French 1 activities to start the school year

It’s always so exciting to start a new school year, especially with French 1 students! They are brand new to the language and don’t know anything at all – yet! It’s not just the language, but the culture as well. Most of them don’t realize that French is a world language, not just the language of France.

Since these students are starting from the very bottom, repetition and basic vocabulary are the most important. For most districts, the first few weeks cover the same things: numbers, greetings and introductions, alphabet and accent marks and a tiny bit of grammar – masculine vs. feminine and subject pronouns.

For introducing the alphabet and accent marks, I like to go over the pronunciation of the letters and then practice spelling cognates and student names in French while the students write them down. I encourage them to go crazy if they recognize their own name – and sometimes I’ll give them a pencil or a candy if they are enthusiastic enough.

When I do numbers, I make sure to not teach them to count. If they learn to count, they often need to count their way to understand the number, which isn’t great if they want to understand a price or a phone number. Instead, I will hold up a flash card with a number and ask them if it’s a specific number. I start with something that is a cognate – zéro. I’ll hold up any number BUT zero – then when I say “c’est zéro?” they respond no, and then I’ll do a choice – is it zero or three? Then we will go back and forth between those two numbers. I add one number at a time and by the end of the hour, they’ve got 0-10 under their belts.

I’m pretty lucky with masculine and feminine nouns, as my students tend to be Spanish-speakers already. The whole concept of nouns having a gender isn’t new to them and they don’t “freak out” about it. One thing that I do go over is how to learn which words are masculine and which ones are feminine. For all students, I tell them that they should come up with a consistent way of coding the words – write the masculine words in one color ALWAYS and the feminine words in a different color, or always put masculine on the left side of the page and feminine on the right. Sometimes they’ll forget whether it was le or la, but they might remember what color or which side of the page it was on.

For my Spanish-speaking students – or really, students who already speak any language that has gendered nouns – whenever we have a list of vocabulary, I suggest that they run through the list to determine which ones match up with the same gender as in the language they already know. For Spanish, about 80% of nouns are the same gender in both Spanish and French. That means they only need to really focus on the 20% that don’t match up.

For subject pronouns, most of them are pretty easy because they can easily be translated. Of course, it’s tu and vous that can cause the most trouble. Those who already speak another language will often have an idea of the concept of formal/informal and it’s pretty easy for them. For my monolinguals, they don’t have this background, so we need to practice a bit. I will give them different people and situations and we talk about whether or not they would be tu or vous.

After we’ve gone over these topics and done some practice together, they get a bit of practice. I like to use Boom cards for this, as the activities are easy to assign and are self-grading. I’ve shared links to some of the French 1 activities below if you’d like to see what I use.