Conjugation notebooks

[Roadrunner]

I am not sure if this is a right place to post this, but I am wondering for those of you who keep such notebooks, can you show me the sample of explain how you organize?

It’s apparent now that we need a system of writing out irregular verbs and conjugating them in gazillion different tenses for French. I ordered a Bescherelle verb book. Do I just pick a verb a week and copy over things into notebook and drill? 

[Loesje22000]

As we don’t notebook we just drill.

precisely: DH drills 

[Roadrunner]

13 hours ago, loesje22000 said:

As we don’t notebook we just drill.

precisely: DH drills 

Just orally? 

We had been doing that and I am now noticing they don’t double consonants....

I am sitting and staring at a beautiful Bescherelle right now. I am thinking we pick a verb and write it one day in all tenses we know and then drill and then test on Friday. 

[Loesje22000]

19 hours ago, Roadrunner said:

Just orally? 

We had been doing that and I am now noticing they don’t double consonants....

I am sitting and staring at a beautiful Bescherelle right now. I am thinking we pick a verb and write it one day in all tenses we know and then drill and then test on Friday. 

 

Yes, just orally.

but I don’t guarantee it has been working.

[Roadrunner]

2 hours ago, loesje22000 said:

 

Yes, just orally.

but I don’t guarantee it has been working.

Do you know if practice workbooks exist for just conjugation? Sort of like addition/substraction extra practice books. 

Mostly what I found (Verb reviews on Amazon) are too intense and written for a more adult audience. I would love something on a middle school level for French kids that just has my kids mindlessly conjugating year after year after year. 

 

Also any tenses we don’t need to learn? We have so far present, future simple, conditional present, future anterieur, pase compose, imparfait, plus que farfait, and subjunctive (present). They can recognize pase simple in literature. I want to be done. Can I be done or do I need to do other tenses as well? I see past conditional, other forms of subjective. I want to cry. 

[Loesje22000]

Breaking the barrier as ibook?

we are crying too as dd failed her Exams

but she thinks also you are doing a great job and doesn’t any more tenses...

[klmama]

Roadrunner, would this site help? https://conjuguemos.com/activities/french/verb/1   You can practice all verb tenses in French, and you can also practice specific tenses and moods.  ETA:  Click "home" for a list of other activities in French.  For anyone else interested, there are other languages besides French.  

[Monica_in_Switzerland]

I drill them to death.  Every French lesson, we start by getting a sheet of scratch paper and folding it into fourths.  Then, it's one verb per section, conjugated in 4 tenses.  

I almost always do etre and/or avoir, plus another irregular that they have learned (aller, dire, faire... ), plus a couple of regular verbs depending on current concepts and revisions we need to practice.  Currently we are doing weird group 1 verbs ( ----ger, ----yer, ----cer), so I just pick a couple of those.  Last week, we were doing the four simple tenses: present, imparfait, future, passé simple.  This week, we're doing the four compound: passé composé, plus-que-parfait, passé anterior, future anterior.  Next week, we will do the group 2 verbs in all 8 tenses (we'll probably spend a month on this) as well as working in a few new irregulars.  

I would say we spend 5-10 minutes on these drills daily.  Every two weeks or so, we learn a new concept (new irregular verb, new tense, new rule for agreement, etc.).  I make a note of the new concept and work it into the rotation.  

Af first, my kids did them organized by tense, like this:

je mange  nous mangeons

tu manges   vous mangez

il mange   ils mangent

This was good for learning a new tense and working on ones that were still weak.  Now we're working on the skill of switching from tense to tense quickly and easily, so they write out the drill like this:

je mange, mangeais, mangerai, mangeai

tu manges, mangeais, mangeras, mangeas

il mange, mangeait, mangera, mangea

etc.

...

And for compound tenses:

j'ai mangé, avais mangé, eus mangé, aurai mangé

tu as mangé, avais mangé, eus mangé, auras mangé

etc.

 

Sometimes we correct going across the line, sometimes we correct going down (so grouping by tense rather than pronoun)

 

I hope that's helpful.  My kids probably will be in counseling for life because of this... but it's getting the job done!  Also note, my kids are native French speakers, so this is all about grammar for them, not about language acquisition... in case that makes a difference.  

[Monica_in_Switzerland]

On 4/26/2018 at 1:50 AM, Roadrunner said:

Do you know if practice workbooks exist for just conjugation? Sort of like addition/substraction extra practice books. 

Mostly what I found (Verb reviews on Amazon) are too intense and written for a more adult audience. I would love something on a middle school level for French kids that just has my kids mindlessly conjugating year after year after year. 

 

Also any tenses we don’t need to learn? We have so far present, future simple, conditional present, future anterieur, pase compose, imparfait, plus que farfait, and subjunctive (present). They can recognize pase simple in literature. I want to be done. Can I be done or do I need to do other tenses as well? I see past conditional, other forms of subjective. I want to cry. 

 

That is probably enough tenses.  Someday they might want conditional passé... but... eh.  I've never known anything other than present subjonctif and I'm very fluent, lol.  Imperative tense too, but that's a super easy one.  

We've gone through many workbooks, but I think my drill system describes above is the only thing that approaches the volume necessary for total ease.  I now am thinking of it like learning the times tables.  Just drill for 5-10 minutes and as your kid gets faster, you can add more to that 5-10 minutes.  Four verbs is a good number for us, each in four tenses, but we did not start out that way.  For compound tenses, I have also dropped to 2-3 verbs just to keep it to that 5-10 minute drill time (that tends to include correction which takes 2-3 minutes.  They correct their papers while I write out on whiteboard.)  It really feels like a juggling act to make sure we are seeing all those tenses for all those verbs regularly.  I keep a list of irregulars we know/are learning, regular special cases, tenses, etc on the front of my French folder so I can just scan and pick a few each day.  

 

On 5/1/2018 at 11:44 AM, loesje22000 said:

Breaking the barrier as ibook?

we are crying too as dd failed her Exams

but she thinks also you are doing a great job and doesn’t any more tenses...

 

So sorry to hear that!  Poor kiddo!  

[Roadrunner]

On 5/1/2018 at 2:44 AM, loesje22000 said:

Breaking the barrier as ibook?

we are crying too as dd failed her Exams

but she thinks also you are doing a great job and doesn’t any more tenses...

I am so sorry. I hope she gets it on a second try, but this must be hard. Hugs to her.

[SoCaliLover]

On 5/2/2018 at 3:02 PM, klmama said:

Roadrunner, would this site help? https://conjuguemos.com/activities/french/verb/1   You can practice all verb tenses in French, and you can also practice specific tenses and moods.  ETA:  Click "home" for a list of other activities in French.  For anyone else interested, there are other languages besides French.  

 Great resource!  Thanks

[Mabelen]

I am just getting started with this with my 14 yo. I need to get her prepared to take a high school  AP Spanish class in one or two years. She is a heritage speaker, but we have not done grammar systematically yet. For verb conjugations, I am envisioning a system that uses spaced repetition and interleaving. I think something like Anki flash cards would work, I just need to figure out how to use it and set it all up. It might be more work than it's worth. Any experience in this area? 

Monica in Switzerland, I really like what you are doing conjugating different tenses rapidly by person. I may incorporate that into my daughter's plan.

[Monica_in_Switzerland]

15 hours ago, Mabelen said:

I am just getting started with this with my 14 yo. I need to get her prepared to take a high school  AP Spanish class in one or two years. She is a heritage speaker, but we have not done grammar systematically yet. For verb conjugations, I am envisioning a system that uses spaced repetition and interleaving. I think something like Anki flash cards would work, I just need to figure out how to use it and set it all up. It might be more work than it's worth. Any experience in this area? 

Monica in Switzerland, I really like what you are doing conjugating different tenses rapidly by person. I may incorporate that into my daughter's plan.

 

My experience with Anki is that the set-up time is just enormous, and falling behind in reviews can be overwhelming.  But I really wanted to love it.  I read the book Fluent Forever and am still subscribed to the author's blog, which has great language learning materials and ideas.  He approaches languages as something to be "hacked" and I'm sure that following his methods would bring excellent results.  But... the set up and maintenance of the systems is not something I was willing to do after trying for a while.  

I do attempt to keep spaced repetition as a model when doing our verb drills.  New concepts are done daily, and older concepts less often.  Because of how we fold the paper into four, we generally do two current concepts and 1-2 irregular verbs from an ever-expanding list.   

[JumpyTheFrog]

On 5/9/2018 at 5:12 PM, Mabelen said:

I am just getting started with this with my 14 yo. I need to get her prepared to take a high school  AP Spanish class in one or two years. She is a heritage speaker, but we have not done grammar systematically yet. For verb conjugations, I am envisioning a system that uses spaced repetition and interleaving.

 

Maybe Maestro Spanish would work. It uses spaced repetition for Spanish verbs. You can select which tenses you want to work on.

[Mabelen]

3 hours ago, JumpyTheFrog said:

 

Maybe Maestro Spanish would work. It uses spaced repetition for Spanish verbs. You can select which tenses you want to work on.

This might work. I will check it out. Thank you so much!

[pmeilaen]

On 7/21/2018 at 3:14 AM, Mabelen said:

This might work. I will check it out. Thank you so much!

 

Tex's French Grammar offers a similar program for French.