The TaskMagic Blog

One of the many improvements in TaskMagic3 (compared with previous versions) is the fact that you can make exercises based on text on separate lines, such as poems, letters, songs, paragraphs etc., rather than just a continuous chunk of text.

The resources on this page are based on the poem Instantes, widely attributed to Jorge Luis Borges, but apparently not by him. The same approach can be used for any poem, short story, nursery rhyme, song etc. You can even add a sound file to the interactive exercises.

The resources below were created using the Mix and Gap component of TaskMagic3. Below you will find screenshots of TaskMagic3 interactive exercises interpsersed with example worksheets, which you can view, download, print etc.

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A TaskMagic3 Picture Match file (requires TaskMagic3 to open it) based on parts of the body vocab in French and pictures. The file (link below) provides access to all of the games and activities you can see in the screen shot (above):

A selection of pdf worksheets based on the same content, printed out from TaskMagic3:

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Some French resources you may find useful for question forming using "est-ce que". The examples all use modal verbs - so any infinitive can be added to make a complete question. But the same structure would also apply to questions in present and other tenses.

I read an interesting blog post about the fact that language learners are used to answering questions but not so used to asking them. See: http://jasonrenshaw.typepad.com/jason_renshaws_web_log/2011/01/when-answering-is-only-half-the-potential-of-a-question.html

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Some matching resources based on 75 pairs of sort-of synonyms in French.

These are often the sorts of things used in GCSE French reading and listening papers to catch students out.

Here is the TaskMagic3 Text Match file shown in the image above (this requires you to have TaskMagic3):

And some TaskMagic pdf worksheets:

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These resources are based on a short story about asking someone to go out / arranging to go out, with lots of high frequency expressions.

The text practises the following:

(no) quiero / quieres / quiere + inf   (+?s)
(no) me / te / le gusta + inf   (+?s)
porque
así que
voy / va / van
está + feeling
es + description
conmigo / contigo / con él / ella
a few freetime activities
+ lots of other high frequency expressions

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