Teaching French can be pretty tricky especially at this time of the year, as Christmas and the New Year as arrives for students. Making things like homework fun and interactive for the students can be hard, as most of the students have clocked out for the holiday relaxations. This doesn’t need to be the case.
Taking full advantage of holiday time and home time for the students is so important all year around, even if they do hate homework assignments. Using the home time to revise and grow their knowledge of the French language can save you huge amounts of time during classes repeating the same content to them, helping them to move onto the more advanced or more curriculum important topics.
The most valuable thing you can do when looking at how to assign fun French homework is to make the French homework relevant to their current interests. Making it more interactive for students will grasp their interest and provide them with a way to channel their current loves into French language learning.
Here are a few recommendations how to assign fun French homework. There’s plenty of ways to make French fun for students if you begin doing one or two of these recommendations chances are your student’s homework completion will double or triple in success and quality. These exercises might be more suitable for GCSE/A-Level students.
These are some simple ideas to get you started! Once you’ve started to apply some of these, you’ll have a better idea of what your student tend to enjoy and you can then tailor the French homework to what they enjoy and benefit from.
Students tend to love any form of video, so releasing them on YouTube is a heaven for them. Setting them a simple assignment to go away and find some French-speaking PG13 YouTubers to watch will go down a treat.
Using native speaking French YouTubers will grab their interest. Keep thing simple. Ask them to research 5 of them, listing them in a notebook with their YouTube URL to make sure they were successful in finding a fully native speaking French YouTuber. Ask them to pick 1 or 2 of those YouTubers on the list to them look into detail with.
Try some of the recommendations from Lindsey Loves Languages.
Ask the students to watch 2-3 of their videos and without the use of Google Translate to work out what the video is about. Ask them to tally the adjectives, verbs, and phrases that they’ve studied in class to see how many they can match-up. Almost like Bingo, but with key phrases in a video. This will keep them engaged and expose them to a whole new culture that might inspire them to learn French during the class time.
Students love apps, no-brainer right?!
Get them onto a language learning app, Try FlashAcademy®, our language learning app, perfect for newbie and intermediate French learners (even Advanced learners too!). FlashAcademy for French is full of games, lessons, activities, flashcards, native-speaking videos and challenges to get started on.
Creative learning for your students can come in many different forms, but apps are an attractive way to learn.
Ask them to go away and download the app on a family iPad or even on one of their own devices (which they probably own!) and ask them to take a few lessons to get the ball rolling, ask them in the morning to share their result and some of the issues that they struggled with during the lesson.
Most of the students will have Netflix at home or even YouTube, with a tonne of French-speaking series or TV episodes. Pick a handful of French-speaking TV series and ask them to watch.
Get the students to note down the characters names, remove subtitles, and capture the storyline in detail explaining how they were able to define what the storyline was. This will help them to use the French language to actively search for clues during the episode to what is going on. If this isn’t something you think will be useful for the students, ask them to use the episodes to explore the culture of French living and note down some of the things they notice from the episodes to what is different to the US or UK culture.
A handy list of French TV shows to get you started!
You’ll probably annoy a few parents with this one. Giving them TV to use as homework will get on their nerves, so assign this assignment with concrete intentions that the students understand to avoid backlash from the parents.
All of these recommendations will help a great deal towards understanding how to assign fun french homework in your French classes. Students will become more enthusiastic and engaged during lessons as they see progress in their own work.
Preparing for these exercises might seem a great deal of work right now, but the potential stress or lack of progress during classes that you’ll face if you avoid this approach might reduce your student’s progress with their French. A small investment into the post-class activities can have a huge impact on the results at the end of the year and the confidence of the student’s French success.
Remember sites like Pinterest are a hub for creative ways to learn French at home for your students. Here’s a great board full of useful ideas to help boost the success of French class with creative lesson assignments and activities.
