For the Love of Français: Languages of the Americas

English, French and Spanish are frequently taught languages of North America. In Canada, English and French have equal status as official languages. Today’s blog is focused on resources for French language instruction.

We’ll cover Spanish resources at a future date. But if you just can’t wait, you’ll find them in the store.

“Prior to Boom Learning, students were merely just going through the motions of learning another language.”

-Najda Zada of Garden Full of Knowledge

Engaging Digital Natives

Like all instructors, Najda has her share of reluctant learners. Digital natives engage with the world visually. Najda says her students “love using Boom Cards because it gives them an opportunity to be able to use their handheld devices to practice their French language.”

In her classroom, she selects a French language Boom Cards deck and then has the whole class work through it, enunciating each French word and deciphering the response. At other times, she divides the class into two teams. Each team is given a question that they must answer within an allotted time. She finds these methods motivate her digital natives to speak French. “With Boom Learning, learning another language has been fun, engaging, and motivating to all types of second language learners.”

Surviving Teaching French

Boom Cards are not just for learners, they are also for novice teachers. At ISTE 2017 we spoke with a number of attendees from Canada. They were excited about using Boom Cards to assist teachers who were new to teaching French. With many authors adding sound features, teachers now how a variety of pronunciation resources.

Teaching French involves skills ranging from phonological awareness, les rimes, to sight words, to vocabulary building, to grammar. Materials available from our authors include sound, writing, and cross-curricular content. Here is just a sample!

Les élèves raffoleront de ces cartes à tâches digitales autocorrectives qui sont totalement compatibles avec tous les types d’appareils mobiles ou écrans interactifs. L’apprentissage des phonèmes, via les sons AUDIO inclus dans cet ensemble de jeux interactifs, augmentera l’engagement des apprenants assurément.

by Prof Numeric – available individually at Boom Learning or as a bundle at Teachers Pay Teachers

Rhyme is a key component of phonological awareness. This fun resource will help students practice rhymes and review vocabulary words. Cette ressource contient 15 cartes qui permettront aux élèves de développer leur conscience phonologique.

by Michelle Dupuis Education French–Français

There’s no such thing as too much sight word practice. With these decks, kids will be able to listen to correct pronunciation and work on recognizing the written words. Kids won’t even notice how much work they’re doing while listening to a native speaker other than you. Try the free sample.

by For French Immersion – available individually on Boom Learning or as a bundle at Teachers Pay Teachers

These 25 cards will help students identify common reflexive verbs and practice present tense conjugations. There are ten multiple choice cards for verb identification, ten fill in the blank cards for conjugation and five fill in the blank cards for negative constructions.

by Mme R’s French Resources

Second language learners need lots of opportunities to practice new vocabulary in fun and engaging ways. This bundle of Boom Cards decks allows students the opportunity to read, listen to, identify and write school themed vocabulary.

by La classe de Madame Angel

Investing in cross-curricular resources is always a good idea when you are building a well-rounded program. Here’s one that combines science and language.

by Peg Swift French Immersion

Build vocabulary knowledge for students. This deck incorporates both listening and writing. It can be used both for assessment for learning (as a pre-assessment) or assessment as learning (used to determine if students are understanding the material).

by Toujour Francais

Find the Boom Cards collection for you

More French teaching resources available at Teachers Pay Teachers

ELA Test Prep (or Teaching) for Third, Fourth, and Fifth Grade Standards

Whether you are squeezing in last-minute test prep or thinking ahead to fall, we have a variety of materials to help third, fourth, and fifth graders meet standards. You can use these materials to evaluate progress, practice and teach, or pre-test.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Mastering the conventions of standard English can be a trial for many children. We have a variety of materials for you to teach, assess, practice, or remediate these crucial skills. The Revising and Editing Bundle by Rosie’s Resources is a handy set for last minute test prep.

If your students need more, check out these resources:

In language arts, students also need to master vocabulary acquisition and use (CC.ELA.L.4, CC.ELA.L.5 and CC.ELA.L.6). This can range from the skills of sequencing, to being able to use context clues to determine word meaning. Rachel Lynette has three decks of increasing difficulty to help students master context clues. Other skills you can practice using cards from our vocabulary collection include Greek and Latin roots, parts of speech, and commonly confused words.

READING

To master the art of reading with comprehension, students must be able to determine main ideas, key details, and draw inferences. We have materials for students to practice drawing conclusions, making generalizations, making predictions, and making inferences from pictures.

Barb Evans creates a variety of materials that combine critical thinking and problem solving with vocabulary building.

You can find more materials here:

WRITING

Writing skills include the ability to write dialogue, sequence, and understand and craft analogies. You can find writing materials for grades third, fourth and fifth here.

Happy Teaching!

ELA Test Prep for Middle School

Middle school brings English Language Arts, Mathematics and Science testing. Today’s focus is on materials in the Boom Learning catalog that can help your students prepare for ELA testing in middle school. These materials are suitable for students in fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades.

Boom Cards resources let you see at a glance how each student is progressing towards mastery and where they are making mistakes. With their cheerful bright colors and game features, Boom Cards are a welcome break from worksheets. Best of all they make sure screen time is moving students closer to standard. Give your classroom a selection of materials to practice for testing season and let students pick and choose which to do when.

Learning with Sunflower Smiles has five decks for students who need practice with Active and Passive Voice. There are two decks for mixed voices, and three additional decks for focused practice each on past, present and future tense. Assigned mixed voices for the whole class. Add focused practice if some students need more.

Students who need to practice conventions can work with possessive apostrophes, commas, and pronoun case with decks from It’s a Teacher Thing, Hand in Hand, Learning with Sunflower Smiles, Deb Hansen, Rachel Lynette, and HappyEdugator. There are also a variety of materials to practice vocabulary, including Greek and Latin roots from Rosie’s Resources.

For reading skills, we have decks ranging from Advanced Point of View by Rachel Lynette, to Author’s Purpose by Deb Hanson, to Analogies Practice by HappyEdugator and many more.

Feel free to repost and share with your teacher friends and students’ parents.

Engage Students with Visual Resources for World Language Mastery

“Prior to Boom Learning, students were merely just going through the motions of learning another language.”

-Najda Zada of Garden Full of Knowledge

Like all instructors, Najda has her share of reluctant learners. I recall struggling to learn world languages, but then I’m a primarily visual learner. My husband, whose strength is auditory learning, can pick up languages in a flash.

Digital natives engage with the world visually. Najda says her students “love using Boom Cards because it gives them an opportunity to be able to use their handheld devices to practice their French language.”

In her classroom, she selects a set of French language Boom Cards and then has the whole class enunciate each French word orally. As a group, they work together to decipher the response. Other times, she divides the class into two teams. Each team is given a question that they must answer within an allotted time.

She finds these methods motivate her digital natives to speak French. “With Boom Learning, learning another language has been fun, engaging, and motivating to all types of second language learners. Boom Cards have just given us a new twist to learning French!” With Boom Cards, the learning experience is enhanced with visual and kinetic modalities.

You can also find materials for French as a second language from Mme R’s French Resources. For a different shade of romance, try Italian resources from Hand in Hand Learning.

Engaging Younger Students

It can be challenging to find world language materials targeted for the elementary grades. Most materials are for middle school to adults. With Boom Learning, you can find ready-to-use decks made by teachers.

If you need something special, it only takes an hour or two to make a DIY deck you can use for years (no reprinting, no hand grading). If your deck turns out to be just what students need, you can add a little polish and put it in the store, for free or for a fee. Everyone gains: students and teachers. Worksheets and task cards both can be translated into Boom Cards, along with books. As Lucy from For French Immersion says “The fact that Boom decks work on computers, tablets, and interactive whiteboards is benefit you don’t get from regular apps.”

Lucy’s best selling French Verbs Growing Bundle is a great value, as you get all new decks she adds. For French Immersion designs materials for younger students in immersion classrooms (they also work for second language instruction). If you want to enjoy the season with French, we recommend this deck. You can also find French immersion resources from La classe de Madame Angel.

We are also lucky to have linguaphile and designer Miss Mindy creating for Boomers in some of her many languages. She has spent the last 7 years teaching Spanish at a small independent K-6 school in Vermont and is now homeschooling her daughters. Mindy started studying Spanish when she was 13 and was enthralled. She minored in German and also studied French and Latin. Expect a variety of language resources Miss Mindy’s store. Here is a sample of her seasonal resources:

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After three German au pairs and high school Spanish we joke that we speak Danglish in our house. In Mindy’s house they must speech Flandanglish. What do you speak in your house?

Do you need more elementary resources? Rebecca Reid of Line upon Line Learning has elementary Spanish resources.

Speaking Scientifically with Boom Cards

“While all my friends were asking for Backstreet Boys paraphernalia or bicycles, I remember getting a microscope for Christmas when I was 9 or 10 and it was like I’d died and gone to heaven.” – Kristin Lee

Today I want to introduce Kristin Lee. She is my soul buddy. My favorite magazines as a teen were Scientific American and Discovery. Neither of us ended up as scientists, but we independently found our way to incorporate science in our careers. Kristin loves “seeing those middle schoolers fall in love with science!”

Puzzles, patterns, problems. Science has it all for Kristin. “I want students to feel my passion for science in my work and maybe, for some of them, light the same fire I have. I hope for a metaphorical fire and not one set by a Bunsen burner in the middle of my science lab.”

Kristin recently started making her Boom Cards.

“Working with Boom has allowed me to take less concrete concepts, like the periodic table or vocabulary, and still make them fun and interactive. Teachers get real time data on students that can help them assess the needs of their class, without spending hours collecting and organizing it themselves.”

Kristin isn’t the only science loving author on Boom Learning. Rebecca Reid has gone beyond the task card to integrate reading comprehension with science learning about coral reefs (best for students grade levels 3-6).

For younger kids, you can also find these materials:

Living and Non-living Things by Grade School Snapshots (grades K-1)
Plant Parts and Plant Needs by Having a Fields Day (grades 2-3)
Water Cycle by Teacher Features (grades 2-4)
The Planets of Our Solar System by Having a Fields Day (grades 2-4)
Weather Quiz by Having a Field Day (grades 2-4)
Plant and Animal Adaptations by Fishyrobb (grades 3-5)

Featured

Mathematics without Restrictions

I teach mathematics to students who have learning difficulties such as Autism and Dyslexia. For them, writing and answering worksheet questions can be difficult. Boom Learning is a great tool for them to have a go at showing their mathematical abilities without being restricted by the difficulties of using a pen.
Rebekah Bullen, LittleStreams

We frequently remind our older children that they once struggled during the early days of reading. Now, reading is a breeze and they have amazing worlds to explore.

Likewise there is an amazing world that will be theirs in mathematics. We share with our children, as much as they can understand, the worlds of statistics and combinatorics, proofs and probability, geometry and logic. And then we remind them that to get there they must put in the work of learning their math ABCs (or 123s).

Sound Fundamentals

Rebekah Bullen is a private tutor who teaches mathematics to students with learning differences. Her LittleStreams store is full of elementary through middle school resources for teaching sound fundamentals. We like how she has made innovative use of the text box element to make her products touch focused for her students.

Find the factors for a given number task cards. — Students use touch or click to identify all the factors of a number.

Addition and Multiplication Facts

Love them or hate them, math facts are the foundation for success in higher mathematics courses. Mastery of facts can be tedious, progress slow, and repetition is essential. Our experience with digital natives is that variety matters. Thank goodness for the variety available on Boom Learning.

Boom Learning

Interactive Teaching Resources

Teachers have always shared resources, now more than ever. Sharing provides teachers with unprecedented access to lessons they can download and print for classroom use. Schools that have invested are asking teachers to print less and use devices more. Boom Learning bridges the gap between school and teacher needs.

“Boom allows teachers to access a growing and varied collection of teacher-created content for those devices, or to create their own” says Boom advisor and former teacher Rachel Lynette. Like familiar printables markets, Teachers can sell what they make, augmenting their pay.

Boom Learning’s tools allow teachers to create and deploy classroom-ready resource in less than an hour. For students with unique needs, “It provides a tool to make customized decks,” says Della Larsen.

“Boom Learning is really a win-win for everyone. Teachers save time, paper, ink, and other resources. Students interact with educational content in a meaningful and motivating way,” says Lynette.

Boom Learning has exceeded Lynette’s expectations: “Boom allows teachers to unleash their design talent. I love how teachers are finding new ways to use the tools, and how the platform is evolving with their suggestions.”

Boom Learning makes a teacher’s job easier. According to Secondary Science Teacher-Author Kristin Lee, “Boom Learning provides a level of reporting, differentiating, and self-grading that has the potential to save a teacher hours of data organizing.”

About Boom Learning

Founded in 2012, Boom Learning develops educational apps and games, including Mathtopia+, which regularly ranks among the top 50 downloaded game in the United States for kids ages 9-11, one of less than 50 apps to receive a 5-star rating on Smart Apps for Kids, and winner of the Children’s Technology Review’s Editor’s Choice Award for 2013. Boom Learning was formerly known as Omega Labs Inc. Boom Learning is launching its latest contribution to the education market this fall with its Boom Cards apps and Boom Learning platform and marketplace, which give teachers the tools they need to share interactive teacher resources in schools with 1:1 devices.

The Boom Learning product was born from the serendipitous meeting of three people on a mission. Senator Eric Oemig, a master coder with a passion for education technology, wanted to build a mobile platform that would become an integral part of the classroom. Mary Heuett Oemig, an attorney and educator, wanted to build something that would meet each student where he or she was. Rachel Lynette, founder of Minds in Bloom and author of more than 120 non-fiction children’s books, wanted to turn the task cards she created for Teachers Pay Teachers® into apps.

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