Bonjour et bienvenue! Hello and welcome!
I’m Mme Cerdas. I was born in Québec, Canada and grew up in a French-speaking family. I would love to teach you French with the same songs, poems, and stories that I grew up with.
I’ve developed this course based on my teaching experiences and my readings of Charlotte Mason’s writings, François Gouin’s language learning work, and the more current language research of Dr. Stephen Krashen and Dr. Liam Printer amongst others.
My experiences teaching French immersion, teaching French classes online, and teaching French to my own children, as well as my own experience trying to learn German on my own, led me to notice that students (myself included) found it easier to start with learning sentences that they could recombine or mix and match to articulate the thoughts that they wanted to express. In my French immersion classes I used picture study weekly to help my students gain confidence and fluency of expression.
Once I had my own children, I heard of Charlotte Mason. I took a deep dive into all her writing and was delighted to discover that I had already been teaching French her way for a decade! Moreover, she agreed with me about learning in the context of sentences: “Of course, his teacher, will take care that, in giving words…they are put into sentences and kept in use from day to day.” (Home Education, p. 301)
Her writing led me to discover François Gouin, a French educational theorist who, frustrated with the language-learning methods of his time, developed his own approach based on the way children acquire their mother tongue. Charlotte Mason found his idea of teaching through series of sentences to be a valuable tool, as it allowed language to be acted out and kept the learning process lively and engaging. Her ideas align closely with the more contemporary Natural Approach to language learning proposed by Stephen Krashen, as well as with Liam Printer’s research on the role of motivation in language acquisition.
All my reading and teaching experiences converge in this Beginner Course, where students are invited to interact with French and shape it into their own thoughts. As Mason writes, “in fact, the new French words should be but another form of expression for the ideas that for the time fill the children’s mind.”(Home Education, p. 81)
In this course, students will learn
-poems
-series
-stories
They will look at art and gain confidence and fluency through describing the paintings using the vocabulary from within the poems, series, and stories.
Students will develop their conversational skills through guided questions and responses.
You will probably want a French Notebook for taking notes. I strongly recommend using the series as copywork so you can become familiar with French spelling right away.
This 30 week course is designed to have 2 main lessons of about 20 minutes plus 3 review videos of about 10 minutes. While they are set to be in the pattern of lesson, review, lesson, review, review for the week, don’t feel like you have to finish all five in one week. However, it is important to watch and do every video.
Ready to do the first lesson? Allons-y! Let’s go!