Teaching French with vocabulary themes
One of the GREATEST things I’ve implemented into my French Immersion teaching program is the focus on a specific set of vocabulary themes each month,
I know, I know, that’s a bold statement. But seriously, I can’t recommend it enough! Year after year, I get parents who tell me how much FRENCH VOCABULARY their child has learned during their first year of French (my board starts French Immersion in 1st grade).
While I’m flattered each time, the greatest joy is not the compliments from parents but the sense of pride and accomplishment on my own students’ faces at the end of the year! During the last week of school, we’ll usually play a TON of FRENCH GAMES and review our vocabulary (Kahoot, I’m looking at you).
A part of me is always a little nervous when we play these games because I don’t want to find out whether or not my students remember the classroom objects vocabulary they were taught back in October. Yikes! Each time, I’m pleasantly surprised to find out that my students DO remember the vocabulary! It’s amazing to see just how much they have learned in a year. There’s a reason why they remember it, we practice, practice, practice!
Now you may already do this type of system in your teachings and if you do, then you already know how effective it is. If you’ve never tried to structure your French language block through vocabulary themes, then you’ll want to keep reading!
What is the benefit of focusing on one theme at a time?
Alright so let’s get down to the benefits. Why use themes in the first place? If you’re a French teacher, you already know that we are so busy and rarely have much time for planning.
Instead of trying to come up with new teaching ideas over the weekend and feeling like you’re constantly planning and reinventing the wheel, go for a theme. Focusing on one theme only at a time not only saves you from decision fatigue and teacher overwhelm but also simplifies the planning process from week to week.
Let’s say that you decided to focus on clothing vocabulary for a month. Whenever you sit down during your prep (or whenever you like to plan), you ALREADY KNOW that you will be planning activities surrounding this specific theme. This makes it so much easier for you to search for helpful resources online, browse through your Google Drive and come up with activities, resources, games and assessments surrounding that theme.
As for the students, teaching one theme at a time can actually reduce anxiety in the French classroom. I’ve met countless students who admitted that they felt a little scared at the beginning of the year in first grade because they did not know any French.
My sweet child, of course, you don’t! You’re just getting started!
But really, having one theme at a time lets students know that when French class starts, or when they come into school, they’re going to be focusing on whatever theme you have picked. Not only does this give students more confidence to participate in class, since they are slowly becoming more and more familiar with the thematic vocabulary, but it allows parents and guardians to structure their home practice, by choosing to watch videos or read booklets on a certain theme.
Parents know what to expect and so do the students. Everyone is happy to work towards the collective goal of mastering the theme of the month. Trust me, that alone is a good enough reason to try it out.
I quickly want to mention, that you do not ALWAYS have to stick with the theme and ONLY do activities surrounding your theme. If you have a great writing unit you want to do with your students that is completely irrelevant to the theme you’re working on, that’s fine!! The point of having the themes is to make your life easier, however, it should never be limiting.
Feel free to do other lessons and units on the side or in conjunction with your one main theme. It’s really fine and I do it all the time too. For example, you may really focus on phonics in your classroom. Some teachers do a sound of the week. You can STILL relate this to your overall theme. If your theme is clothing, you can do activities following a sound in combination with clothing. Students may notice that a lot of French clothing vocabulary has the “Eau” sound such as manteau and chapeau. So there are definitely ways to tie your thematic unit to other areas.
How do you incorporate the four French teaching strands?
Hopefully, I’ve convinced you or at least have you interested in trying out a theme-based approach in the near future. Now the next question to address is… how do I go about teaching all four strands of French through thematic units?
So in Ontario, we need to report on 4 strands of the French curriculum. There is reading, writing, listening and oral communication. These are the foundations of assessment in French.
The beauty of having a theme for the month (or for a couple of weeks, however you want to structure it), is that you can plan all your assessments to follow a certain theme. This allows everything to be cohesive, streamlined and eventually, highly effective for your students.
Let’s take an example theme and work through the four strands. Let’s say you’ve picked the weather as a theme for the month.
Oral Communication / Speaking
Starting off with oral communication, a simple way to teach French weather vocabulary is during your morning routine. Have students sit in a large circle on the carpet or in chairs and go through the calendar.
After talking about the date and schedule, go into the weather. Take a look outside, open the blinds and talk in French! I have visuals at all times that my students can refer to when answering basic questions like “Quel temps fait-il aujourd’hui?”. Students who are comfortable can volunteer to answer the question and move pieces around on your magnetic board.
Next, always have a poem or song of the week that relates to your theme. This one is HUGE, as it gives students something to practice at home that directly relates to the vocabulary being practiced in class.
We have a French song of the week folder, so every week there is a new song or poem sent home that students can practice repeating. This French poem or song is practiced daily in the classroom too.
We use a large pointer stick and get volunteers to read a line or a small paragraph of the song while the rest of the class is doing the actions associated with it (I’m big on hand motions and actions).
Then we will sing the song together as a class. At the end of the week on Fridays, I record a video of the class singing the song and I send it out to families via our private communication app. Families have expressed to me just how much they love watching these videos!
Finally, you can engage in mini dialogue presentations. These are so much fun and can also be used for drama marks. These scripted presentations help build student confidence with oral speaking since they can rehearse and practice with their partner and can follow the dialogue rather than being asked to freely speak in French, which can be overwhelming to primary students.
French weather dialogue from my weather unit
Reading
Next, let’s look at reading. Now, of course, reading and reciting the poem of the week can be great reading practice for students. Besides that though, we do a lot of reading practice surrounding a theme.
My favourite way is to give students mini reader booklets on whatever theme we are working on. So if it is the weather, students will have a booklet that they can trace, colour and practice. We will all read our own copies together and I sometimes use them during my small-group centres. I will also send these home for them to practice as well. Students keep the booklet inside their desk or book bin for the duration of that theme, so that they can practice reading it when finished a task early, or to refer to it when they need to be able to write a sentence.
French reader booklet from my classroom objects unit
I will sometimes give thematic reading comprehension passages to my students as well, however, I have not done this every year. It really just depends on my group of students and what level they are at. Read & draw activities are fun and easy to do. Give students a simple sentence like “Il pleut aujourd’hui” and have students draw a corresponding image.
Any time that you can be extra fun with your students, they will be that much more likely to retain the vocabulary. This is why I’m constantly incorporating games throughout our thematic units. A classic activity I love to do while we learn French body parts, is to get my students to use sticky notes to label me correctly! It’s absolutely hilarious and every single one of my students participates.
Centres are probably the best time to get your students to practice reading and decoding. You can print, laminate and cut puzzles, task cards, sentence building strips, game boards and more! All these centres should be properly stored in a bin so that every year when you’re starting a certain theme, you can easily find everything you need and just pull out those thematic centres.
French vocabulary centres from my classroom objects unit
Writing
During our writing blocks, we are again, working on producing writing based on our theme. During centres, you can give your students a variety of writing prompts surrounding the weather.
You could have students fill out a weather journal for example, where they need to apply the vocabulary they are learning into simple sentences. I always make sure to model any writing they are expected to do on the board or a chart paper.
French weather journal from my weather vocabulary unit
The options are truly endless. My favourite no-frills way to incorporate thematic writing is by giving students a prompt for them to fill out in their own journals. I’ll start off the sentence and we will go through it to make sure everyone understands what it means. Then, the students fill in the blanks using their acquired vocabulary. Eventually, some students won’t need the prompts anymore after much practice.
Another great writing activity is “write the room”. This is a classic game that students and teachers both love. You will basically scatter a bunch of thematic vocabulary around the room. Give each student a recording sheet and a clipboard. They are to circulate around the room and try to find the various vocabulary words. They will write them in the correct placement on their sheet. My first graders loved to write the room and would beg me to do it more often!
Finally, you can incorporate your French vocabulary themes into your regular writing units. For example, if you usually do descriptive writing, you can have your students write about monsters and identify the body parts (the greater theme being body parts).
Or if you’re doing French procedural writing, you can have students write the steps on how to make a simple recipe (food being your greater theme) or have students write about how to dress for the cold winter (clothing being your greater theme). As you can see, it really is possible to throw in your thematic vocabulary into any area of your French teaching.
Listening
French listening assessments are always the most difficult in my opinion, and I know I’m not alone in that. I find myself worrying that I’m not providing enough listening opportunities but then I realize that every time we are engaging in authentic French dialogue, I am already exposing my students to tons of listening practice. So don’t be too hard on yourself if you find yourself panicking that you’re not providing enough assessments.
Working on our numbers unit!
I tend to do a TON of listening vocabulary games that really helps my students with their vocabulary. A favourite is “SPLAT” (also known as fly-swat and other variations). I posted all about this game on my Instagram, so click the photo to learn more.
Games like SPLAT allow my students to listen for the correct vocabulary word and identify it among a set of varied images relating to the thematic vocabulary. I will also do a ton of listen and draw or listen and colour activities. These can be just for practice and don’t only need to be for assessments. I provide a listening quiz in each of my vocabulary units, as I find them extremely effective in identifying which students could use more practice and exposure.
Lastly, just encourage lots of oral games, as listening is usually a by-product. For example, a round of “Simon says” for body parts helps encourage listening skills. I have those fun classroom buzzers that you can buy on Amazon, and my students GO WILD for them. We do a ton of listening activities with them.
If you’re working on phonic instruction in conjunction with your vocabulary theme, an easy activity would be to give a buzzer to 2-4 students and give them instructions to listen for. As an example, you may tell them that you are going to say a bunch of French words and they need to smack the buzzer when they hear the precise phonic sound that you are working on. It’s an easy way to assess listening while giving students some hands-on manipulatives.
So, what themes should I use?
It is clear that we can use this thematic teaching approach across all four strands of the French program, but let’s discuss possible themes. This part truly depends entirely on your group of kids and their interests.
I love that we are able to promote a more inquiry-based approach by choosing themes that fit well with your students. There is also the factor of age and grade level. Some themes simply would not work as well for say, intermediate students as it would with primary. Not sure if any 13 year old would want to keep learning about the weather and colours year after year. We have to adapt our themes with the grade level in order to keep things interesting and also avoid too much repetition.
I’ve compiled a list of possible themes below. These themes have not all been tried out by myself, so you’d have to dive a little deeper on your own. There are so many amazing resources on Teachers Pay Teachers that you could probably do even more themes than I’ve mentioned.
I will say, I tend to go for themes that are a bit more authentic. While a pirate theme or a circus theme sounds fun, how often will students use that vocabulary in their everyday life? For that reason, I try to go for more versatile themes that will help down the road with reading and writing, as these words are needed while on the journey to bilingualism.
Seasons
Prepositions
Holidays/Celebrations
Family Members
Animals (Farm, Zoo, Ocean, Jungle, Arctic, Etc.)
Fruits
Vegetables
Restaurant
Shopping
The House
Sports
Travel
I’ve put links to the themes that I already have full comprehensive units for in my store. If you like the way I’ve structured my units and are looking for me to add any more themes to my store, feel free to reach out via email (hello@firstgradefrenchies.com) so that I know a certain theme is in demand!
How to structure the year and plan for assessments?
The last piece of the puzzle is trying to figure out how to structure and plan out all your themed months. The reason I keep referring to them as a themed month and not a week is that I find you cannot dive deep enough in only a couple of weeks. Especially with core french, where you only see each group for a small part of the day, it’s just not possible.
We know that repetition and practice is key to second-language learning, so a month is that perfect sweet spot where students have been given enough time to thrive, but not too long to where it starts to drag on and become boring.
Now don’t forget, you don’t need to strictly stick to a theme for the ENTIRE month. If you feel like you’ve reached the end of a unit, and students know the vocabulary very well, feel free to move on.
I’ve created a simple long-range plan document on how I personally schedule out my themes for the year. This can change depending on the year and group, but these are the general themes and timeline I like to follow for primary French Immersion. For some of the areas, I’ve included ideas for final tasks. Please take what you need from it and adapt it to your own needs!
Remember, this is a general outline for the themes and possible assessments I’d do within them. This is not a comprehensive plan that has to be followed directly. Some years we get to it all, and others, we don’t, I don’t stress or worry too much about it, but it DOES help to have a general idea of which themes I’ll be starting in the next month so that I can gather all my resources and feel prepared.
My long-range plan is laid out for grade 1 French immersion in Ontario. If you teach another grade, you can still use a lot of the info but just adapt a little bit to suit your grade level.
Click on the image to access the long-range plans!
That was a lot of information but I truly hope it helps you plan out a thematic approach with your French language block! If you’re interested in my vocabulary units but aren’t quite ready to commit yet, I have a free sample of my French Body Parts Vocabulary Unit that you can try out!
This sampler does not include the vocabulary centres, games, assessments and presentations but it does allow you to use the reader booklets, the word wall and some worksheets to start out!
Thank you so much for reading and I’m sending you all my love as you continue to be an amazing role-model and educator for your students! Feel free to come join my mailing list so you’ll be notified if I ever add any new vocabulary units to my store.
