While building community is an ongoing process, you can start to build a strong community foundation in your French classroom from Day 1!
Keep reading to see the resources (including FREEBIES) to help you achieve that.
Building Community in the French Classroom
Here are some activities that will make students feel welcome, feel seen, and feel welcome. If this is their experience, students will tend to interact with one another in positive ways.
Relationships will blosson and grow, and a community should eventually emerge.
1) Names, names, names
You might not know this, but my name’s not really Lucy.
Lucy’s a nickname I’ve been given because my American classmates weren’t able to pronounce my name correctly.
Honestly, I’ve never had an issue with that, but that might not be how everyone would feel in the same situation.
Mispronouncing one’s name (even just one time) might justifiably hurt a person’s feelings, might offend them, or make them sad.
And we don’t want that.
So I’ve got two FREE resources that will help you:
- Celebrate everyone’s names.
- Teach or review one very important sentence starter: “Je m’appelle…”
- Promote reading, writing, and speaking in the target language from week 1 of school (at a starter level).
- Offer students fun activities they’ll beg you to do.
Here’s a FREE easy reader around the sentence starter “Je m’appelle…”
Check out a FREE Name Game that plays like “J’ai… Qui a…?” but with different sentence starters
2) Their place in the classroom: the student’s desk
After a couple of weeks, maybe as fast as a few days, all students will know one another’s names.
Now, that occasional classroom visitor, maybe the principal, will not know.
Or even you might draw a blank in those first few weeks of school and forget a student’s name.
How about having kiddos write their names on these FREE desk name plates?
Not only will these desk name tags help you and visitors identify the kiddos in your French classroom, but they’ll also help students remember the alphabet, numbers 0-20, right/left, and colors.
Like teacher Stephanie N. said: “This was a very helpful resource to have on their desks all year. We regularly referred back to it throughout the year.”
Click here to check out the desk name plates FREEBIE on TpT
3) Seeing the bigger picture
I’d say the ideas above focus on celebrating and acknowledging each student as an individual person, which is important if we want to build a community.
But now let’s go for a real community building activity: a collaborative poster.
In case you’re not familiar with collaborative posters, the idea is to assemble a poster and each student is in charge of creating one piece of the complete poster.
The most famous example is the jigsaw pieces collaborative bulletin board (“We all fit in here”, or some variations of that sentence).
I have created a collaborative poster with the sentence: “Notre année sera super!”, illustrated, of course, with superhero images.
This is a community-building activity to get school started with a positive message for the year.
Each student colours a square which is part of the poster. Then, they assemble the image by putting the coloured squares together.
❤️ Your students will love seeing the big picture reveal itself!
❤️ And you’ll love how the hands-on and collaborative aspect of this activity will help your students come together as a group!
Click here to check out the collaborative poster on TpT
And to wrap things up, give each student this FREE bookmark with the same sentence as the poster!
Suggested extension activity
Have students write or say why the school year is going to be amazing.
You can have them write their ideas directly on the poster, on whatever space they find in it.
A more fun idea is to have them write their sentences on the back of the bookmarks.
Every day, until everyone gets to read their sentence, have a few students share what they wrote (if they want to, of course).
Building community in the French classroom is important if you want to encourage students to speak the language.
A strong sense of belonging will help your students open up to the learning experience!
Give these resources a try during the first week(s) of a new school year and let me know how it goes.
Read: How Art Can Help Students in your French Classroom
Read: Using Music in the French Classroom
Thank you for reading!
À bientôt,
Lucy
