps playing a part in developing in your child a life-long interest in French. It takes thousands of hours of contact (mainly in the form of input) to gain output mastery of a language. In one middle school year, even if your child is hearing and reading the language every single minute in class, we still can only get about 80 hours of practice in per year, far less that what is sufficient to result in real authentic gains in speaking and writing.
Don’t feel you need to know French to be able to help your student. Simply guiding your child to our digital classroom in Schoology and reminding them to study their vocabulary will help them tremendously. Here is an article that gives more ideas too. Ask your child about words and phrases they hear in class and you too will learn some French!
I encourage you to be a part of their learning experience by following their progress in our digital classroom, Schoology. This learning management system is the go-to place to view assignments, the class calendar, and grades. I also use ClassDojo, Quizlet, and several other digital tools to help students. You may received email notices as students begin using these tools. You are welcome to track their progress!
Please have realistic expectations about your student’s progress in French class. Language acquisition is a LIFE-LONG endeavor, it takes a lot time and continual exposure. Think about your student as they began learning their first language. They listened for the first several years before uttering single syllable words. Then, they started linking words together in short phrases, until finally they were speaking. It isn’t until year 6 that they began writing. I am always here to help students and make their experience as fun and valuable as possible.
To restate – the overarching goal of the instruction I will offer your child in French this year is that your child begins to understand the most frequent and basic phrases and that they perhaps maybe even make it a lifelong passion some day, since so much more time is required for mastery than we have available to us in our school setting.
To reach those goals, I would ask you to encourage your child to be fully present in class and ready to learn, and ready to follow my classroom rules, which are posted here on my website. We will talk about what learning habits are necessary for your child to succeed in French at Summit Middle. If they just follow those rules in class and attend to the other requirements of the course, then I will take care of everything else, since that is my job as the teacher!