It can be hard to come up with fresh ways to teach French while keeping students interested and engaged in their learning. In this article, Alloprof suggests a number of activities and resources to help you teach French to your elementary school students.
Designed for Cycle 3 students, the learning activity La puissance du vocabulaire requires students to work as a team to improve a text about water skiing. Specifically, they are tasked with finding synonyms to replace repetitive words and searching for terms to replace imprecise words such as chose, pas bon, or fun.
Learning to Read, One Sound at a Time is a great activity for helping Cycle 1 students recognize and master the letters that form the different sounds in the French language. For instance, you could have your students pick a card, then pronounce the sound indicated on the card or name another word that contains the same sound.
For older students, colouring homophone mandalas is a calm but entertaining activity that develops focus and mindfulness. They are perfect for a Friday afternoon or the day before an expected snow day!
Parts of speech and sentence types are two concepts that require practice and repetition in a variety of ways!
First, this version of the exquisite corpse game is an excellent way to practise parts of speech while crafting a silly story. This activity can easily be adapted to suit the level of your group: simply choose a sentence structure your students are familiar with.
A “5 to 7” exercise featuring different sentence types can also be a great way to reinforce your students’ learning. If your class already has a good grasp of the characteristics of each sentence type, go a step further and challenge them to use the Wheel of Sentence Types to change a sentence from one type to another.
Younger students can learn to decode words and associate them with the ideas and objects they represent with the fun tool French Syllables with Flo. In this activity, students have to help Flo reconstruct words by putting the syllables back in the right order.
Once your class has mastered the basics of reading, the next important step is understanding the meaning of a text. After you read a book together as a class or have students read a story in Grimoire in small groups or as a class, try asking these questions to assess their comprehension and see how much they enjoyed the text. You can also cut out the questions and put them in a bowl, then use them as a starting point for a book chat or writing workshop.
If you are looking for fresh conversation starters and new ways to help your students improve their oral expression skills, read through these discussion topics and improv themes for inspiration.
You can also look to the news for a constant source of new discussion topics. Depending on the topic, you can relate current events to social sciences, mathematics, science, or language concepts you are covering in class.