La semaine de la francophonie

This week was the annual francophone week at the school and the entire French department focused its efforts on celebrating la francophonie. Each class spent the week learning about the francophone world and one day was set aside to play French games.
For my three classes, I decided to teach units on francophone Africa. This actually worked out pretty well with my two high school classes, as it was easy to incorporate the theme into the units we were beginning. It helps to have a student body that lives in a francophone country, as it provides a frame of reference that can easily be related to the subject matter. We will be continuing these units well into the next month.
The middle school was another story. We had begun a unit on the household, but everything had to be put aside for the week in order to focus on our theme. This is not to say, however, that this was a lost week. The theme was geography and it was pretty easy to use this theme to teach important grammatical rules such as partitive articles. We'll get back to households next week.
One of the most fun parts of the week were the activities. The elementary school only had half days on Thursday and Friday, so the French teachers started the elementary units last week and planned the activity day for Wed of this week. I volunteered to run the jump rope race (who would have thought jumping rope was French?)and play "1,2,3 soleil!" (a French version of 1,2,3 red light) with the kindergarten and first graders. I also organized the Middle school activity day (which was today). We played the coupe de l'Afrique francophone. The seventy MS students were divided into four teams (each team had students from every French level). The students decided which francophone country their team would represent and competed in a forty minute long tournament for la coupe d'Afrique francophone. The tournament was won by la Cote d'Ivoire.