For the last two years, my class has been flip flopping between in-class learning and distance learning.
I found that with the distance learning, it was challenging for my students to hear French, as well as practice all the skills they had been practicing with pocket chart sentences while at home.
I was really worried about their success stalling. My school didn’t do any live teaching the first year of distance teaching, so this was a major struggle for my students.
It was at this time that Lucy from For French Immersion convinced me to try Boom Cards, and I immediately knew I had to find a way to make my pocket chart sentences work on that platform!
This blog post is all about how you can use Boom Cards to help your students practice sight words, vocabulary, listening skills, and more – tout en français!
What are Boom Cards?
Boom Cards are basically digital task cards created by teachers for students. They are engaging, self-checking and interactive.
When the students are given a question, once they submit their answer, they are instantly given feedback on their answers! These digital task cards often include audio (once more, tout en français!), and are fun and engaging for our primary students.
To use them, you (the teacher) will need a Boom account, where you can house your library of decks.
I am not allowed to have my students log in to the site, so I used the “fast play” option and just put a shortcut to the boom.cards website right on their tablets before I sent them home. They click the shortcut, enter the FastPin, and are good to go!
This way, I’m the only one who needs an account – not my students.
If you do have permission for your students to have their own accounts, you can create student accounts where you’ll be able to see data and their results each time they play.
What are some of my favourite decks for targeting the most skills?
As I said in the introduction of this post, I was really looking for a way to help my students practice all the skills they had been learning from “Les phrases fantastiques” pocket chart poems at school. So, I created some corresponding Boom decks!
These decks are based on my Phrases fantastiques pocket chart poems for in-person learning.
To play, students just click the audio button, listen to the sentence, and then drag & drop to build it, using the correct articles and vocabulary words. They will also work on directionality as they fill in the sentences from left to right, and add punctuation, giving them important practice with these skills.
My favourite part about these decks is the listening portion – students will need to listen closely and really think about which words go where! This also helps reinforce 1:1 correspondence; each word they hear will correspond to a word that they add to the sentence.
If you’re curious which sight words and vocabulary words are practiced in each deck, see the end of this blog post for info on how you can get a list to help you better find the specific decks you need.
Another Helpful Bundle of Decks
My students also use my Apprendre les mots fréquents sight word program to learn and practice sight words, so I wanted a way for them to practice their word lists at home as well. I needed a way for my students to do our “étude de mots” centre at home; so, I made practice decks for each of the coloured lists in the program!
Each deck has students practice reading, spelling, building, etc. each word from their list.
On Boom, you can assign just the list that each student is working on. No problem if they’re on different lists!
If you are using FastPlay, just create a FastPin for each deck you need and share those specific pins with only the students on that list.
Looking for the word lists?
If you’re curious about exactly which words are practiced in each of Les phrases fantastiques decks, to help you decide which individual decks would best suit your needs, you can CLICK HERE to grab a go-to list!
Print it out, and you’ll always have it to refer to whenever you want students practicing listening to, identifying, and spelling specific words.
You can also check out the bundles for each of the decks at the following links: Phrases fantastiques and Les mots fréquents. From there, you can also see each of the individual decks and/or purchase the ones you need separately.
Of course, the bundle is always the best deal – you can grab 20% off the total value for each!
