French authentic resources – Hugo décrypte and 5 daily stories

I’m always on the lookout for cool French authentic resources that even the most beginner of students can do.  And if it helps them with their context clue skills, even the better!  My level 1 students this year have been reading about current events from Instagrammer Hugo Décrypte, 

Each day he posts 5 different news stories plus a question of the day on his Instagram account.  Sometimes the stories are very easy to understand – even for the most beginner of students.  There are generally plenty of cognates and there is always a photo to help out.  I pick the story each day that I think will be the most interesting and/or most comprehensible to my students and we read it together.  I point out strategies they can use to read, and how they can determine whether or not an unknown word is worth looking up in the dictionary. 

Sometimes we look at the question of the day – often it’s a poll and the following day, he posts the results.  So not only are you getting to learn about current events, reading strategies AND new vocabulary – you can practice questions as well. It’s a great way to read some REAL French! This is one of the best French authentic resources I’ve found and because it’s such a short summary of the news story, it can be used when you have just a little bit of time – or a lot of time, if you want to go more in-depth.

French authentic resources with Desmos

If you’re looking for a good way to use Hugo Decrypte, I would suggest taking a look at Desmos. I use Desmos as my bell work each day. I share the image from the Instagram account and then add questions – sometimes open-ended, sometimes more detail-oriented. My students are able to understand so much of the content when they read these, but collecting their responses on Desmos helps me to determine which things are causing trouble.

Information about using Desmos can be found in these blog posts: