I teach all ages and levels, which I love because it keeps me challenged and my teaching fresh. Some of my favorite classes are the ones I do with children. I created this story to use with some of my youngest students.
I like to create my own stories (and songs) because by doing so I am able to center them around the vocabulary, idiomatic expressions and grammatical structures I have been teaching my students. When I teach children stories I like to have the children act out the stories, both while we read them together and afterward in small groups. Sometimes I will also have students make craft projects, including small books wherein they recopy and illustrate the story or puppets of the characters they then use to preform plays based on the story.
Children love to watch themselves, so sometimes I will film them, or the puppet presentations they create, on my Flip camera. The stories I write are short and simple and often incorporate rhyme so they are not difficult for children to memorize. Older children can also formulate simple sentences restructuring the vocabulary of the story and thereby summarize the stories in their own words.
Your students, particularly children in second grade and beyond, will also able to answer simple questions about the story if you first teach them the “question words” (“who”, “what”, “when”, “where”, etc.) you will use in posing your questions. This is easier for them to do if you post the “question words” on the board and point to these “question words” as you use them and if you ask your questions in the order they occur in the story. You might also want to write out your questions on the board so that students can see the questions the first time you ask them; this is especially helpful to visual learners when they initially hear the questions. Of course after your students have already seen and heard the questions once you will want to erase them from the board. After all, their goal is to learn to understand and respond to spoken French. 🙂
This is a story I wrote about a snail’s gift to the flower he loves. I have included a translation at the end of the story.
L’Escargot Amoureux
Un escargot 
Se promenait
Dans une fôret.
Qu’est-ce qu’il cherchait,
Notre escargot?
Quelque chose de beau.
Parce qu’il aimait
De tout son Coeur
Une jolie fleur
Et il voulait
Lui donner
Un beau cadeau.
Il a trouvé
Un bel oiseau
tout bleu et gris
Qu’il a assis
Puis doucement pris
Sur sa coquille
À son amie.
Story of a Snail in Love
A snail went walking in a forest.
What was our snail looking for?
Something nice.
He was completely in love with a flower.
And he wanted to give her a beautiful gift.
He found a pretty bird, all blue and grey.
He put it on his shell and carefully took it back to his girlfriend.