C'est la rentrée!

Bonjour à toutes les familles d’Archway Arete!

I hope you had a wonderful and restful summer!

Welcome back to another exciting school year in French class. 

I am looking forward to meeting the new families and seeing my old students back in the classroom. For the next two weeks, we will be reviewing simple commands and greetings, singing familiar songs and counting as we bring the French language back into our school routine. As the weeks progress, we will be continuing to study different thematic units left at each grade level.

My name is Salwa Gebara. Born and raised in Lebanon, I was educated in a French school, after which I pursued a BA in Child Psychology. During that time, I taught Kindergarten French and Math. When Lebanon began its long civil war, I left and went to France. Because of this I had to change careers. I attended “Pigier” Techniques and graduated as Head Secretary, and then took up a job as a Medical secretary for almost 5 years. I got married in the USA and established my life in AZ, where I have now lived for almost 22 years. When my children reached 18 months, they began Tutor Time, and so did I. I worked as their care giver for 11 years, before finally making my way to Great Hearts, where I am now in my 7th year teaching French, and my 4^th year at Archway Arete.

Here at Archway Arete, we are committed to providing French classes where the children are fully immersed in French. We will be using a French program called “Les Loustics”. It is a fun, creative, action-oriented course full of visual and audio documents that reflect the lively world of children and gives them a zest for learning. It uses a gradual, spiral approach to reinforce learning from one lesson to the next. Each unit consists of five lessons offering a variety of activities and a glossary.


This year,                2^nd and 3^rd Grade will continue “Les Loustics 1”

                                   4^th and 5^th “Les Loustics 2”

And I am very excited about all the work that we are going to accomplish together. I would appreciate your help in providing a spiral notebook also for French. This will be their tool to repeat daily the glossary of terms learned in class. You may also use Google translate as a means of interpreting them. Google also has a pronunciation feature which can be useful at times. The French activity book (2^nd-3^rd-4^th – 5^th) will remain always at school to help preserve the flow of the class.

If there are any questions or concerns regarding the class, please don’t hesitate to contact me at sgebara@archwayarete.org

The link to the blog is: aretefrench.blogspot.com:  Please check the blog often as I will inform you regularly on the content we are studying and the exciting things occurring in French class.

 I am looking forward to a wonderful year and we will continue to explore the French language together!