Cajun French - une affaire du coeur!

Right now, I'm speechless...

I just watched this BEAUTIFUL video that absolutely touched my heart! I know, I know... I am a total language and culture nerd. I believe that I'm in good company amongst those of us who teach languages. (No offence if you don't consider yourself in the same boat!) Check it out using the link above, or here it is embedded from Vimeo. It's Louisiana’s bid for the CMA 2014 from Makemade on Vimeo.

I will need to save this for now, because I absolutely have to use this in my French class, and I'll post the blog when I've created some questions to go along with it, to make it easier for other teachers to leverage this 10-minute video, and do something engaging with it themselves! ...AND I'm back! :-) Here's what I came up with... I had 7th grade curriculum in mind, likely immersion level. I'm assuming you've already talked about the Grand Dérangement. This set of questions has a bit of Social Studies, and a bit of French (with a special emphasis on cultural appreciation) and I've left it as a Word document so that you can easily edit it to suit your class' particular needs.

The blogger who shared this video is teaching her (or his? Not sure!) child Cajun French at home. You can check out some other resources by the same person here on Quizlet. If you'd like to share more about Creole French with your students, here's an interesting comparison on YouTube.

This would be great to use in a French Immersion class learning about natural disasters in Geography, or even with a grade 7 Core French class, just to make those cross-curricular, real life connections. The whole video is well subtitled in English, so the students will get the information despite the language of delivery, and you could have them pick out certain words... perhaps asking them to identify synonyms used. (i.e. The teacher provides the alternatives; they just listen to discern the vocabulary they should be familiar with already!) or consider adapting some of the questions I provided to a multiple choice or fill in the blank format to simplify them.

Since the video was created as a proposal to host the Annual Acadian Conference, you could also use this when discussing communicating for a specific purpose, or persuasive writing.

I won't tell you how long ago I started to write this blog post, or how many other half-finished posts I have! Ha! Suffice it to say, although it's Sunday, I've decided to link up with 2 Peas & a Dog's Wild Wednesday which featured Canadian Social Studies resources in either English or French this week.