The words in French, Spanish and English – Mais/Pero/But! – can be bleated. This is one of the funniest thing that occurs in my classes, and it occurs all the time. But it is hard to explain and may not resonate with some. Also, it may only work in French.
In French the word for ‘but’ is ‘mais’. However, there are other words in French that sound like it: mai (the month) or met (puts) or mes (the plural form of the first person possessive adjective). So, in order to distinguish between all of them, I bleat the word mais, like a sheep, so that the kids always know that when they hear this strange bleating sound it means but, to clarify from the other identical sounds.
Stories always seem to include a lot of buts, and, when bleated, mais really helps out in comprehension. Some bleats can last up to five or six seconds, or even longer. There have been fifteen second bleats.
But the real fun comes when you appoint an echo bleater from among the class. This is a student who bleats, within the second after you say it, mais as an echo to your mais. This is not easy to enforce, as many students wish to bleat the word, but you must allow only the assigned bleater the bleating privilege, or the room will sound as if it is filled with sheep.
Another thing is to require the class never to laugh when the assigned bleater bleats. It is a quiet thing, best ignored. Tell the class that they must never react to the student bleater, especially when being observed. In those cases, when the bleat of the instructor and that of the student occur, everyone remains quiet, the observer turns their head and raises an eyebrow over the strange double bleat, but gets no explanation, like the double bleat was a normal thing that happens in this class.
Go on with the story as if nothing happened. After the third or fourth double bleat, the students usually burst out laughing because they love to prank administrators. This idea may seem strange, but once tried it is hard to stop, the kids love it so much. It goes on all year. Injecting humor into an Invisibles classroom in ways like this is a wonderful thing. Laughter is a beautiful thing.
Find ways to laugh with your kids. Send the message that it’s ok to laugh. Their capacities in the language will increase if you do that. This is not true in their other classes like math and science, which occur in the realm of the conscious analytical mind. But it is a fact in our field, where acquisition occurs uniquely in the realm of the unconscious mind, where language gains happen without our students even being aware of them, as long as they are focused on the message.