Petit livret de Noël à illustrer #aimlang

Saturday, December 15, 2018

With only one week left of school, I wanted to do an activity with my students that they could take home for the holidays. I have been meaning to create a mini book that they can practice reading with their family and I finally finished one. It's certainly not my best writing. I had to keep it simple since I wanted to use words that my level 1 AIM students would be able to read, in particular my grade 1 students. Words that will be fairly new to them are pôle Nord, père Noël, renne Rudolph, et carotte but they are pretty straightforward in terms of meaning. We will just need to work on pronunciation. Ideally, they will work on this all week as I want them to take their time with the illustrations. I've added some images to help out and even erased parts of Santa's and Rudolph's faces so we can review the French words for nose, mouth, happy and sad, for example. Here is my fully illustrated sample:

Before we even begin folding it into a mini book, I plan on coaching the whole class through the illustrations one page at a time, practising additional vocabulary that is not in the text by directing them as follows: "On doit finir le dessin du père Noël. Tout le monde, dessine la tuque sur sa tête, le manteau et la mitaine." And then I will invite them to provide their input: "Qu'est-ce que le père Noël dit?" for example.

For the next two pages, I can already predict many of my younger students will complain that they cannot draw the same way that I did so I will model a much simpler version of Santa. What I will stress, though, is the importance of drawing the line of horizon (which I will simply call la ligne) on most of the illustrations since it helps to separate le ciel en haut and la terre en bas.

Once we have finished illustrating the pages using pencil, then they will be able to colour.

And then we learn how to fold and cut along the dotted line in the centre. This is where it gets tricky so I will likely come around and cut for the grade 1 students once they are done folding.

If you'd like to try this petit livret, click on the thumbnail below to download a copy.

UPDATE: I've created a slightly modified version in the hopes that each page will be better centred and not cutoff when folded, given that the proportions might be a bit off depending on how your printer adjusts for borderless printing. It also more clearly shows the dotted line where you are required to cut in the centre. Here is the modified version of Le père Noël mini book:

Le père Noël petit livre à illustrer #aimlang

Should you require a tutorial on how to fold the mini book, let me know in the comments below and I will post one on the blog.

Update: Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to fold the mini book.