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25 thoughts on “Verb Strips French”

  1. Fascinating to read your list, thanks for putting it up. Here are my additions, based on using TPR and from years teaching LICT vocab. Prend is on your list twice.
    adore
    arrête
    arrive
    avance
    cache
    chante
    cherche
    coute
    crie
    danse
    dessine
    déteste
    dit
    doit
    donne
    frappe
    gagne
    entre
    goûte
    lance/jette
    marche
    porte
    préfère
    prépare
    regarde
    rencontre
    reste
    retourne
    s’assied
    saisit
    saute
    se lève
    se promène
    touche
    vient

    1. Maggie I think this is fantastic. And Michele I never accessed Diana’s DPS list – I’m just too scattered. I’m glad that guy in our copy room lost my old list because it was outdated anyway. Now, with those golden additions from Maggie, I can say that we have a complete list.

      Michele do you want me to go to the DPS list and cross check the new list (Maggie’s and mine) with Diana’s? Actually, I can’t do that, seriously. I can’t cross check verb lists because I am lazy and in that upper right MB quadrant. It would take me hours.

      What I get from this thread is that we need to come up with a final, acceptable list of word and/or verb posters in some form for next year. Right? Isn’t that what this dicussion is leading to? We need to have some kind of manageable list of verbs and other words in our rooms ready to go in the fall.

      The key word on this project is manageable. Maybe the verb strips should be scrapped – I’m not tied to that idea (I just don’t have my own room) – in favor of the Ben/Maggie list above and we just put up that list on the wall to start the year. Or maybe the verb strips work, I don’t know. I like both ways. I’m leaning toward a big Ben/Maggie list of verbs and not the strips, even though I won’t have my own room next year.

      Help me decide on this bc it is time to plan our walls for next year based on what we are learning now. August is too late.

      And here is another question. Michael’s list of 200 is excellent, but now we are faced with that list and the Ben/Maggie verbs and that would be a lot of wall space.

      So let’s solve this here and now in the next few weeks and then I will be able to put up the BEST poster choices for the fall.

      Sorry for the ramble but all of this is important. If I had to start school next year today, I would put up a combination of (the best adjectives and adverbs and nouns from) Michael’s list and all of the Ben/Maggie verb list. I would not put any little words on there bc I have a cool poster for that already (below). I would not use the verb strips. Just thinking out loud. There are never any firm answers in this stuff, which, as Paul said to me in an email last week, could end up driving us all nuts.

      Here is the Little Words poster that I use, to keep them off the big poster that I see us doing together now. The kids need them separated, I think:

      le = the (m.)
      la = the (f.)
      l’ = use w/ a vowel
      les = the (pl.)

      un = a (m.)
      une = a (f.)
      des = some

      à = to, at, or in
      de = of or from

      à + le = au
      à + la = à la
      à + les = aux

      de + le = du
      de + la = de la
      de + les = des

      [Brigitte sent me these in German and (I feel like a biscuit that I can’t remember who sent them – who was it?) in Spanish and John might send them in Latin and Michele maybe we can get them in Russian, all for the posters page of the new site.

    2. Again Maggie that is some pretty fine detective work. I left all those out? Dang. Well, I’ll put up a post that has all of these in it – in one place – and then we can make our verb posters in various languages for the new site once we can get them from whomever. Michele needs a translated list in English. Hint.

  2. Here are your/our words in German (3rd person singular):

    arbeitet
    schreibt
    mag
    das gefällt mir
    fragt
    stellt
    bringt
    kauft
    kann
    will
    wäscht
    zählt
    trinkt
    fährt
    isst
    fällt
    findet
    (be-)endet
    stiehlt
    vergisst
    geht
    hat
    ist
    hört
    weiß
    kennt
    lernt
    lebt
    wohnt
    nimmt
    verliert
    macht
    braucht
    öffnet
    schliesst
    (be-)zahlt
    spielt
    es regnet
    es schneit
    liest
    antwortet
    läuft
    sieht
    verkauft
    sendet
    schläft
    raucht
    spricht
    steht auf
    lernt
    schwimmt
    unterrichtet
    glaubt
    denkt
    legt
    dreht auf
    dreht ab
    übersetzt
    reist
    versucht
    versteht
    verwendet
    wartet
    hört

    Plus Maggies:

    liebt
    hört auf
    kommt an
    fängt
    singt
    sucht
    kostet
    weint
    tanzt
    zeichnet
    hasst
    sagt
    muss
    gibt
    schlägt
    gewinnt
    tritt ein
    schmeckt
    wirft
    geht
    trägt
    mag lieber
    bereitet vor
    sieht an
    trifft
    bleibt übrig
    kommt zurück
    setzt sich
    springt
    steht auf
    geht spazieren
    berührt
    kommt

  3. Could one of you do the list in English? I have my own list of HF words, but it would be nice to stay in step!

    Are these correlated with the 200 words that Diana has on the DPS site for Spanish and French?

    Do you want a list in Russian for your site, Ben?

    And…could you take a quick picture…or ask one of your kids to do so, and post it somewhere? I can’t figure out what your strips look like. I’m running out of room in my room, and suspect you have a much better plan (not very much wall space available…windows on one side, boards on another, and blocky cabinets or elementary-school hangers on the third and fourth walls).

    1. Michele I have a pic I took today and will send it.

      I would love to have the Russian because we have a guy in Russia in our group:

      1. question words
      2. little words
      3. places in Russian

      for the new web site. (pls. see separate email)

        1. Just to be clear on the word lists – I stack them on top of each other like that for two reasons:

          1. big Word Walls cause a feeling of disorder and clutter. In my view, the absence of simplicity and neatness in my classroom, especially on the walls, are one of the major resaons we have discipline problems. Clutter brings disorder. Most posters are useless. There are only about five that we ever use. (A few years ago I was administering a state test at East High School in a Spanish classroom and, bored, counted hundreds and hundreds of verbs in various tenses on the walls. It was simply ridiculous. I took some notes for a blog post that I haven’t written yet about that room. Maybe I can find it and publish it here. It was frickin’ insane.)

          2. I know that it’s good for the kids to be able to see all the verbs, but if we actually teach them for acquisition, then we don’t need the massive lists. So I just take the strip of12, make sure those 12 verbs are acquired, and then go to the next strip.

          I use them:

          – to introduce each class (2 or 3 per day for maybe a week, and then on to the next 2 or 3 in the strip, so that it takes about a month to get through one strip, but then they know them)
          – as a source for spur of the moment PQA
          – as points of reference during stories, which – the overlapping of the current verb strip with the story we are doing, seems to happen a lot.

  4. Those two lists combine are a great start. I can only think of another one now: Il faut, I find myself using it a lot in front of kids, but I haven’t used it yet in any stories.

  5. Il faut is tough. I don’t put it in the list bc of ease of confusion with fait, which itself is problematic. I just wait until I get a story with that structure and focus on it then. I would bet that it is late acquired.

  6. What I’m suddenly seeing is a set of lists that is different for me.
    I have had:
    Question words
    a long list of “little words” including also, and, but, although, etc.
    a long list of 200 first words.

    Now I think I’m getting:
    Question words
    a short list of “little” words
    places

    Russian doesn’t have the “the” words, but it does have a lot of little words, including time words and conjunctions.

    Do we still keep a longer list of those HF words?

    I’m happy to look at the DPS list. Either the French or the Spanish has English equivalents.

  7. Maybe you can decide if we should just use the DPS list. Forget the little words in Russian. I just want to make available in different languages posters for:

    places
    little words if the language has them
    question words
    verbs
    other words

    I want the posters to be in simplest form possible to deliver the most information, esp. verbs, in as little space as possible. I would not even include the little words since they are normally acquired unconsciously in speech, but for writing and reading they help the kids along.

    So really the big decision is what form the Verb List/Wall list(s) will take. Anyone with thoughts on that please chime in. If we started using more uniform posters, we might have more efficient conversations here, as well.

    1. Ben, if you look back to the video you posted when Carol and Kristy visited your school during ACTFL, you will see two Spanish posters of “other” words, I adopted that immediately (it’s up front with structures and ? wds) and actually refer to it more often that my big one in the back of the room which has more of the linking words that FR 4 comes across in reading

  8. Here are the verbs from the list of first 200 words in Spanish:
    there is
    to be
    to have
    to do, make
    to be able to
    to say, tell
    to go
    to see
    to give
    to call
    to come
    to think
    to leave
    to return
    to take, drink
    true
    to meet, know
    to live
    to feel
    to try
    to look, watch
    to count, tell
    to begin
    to wait
    to look for
    to exist
    to enter
    to work
    to change (might have been the noun)
    to write
    to lose
    to produce
    to occur

  9. Might I suggest that word lists for other languages, i.e. French, German, Russian, etc., be not composed from the Spanish frequency list as differences in the way we express certain ideas may be translated differently (if we translate literally). I just did a search and there are research based frequency lists available for other languages. Personally, I wouldn’t want to use a list of Spanish words based on a French word list for my class. I have nothing against French (and in fact, I’m a bit envious because in the FL world Spanish is just so “Bourgeois”) but I want things to be as authentic as possible. If we do want to maintain commonality and have some standardization to begin with between the different languages we’re teaching, I suggest we start from a frequency list of English words (based on American English, as I assume that most of us here teach american students whose first language is American English).

    http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists

    French:
    http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:French_frequency_lists/1-2000

  10. I should have just been a good boy and implemented the DPS list. But it’s too many words for me. Michele is going to say in an upcoming comment here how she does 300 words over three years! And then there is the question of do we separate the verbs from the rest of the words question. And the question about the little words. It’s complex, this quest for the perfect posters in the smallest space game that we are playing here. We’ve got to hammer out what we want bc when that site goes live next month with all those posters up there, we better have what we want for next year.

    It took me ten years to come up with the Rules Chart, and we have all made countless attempts at coming up with posters that really work. This has never been discussed in the TPRS world, to my knowledge. I threw out many posters that were counterproductive and just cluttered the walls. I do think that we are very close to having a set of five or six posters/walls/strips/whatever that is really state of the art. So let’s keep the argument going. This might get messier before we figure it out. Let me ask for comments to the question, “Are the posters below what we all agree we want?” before we continue to throw pies at each other.

    Here is a list of the only posters I want in my room, and, again, this is ten years of work here so let’s do it right:

    A. LANGUAGE SPECIFIC POSTERS:

    Word/Verb Walls (what form do they take?)

    Question Words (in what form should these be? I got no room for those ones with the guy with the sunglasses on)

    Little Words (Diana would say we don’t need them. She’s always right so maybe chuck them?)

    Place posters (great because they can be personalized to your kids’ local hangouts but they take up a lot of room)

    “How do you spell that?” (only up there to remind me that I can always ask that question when I don’t know what the hell to do next)

    ENGLISH

    Rules 2010 (this is what took me ten years to create with 90 or 100 shitty rules thrown out over the years and those are the bad ass ones left)

    Rules 2012 (this is the product of our recent new thread on, as Annemarie says in the now famous (I think it has been adopted for use in Papua New Guinea schools) Orth Principle that we tie learning goals and assessments to habits of learning, which is the whole three modes thing, the metacognition piece, the self reflection (i.e. teaching them how to interact with others as human beings in a social setting in a world gone robotically mad).

    1. I think Jody has mentioned there’s no one answer to the word wall question. I took down my word wall at the end of last year when I had to move furniture around and lost the wall it was on. Some kids from the last couple of years say they miss the word wall. Others really like the current growing list of words that the beginners use. I have settled on this direction: 100 basic words the first year, and from then on in my mixed classes, I do 25 more a quarter, so that we are rotating and will go through 300 total HF words over the course of three years. In the fourth year, we’ll start back over with that first 25 of the second hundred, because kids can always fix up the cases and tenses. Diana told me a couple years ago that if kids have a basic 200 really down, in all tenses, they can truly communicate. As you know, we aren’t really sticking only to those; those are just the non-negotiable words.

  11. Here are my personal preferences (and I don’t mind getting pie thrown at me, I love pie, any other pastry will do, too):

    Definitely keep: 2012 rules (!!!!!!!), question words, verbs (strips, wall, whatever)
    Maybe, but not necessary: all the rest

  12. Dude. Those 2010 rules are kind of a short version of the 2012 and don’t take up much space but are referred to a lot (instant laser accountability during class for each infraction) so I say I want them (not throwing a pie on this, just sayin’).

    The weakest one is the little words poster. Honestly, it’s not needed. My melting grammar master just kicked me in the shin on that. Ouch.

    The place posters would depend on how much wall space is available to the individual teacher. After the first semester the kids know them all anyway. Maybe just put them up for half the year, get them acquired, and take ’em down.

    The big decisions are on the verb/word wall deal. Do we:

    1. separate verbs out on a separate poster?
    2. include the full 200 word DPS list in level 1? (I say no)
    3. alphabetize?
    4. what words should go on the word wall?
    5. big poster or strips of 12 words each?

  13. I think the verb/word wall is up to the individual teacher. I, personally, will never use a verb wall because those are the structures we are learning and I like to keep them in chunks–not in giant lists on the wall.

    When I introduce the structures, I write them in the clusters (that go with the story we’re working on) on chart paper large enough to be seen from the back of the room. I have fat magnetic clips that hold the list up during the class to which it corresponds. (I have six classes/three grade levels/so at least three lists at any one time). The list goes up every day until we are done with the entire cycle of work that goes with those structures. Then, it ends up on my back wall. I can always yank it back up if I need to.)

    My kids have a metal ring they keep in their binders with little mini-word cards of all of the structures for which they are responsible (Spanish on one side, translation and self-drawn definition pic on the other side–initials and class #, too). After introducing structures, gestures, pqa, and the oral story, they get the word card sheet and make cards for homework. During writing, I let them use the cards (on occasion). They know that after they receive the word cards, they are now responsible for knowing them on any vocab quiz now or in the future. If they lose them, they get to make them again. That has happened only a couple of times. Someone always finds them somewhere.

    We use the cards all of the time in a variety of ways that I won’t go into here.

    My word wall will always be “the connector words”–which come up over and over, every day of the week in our stories. It really, really works for my students, but another teacher may find a system that works better for them. In my opinion, that decision should be left to the teacher’s professional discretion. I would hesitate to standardize this for less-experienced teachers. These things may help support the students in a tprs/ci classroom, but that’s as far as I would go.

  14. Good call. We have to avoid standardizing anything. That would lead down the road to Textbook City and the fluidity of the method would be lost. All the same, I feel the need to figure this out for myself, to make it simple for me, really. I could do what you do with the word cards and all above about as much as I could fly to the moon.

    Very interesting on the verbs being acquired during class and not really needing a verb poster. Why was I going that way, with the verb strips? I have an honest and it’s not a good thing. I was thinking of the district writing tests in April, making sure at the beginning of each class that the kids got some extra exposure to those common verbs. It’s not necessary. It’s where my CI mind met the part of me that likes my kids to crush tests. Shit. Scratch the verb walls.

    Jody, I nominate you for Planetary Teacher of the Year, all areas. I’ll just stick some verbs in a Word Wall like I used to. Keep it simple. But the question of how many overall verbs should go into one Word Wall remains.

    I know we want to avoid standardization, but I bet if you made some videos of everything you do (easily done, right?) you would have a lot of happy elementary teachers out there.

    1. Someone just sent me a note that Nathan’s word lists are really great.

      http://mjtprs.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/updated-word-lists-part-i/

      (Click the category link “Word lists” for more discussion on the page.)

      I think the DPS ones are too. I have my own. Maybe what could be on your page would be links to a few places, and posters of lists that teachers could use, with a description that says that some people like a word wall of connector words (that’s what most of my word wall was, too), and others like having verb strips. We can always use the place posters for the day; a list can be up, but all the pictures don’t have to be there (I’m thinking of my no-wall-space room).

      One reason I didn’t find a way to put my word wall back up was not only wall space, but because some kids seemed to be just memorizing where the spot was on the wall so they could look when the word came up. They didn’t actually learn the word. But maybe that’s because they weren’t ready for it; now that I think about proficiency levels, I remember that complex sentences develop later, and the word wall was giving them a certain support out in the sea of Russian. Going to have to think about that. Since I have all these levels at once, maybe it’s good to have the support for the ones who need it.

      And…Jody, I used to use little card-vocabulary rings too! We’d play bingo in the last five minutes of class, or pull five words and use them in a story, and so on. I’d forgotten all about those, and might think about going back. I have adult students who swear by them!

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