What to Teach Preschoolers Who Just Start to
Learn French

From LoveToKnow French

As more and more schools begin preschool level foreign language learning, many teachers are wondering what to teach preschoolers who just start to learn French. Sometimes a school may have already decided on a curriculum; however, more often than not the teacher must decide what to teach preschoolers who just start to learn French.

A French Foundation

If the goal of the school's program is to teach preschoolers French with the intention that they continue learning French throughout elementary school and high school, there are two main possibilities. One route is to approach the idea of laying a solid foundation in French by doing intense French immersion in preschool. Another route is to simply play games with the preschoolers because you know that they still have plenty of years of French to actually learn the language later on.

If your goal is to simply expose them to French through games and singing, you can use seasonal songs and various games to bring French into the classroom. If you’d really like to start building the students' vocabulary and French language skills during the preschool year, the best thing you can do is to come up with some themes that you can make central to various weeks or months of the school year. Using themes allows you to organize the vocabulary and language skills into manageable groups that logically lend themselves to being acquired at the same time.

For example, learning all the color words at once is logical; counting to ten is also something that should, preferably, be learned in sequence. Although you can come up with a list of things you’d like the preschoolers to learn, you may also find it helpful to consult the list below, which shows commonly chosen things for preschool French classrooms.

What to Teach Preschoolers Who Just Start to Learn French

The key to making anything stick when teaching preschoolers is to make the amount of information manageable. For this reason, when choosing, for example, to teach colors in class one day, keep the list of colors that you would like to teach at a manageable level, between five and eight colors. Exposing the children to 20 color words is good exposure, but preschoolers cannot learn twenty words in one session.

French Topic Ideas for Preschoolers:

  • Alphabet
  • Colors
  • Days of the week
  • Months of the year
  • Numbers from one to 31 (maximum number of days in a month)
  • The current year and the year(s) they were born
  • Classroom object vocabulary
  • Home object vocabulary
  • Words for family members
  • Animal vocabulary
  • Places vocabulary (e.g. la plage)
  • Food vocabulary

Choosing French Topics to Introduce for Preschoolers

Depending on what kinds of teaching materials you have access to, some of these items will be easier to teach than others. Since teaching about concrete things is much easier than teaching vocabulary for things that are conceptually absent from a preschool classroom, teaching vocabulary for items in the room, and the color words that describe these items, will be much easier than teaching vocabulary for items that are not in the classroom. For most teachers, this may be a good reason to choose certain topics over others; for other preschool programs, there may be a vested interest in teaching vocabulary about traveling even though it is a difficult topic to teach preschoolers.

In general, when teaching preschoolers French, sticking with topics that they learn about before coming to school is a good plan. Children should already know the animal or place name you are teaching them in English; introducing new concepts gets very difficult and the students will not be likely to understand the new concept since it is in another language. Sticking with what the students already know, and find fun and interesting, is sure to be the best route to success when you're teaching your preschool students.

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