I gave a French lesson to the 10 year old girl from Falkirk last week, and we moved to a first Clicker demonstration this week. The young lady had read Utopia in a little over a week, and we had a discussion on positive and negative points she had picked out. Her sister was ill. Here is her mother's comment on the French.
John
Thank you for another inspiring lesson.
Going through these fundamentals of French with S. has been really useful. Surprisingly, I had never thought to mention to her that the French like their language to flow and so will use apostrophes and silent letters at the ends of words to allow that flow to happen more easily and naturally. Somehow it was so obvious that it didn't occur to me to think about it - until you pointed it out. Actually, without this grasp of the basics - what makes French a language distinct from English, it is impossible to progress beyond a certain point. I found this out myself when attending French university and struggling to understand this 'flow' when engaging in conversations. It made life much harder than it had to be. So for that, and your continued development of my daughters' intellects, I am wholly grateful.
Here is the first Clicker 6 grid I used with S. After the pupil has composed a sentence, an excellent French speech engine says it back to them.
Here is an extension suggested by a very bright eight year old in a Hackney school.
Reading Update.
The seven year old pupil from Kettlewell had another very successful lesson, lasting just 18 minutes. He reread everything he had previously read, without any errors he did not correct himself, and two further pages with several unfamiliar words. His sharpness in working out words he did not know already, and in correcting errors - he made only one error on plurals in the whole lesson, and corrected it after a prompt - indicate that he is changing the way he thinks, and reading much more effectively as a result. We now need to work on his writing, but progress so far is exceptional.