It has come to my attention that I may have failed to mention that the Lit Pit is a bilingual place. Yep, that's right, not only do we read, write and think in English around here, we do it in French too. 

The Lit Pit seems to work equally well in both languages (see the post about our success so far). The only problem is one that is common to French Immersion teachers from sea to shining sea in this beautiful land of ours...

Major.Lack.Of.Resources. 

And by major, I mean French Immersion teachers spend a disproportionate amount of time creating their own resources in order to meet the needs of the students in their class. There are some fabulous people out there creating and sharing (shout out to Mme. Belle Feuille & La Classe de Karine, whose materials I have used over and over again) but not nearly as many as there are in English. While we can easily hop on TpT and find English resources galore for any given topic, they are few and far between in French.

Don't get me wrong, there are publishers who sell resources in French. But even then, the pool is small. And expensive. And often not exactly what you were hoping for. So your choices become: use something that doesn't quite work and try to make it fit as best you can or create something. 

So many French Immersion teachers spend a lot of time and creative energy building worksheets and activities to suit the needs of their classes. Many other French Immersion teachers could benefit from using these resources in the classroom. Somehow we need to start bringing these two together!

Luckily, a colleague of mine is working on it...it's not my place to share her idea here (yet) but, if you are a French Immersion teacher, know that a resource sharing option is in the works. More on that when it happens, I promise.

For now, my small contribution to the world of French Immersion resource sharing is this: a worksheet for c dur et c doux. Some of our little guys have been struggling to differentiate between when they should read c as /k/ and when it should be /s/, so I created a few activities for them to do. They loved using the bingo dabbers on this one! Hope you enjoy it too...more to come as I build them!

Recently, Kristi and I presented to our School Planning Council about the Lit Pit (for those of you wondering what a school planning council is, the short version is that it's a group of higher ups and parents who help guide the direction of the school and review said direction later in the year. 'nuff said.). When our principal asked us to do it, we were more than happy to say yes because we really, really wanted to show how fabulous our little project really is. I mean, this is our baby. We love it! Our teachers love it. Our students love it. And it has made such a difference to our students and their literacy success this year. We needed to show that it wasn't just a pretty space; we needed to show that there was some actual meat on these bones.

So we ran some numbers. Now, we had a pretty good sense of how each of our classes was doing, given that we were reading with each of these little gaffers twice a week. But put it all in to a lovely spreadsheet and oh man, we were blown away! Check it out (for those uninitiated in our district's lingo, any colour of blue is not so hot, green is good. I'll leave you to see if you can figure out the acronyms...):

Sweet, non? So incredibly validating to see something you've created be so successful. Kind of makes me want to puff up my chest and swagger...