Topic:  Les Voyages

Unit Rationale

Study of a foreign language lends itself to discussion about visiting foreign countries.  Traveling is something that many students do, whether to visit relatives, other areas of the United States, or for some, other countries.  Having vocabulary and grammatical knowledge to communicate about travel is important, as well as understanding the geographical locations of possible vacation locations.  It is also a potentially important life skill to know how to navigate international travel situations, especially as our society becomes increasingly global.

Essential Questions:

• How do you decide where to go on vacation?
• What elements are important to you in a vacation?

Students will be able to...

• Talk about past vacations
• Describe an ideal vacation
• Create an itinerary
• Navigate a French train travel website

Students will know...

• travel vocabulary:  un passeport, faire les bagages, faire les réservations, un chèque de voyage, un billet, un vol, un train, une voiture, un agent de voyages, le douanier, les noms des pays, rendre visite à, visiter, faire un séjour à l’étranger, faire un voyage organisé, un itinéraire, un hôtel, les vêtements, etc.
• prepositions of place :  à, de, en
• temporal adverbs :  d’abord, puis, ensuite, enfin
• conditional

Students will already need to know...

• how to conjugate regular and irregular verbs in present, past, imperfect, and future tenses
• express preference and liking or disliking
• quantitative comparison:  moins and cher

ACTFL Standards

• Communication
  • Standard 1.2: Students understand and interpret written and spoken language on a variety of topics.
  • Standard 1.3: Students present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on a variety of topics.
• Cultures
  • Standard 2.1: Students demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between the practices and perspectives of the culture studied.
• Connections
  • Standard 3.1: Students reinforce and further their knowledge of other disciplines through the foreign language.
• Comparisons
  • Standard 4.2: Students demonstrate understanding of the concept of culture through comparisons of the cultures studied and their own.
• Communities
  • Standard 5.2: Students show evidence of becoming life-long learners by using the language for personal enjoyment and enrichment.

Subtopics/Objectives

• Going on trips
  • Describe past trips
  • Make a list of things to pack for a vacation
  • Identify preferences of vacation spots in France
  • Make an itinerary for an imaginary 2-week trip to France
• Lodging
  • Obtain information about room availabililty
  • Express lodging preferences
• Traveling in France
  • Compare and contrast common forms of transportation in the US and France
  • Navigate a French website to “buy” a train ticket
• Amusements on vacation
  • Identify preferred sights and activities to be done on vacation
  • Match culturally specific sights with their locations

Activities

• Examine SNCF Toussaint advertisement.
• Present a photograph from a past vacation, use it as a starting point to describe the vacation.
• Make a list of things to pack for a 2-week trip to France
• Skit:  Talk to a person at the front desk of a hotel and get information about room availability according to your preferences.
• Reading/discussion:  Students will read an article that describes travel in France.  In small groups, students will discuss how they travel in the United States:  in their town, their state, when going out of state, when going abroad.  As a class, create a Venn diagram comparing travel habits in the US and France.
• Classroom map activity:  Students choose a countries and a category—museum, natural sight, or monument/building—and then bring in a small photo of the sight, to be placed on a large map of Europe after presenting the sight to the rest of the class.  Then, use the map to give examples of prepositions of place.
• Oral exercise:  Teacher points to a country on the map and a student says “I come from X.”  Another student says “I’m going to X.”  Another says “I am in X.” Repeat with cities and states.
• If...then:  Using sights from classroom map activity, students will use the conditional to explain that if they were in a certain country, they would do a certain thing (ex:  Si j’étais en Italie, j’irais voir le Colisée).

Assessments

Formative

• Daily observation of students’ progress during above activities
• Total physical response activities:  Ask students to do something (i.e. stand up, raise a finger, touch an ear) to indicate that they have done—or would like to do—something (i.e. traveled out of the state, out of the country, to France, etc.)
• Final project progress

Summative

• Quiz:  prepositions of place, vocabulary, conditional
• Final project:  Students will plan a 2-week trip to France, working within a budget to make travel and lodging arrangements, as well as an itinerary of events.  Final summative assessment will be given on presentation to class.  Grading based on a rubric.