Language for Little Learners

The weather is getting nicer and nicer and now is the time to take a nature walk and use the blooming flowers to increase your children’s French vocabulary. If you haven’t studied French in a long time or if you are learning French with your children, you can take a little pocket dictionary with you on your walk. This way if they point to something and ask you how you say it in French, you’ll be prepared.

Here are some useful French Springtime vocabulary words:

Spring – le printemps
flower – la fleur
grass – l’herbe
tree – l’arbre
butterfly – le papillon
Smell! – Sens!
Look! – Regarde!

My motto with homeschooling is to run with whatever works. What worked was the felt dolls. So, today I practiced listening comprehension with my kids. I told them how to dress the dolls in French and then they had to dress the dolls correctly.

We also reversed this and they had to tell me how to dress the dolls in French. I turned my back so that they couldn’t see what I was doing. It made it more fun for them to see if mom would get it right.

Then, when daddy got home from work, we let him join in the action. A simple, yet very effective way to teach French clothing words.

You can also do this with felt faces and different color eyes, mouths and hair.

A really fun thing I did with my kids this weekend was to cut out a few dolls and clothes from felt. Felt is kind of hard to cut for kids, so I did most of that work, but they got to design the clothes.

Felt is really neat because it stick to other felt. Thus, you can play ‘paper dolls’ but with your felt dolls. While you do this you can practice clothing words in French.

First, you can have your children decorate the clothes you cut out with glitter, markers, fake jewels or anything you can think of. Then, afterwards you can do different role playing games or just change the clothes and mix and match outfits. Make sure they practice their French the entire time!

I think your kids will really enjoy this activity. And, felt is really cheap to buy. You can find it at Wal-mart or Michael’s.
Here’s an example of what you can do. Ours didn’t turn out as well, so I thought I’d show this example instead.

Here are a few French clothing words you can use:

un manteau -coat
un pull – sweater
un tee-shirt – T-shirt
un pantalon – pants
un jean – jeans
un short – shorts
des chausettes – socks
des chaussures – shoes
des tennis – sneakers
un pyjama – pajamas

Today, I played a fun little game with my daughter. I had some pre-made cookie dough and put it on the cookie pan and then I told her what shape of cookie she was to make, in French. She had so much fun making the different shapes.

After we cookies them she told me their shapes in French before eating them. We used Peanut Butter cookie dough because that was what we had, but you could use sugar cookie dough and they could decorate them afterwards. That way you could practice the colors in French, as well as the French words for shapes.

Here are some helpful French shape words that you could use:

le carré – the squarele
cercle – the circlele
cœur – the heartle
rectangle – the rectangle
le losange – the diamond
l’ovale – the oval

Here are a few pages example pages of my French for Little Boys Workbook. This book has 50 activities to teach your son (or daughter) French. Although it’s for ‘Boys,’ girls who like trains, cars, animals and robots would like this workbook as well. Please let me know if you have any questions!

Some days I just get to where I want to goof off all day. Today was one of those days. I did it, but in a fun and educational way. We had the Jelly Bean Olympics. We had silly games using jelly beans and the whole time I made the kids speak French.

One game was a jellybean relay where each kid had to have a spoon with 1 jelly bean and then run the distance of the yard, the other child was then shouting out the number in French, then we switched kids and added a jelly bean. The other child now had to yell out the number in French. We also yelled things like, “Cours!” (run) and “vite!” (quickly).