French club: learning to express an opinion

The latest session of the club ran very smoothly since we were finally able to find a permanent room that we could use every Wednesday lunchtime: the German teacher has kindly given us her classroom which sorts out the issue of having a proper venue to run the club. Once our student had settled into the new atmosphere, we began with asking them to show us the sheet on the imperfect tense which I had prepared about a week ago and had asked them to complete at home; after marking the exercises, it was evident that our student has grasped the formation of that tense since they made no grammatical errors apart from a few slips which, however, are insignificant since they quickly corrected themselves when I pointed the mistakes out to them:

The exercises

For the lesson itself, we chose to step away from grammar for a while as it is quite a difficult aspect of any language and it is tiring both to teach and to apprehend, although we will be giving our student a sheet similar to the one above but on the simple future tense to test their knowledge of it; this time we focused on the many ways of expressing opinions. I remember that my previous teacher at IGCSE had always stressed the importance of a wide range of vocabulary and the ability to say something of one meaning in many different ways, which is exactly why we had given our student a short yet useful list of phrases used in speaking and writing to portray one's thoughts. Some of the expressions that we had explained to our student were indeed above the require level for IGCSE, however we agreed that they would have a great advantage over the other people if they could use structures which hadn't been taught in class. We asked our pupil to learn this information for next time so that we could yet again test them to ensure their understanding of the material. Finally, I have given our student a link to a very useful website (languagesonline.org.uk) which they could use in their own free time to check any rules or just simply practice using any tenses.

List of opinions

Next week we will be having the final session before mid-term break, so we might give our student a little task to complete (for example, writing an essay) so that we could help them implement the skills that they've learnt in practice, and also to just have a general overview of their level in French. It had indeed been our mistake to not give them a sort of test earlier in order to determine their progress in French sot that we could come up with relevant aspects to cover, instead of asking them every lesson about what they may wish to have explained to them. We must also learn to prepare for each lesson more thoroughly so that we don't end up wasting time and giving our student tasks to complete long after we have discussed the given topic, as for example with the simple future tense: we should have prepared an exercise sheet for this week's lesson, however we failed to do so which led to us having to postpone it, which ends up shifting the whole process as next time we will be talking about opinions and vocabulary instead of tenses.