How To Introduce New French Vocabulary: 5 Fun Ways

Fun ways to teach new French vocabulary to your French Immersion students. You can use booklets. word walls, games, visuals and real objects to help them learn French while having a good time.

How To Introduce New French Vocabulary

Teaching French gets a bad rap. Sooo many parents have boring memories of memorizing ridiculous words and phrases. I mean, when are you ever going to need to know how to say “Michel est dans la cuisine” and other random phrases like that lol.

Other parents cringe at the thought of sitting in rows and conjugating verbs while doing worksheets. Gross.

That’s why we French teachers need to make learning new vocab FUN 🎉

I was lucky and had an amazing French teacher in high school. Even though we were teens she had us sing songs and even brought out puppets. She’d make the puppets have conversations with each other to teach us the “phrase du jour.” Looking back, we knew it was silly but we didn’t care. It was a break from our other classes. Mme. Switch, wherever you are, merci!

So I’ve come up with this handy list of ways you can put some pizzaz in your vocabulary lessons with primary French Immersion kids or FSL friends.

Sing it out

I don’t know about you but I simply CAN’T learn a catchy new song without it getting stuck in my head at some point. I’ve fallen victim to falling asleep with a song stuck in my head and waking up to the exact same song playing. Has this happened to you?

As annoying as it can be, it helps me learn song lyrics… and that is EXACTLY what we want our French Immersion munchkins to do.

They’ll practice singing songs they like (that sneakily have tons of French vocab in them) and then remember the words and their meanings. My kids love this French song about Crocodiles.

They don’t call music the universal language for nothing 😉

Word Walls for the win

I should rephrase this one… for early primary I am a huge fan of word BANKS instead of word walls, especially in Kindergarten. A word wall is an alphabetical list of words that may or may not be unrelated. So under the Aa column you’d find all sorts of words starting with the letter A. You get the idea.

In a word bank you’ll find words with a similar theme. I put mine in a pocket chart and laminate the words so the students can take them to their tables to copy them in their journals. It works like a charm.

I’ve created a black and neon French word wall and blue watercolor French word wall that include 100’s of words. Both of these resources are editable so you can add your own words. If you teach grade 1-3 you can use it as a regular word wall and have the kids reference it errrr day in their writing.

For my Kinders I pick out the words I want to teach the littles and put them in a small pocket chart. #wordbankforthewin. Check out these ways to use printable French flashcards in your classroom.

Emergent Readers

Repetitive books help kids feel more confident in their new reading skills. They introduce new vocabulary at just the right speed with just the right words per page ratio. Plus the kids feel so grown up when they get to make (and keep!) their own books while learning new French phrases.

Check out my French Flip Books bundle with 14 different vocab themes - and stay tuned for a second bundle coming out in Feb 2021. The alphabet and colour booklets are literally the most popular resources in my TPT store ;)

Reading stories aloud to kids is definitely another great way to add French vocabulary to their days. You might like these books for Black history month, books for women’s history month or these kid-friendly stories for LGBTQ pride month.

Get Real

Ok so this most definitely is NOT the tip you want to use in a global pandemic but save this for when this is all over!

Gather REAL objects and show them to the kiddos and pass them around to introduce new words. Feeling the objects in their hands is great for kinaesthetic learners and its FUN.

Start by collecting happy meal and kinder surprise toys - those always end up in the garbage anyways amirite??? You can classify the little toys into themes that go along with your word banks or alphabetically.

This is also a fun one to help your child learn French at home by sorting their toys by the letter they start with. Check out this post on 6 things your French Immersion child needs to know if you need a jumping off point!

BINGO

It’s the simplest of games, isn’t it??? Yet we all have fond memories of playing it at class parties and winning stickers or candy… mmm ring pops…

There are tons of bingo games to chose from on TPT or if you’re feeling creative you could make your own.

You can find some Free French alphabet flashcards here along with 10 game ideas to play with them or these Free French alphabet flip books and how to use them in your classroom.