Today was the first time in a long time I tried classic tprs 3 sentences with 3 structures and circled everything methodically.
Well, close.
The 3 lines were a La maison il faut nettoyer la litiere du chat
Pour la menage, on doit balayer et laver le sol
Apres ca, il faut nettoyer la cuisine
As it unfolded, I reached only half way through the second one. By that I mean that I had written out the circling for each on one doodle pad (17×21 sheet) each and got only half way through the second page.
She’d asked for a new story but what I gave her was household chores. It got interesting and funny b/c her mother does most of the work and that became obvious and made her slightly (only slightly) self-conscious.
I had the structures il faut, menage, and one other to choose. I chose laver as the ‘story’ unfolded. She already knew laver cold.
But I also introduced ranger, la crotte, litiere, balayer, le sol, and le lave-pont (put in order, poop, litter, sweep, the floor, the mop). I got to explain that in lave-pont, and she remembered bridge, the pont did not mean the bridge across a river but the bridge or deck of a ship, thus ‘swab the deck.’
However, we’d used litiere, balayer, lave-pont once or twice recently. But I still am unsure how to do a free-wheeling lesson – and this one was not very free-wheeling – and stay with the structures.
Vocabulary remains an issue b/c when I asked if she cleans the fish’s litter, she demonstrated scooping and I don’t know anything for that.
I asked litiere de quoi, the litter of what, and she got ‘what’even though she hears ‘qu’est-ce que’ a lot more. She at first didn’t get ‘a qui’ but then settled on qui and specified it was the a that she didn’t grasp, so the phrase a qui, not qui itself as ‘who’. The a + pronoun is not a frequent possessive construction for us so far. I’m curious whether how she accesses something like ‘qui’ – is it as Eng ‘who’ or as simply a realization as to its meaning.
Before we started I was demonstrating le voila and la voila and used a Kleenex box, using the word boite, which she knows mainly as nightclub and box less so. So when we got to litter box she had no problem. Nor did she have a problem with en dehors for outside.
I slipped in a subjunctive with ‘ramassiez’ in ‘il faut que vous ramassiez’ la crotte – the poop. She got defensive, exclaiming that her dogs poop more than hers.
The ramassiez and nettoyez vs nettoie are instances of not sheltering grammar, a tprs hallmark.
An example of the difficulty I have in staying with a limited vocabulary is when I used apres l’ecole or le matin (after school or morning) for cleaning up after the animals, I went to l’apres-midi, afternoon, b/c we’d had it before but it is not in her repertoire. I also reintroduced devoir = have to b/c it fits with il faut, it is necessary.
Getting defensive again, she said she does her own floor, so that introduced ‘propre’. Maybe soon I can work it in as a structure.
At one point she looked like she was nodding off and I asked ‘vous dormez?’ and she said no, she was visualizing the washing machine. Interesting for my question above with ‘qui’, how does she access.