Do you ever feel like you’ve run out of French literacy center ideas?
Or maybe you’d like to refresh or spice up what you’re already doing?
Either way, let me share this list of center ideas that won’t cost you a thing to implement.
When I say the ideas won’t cost you a thing, I mean that you won’t have to purchase anything besides what you probably already have in your classroom.
You will need paper, books, pens (markers, pencils, etc), zip lock bags, and so on.
So are you ready?
But before we get to the list, let’s just make sure you and I are on the same page.
- What is a literacy center?
A literacy center is a place where your students work on activities to develop their literacy skills. They can work independently, in pairs, or very small groups. You can set up a literacy center anywhere in your classroom, e.g. it can be a classroom corner, a desk, etc.
- Are centers always related to The Daily 5™ method?
No, not necessarily. The Daily 5™ revolves around five specific centers, but you don’t have to use or even know about the D5 to use centers in your classroom.
- Why should you use French literacy centers?
It’s your classroom, so you know what works best for you and your students, but literacy centers can be great for differentiation (different center activities for different group of students); for students to get more independent practice; as a way for you to have students working on a task while you have a conference with one student or you need to pull a group for guided reading; for students to have a chance to repeat an activity that you did whole-group (for example, the class as a whole unscrambled sentences on the board and now, in the corresponding literacy center, students get a chance to unscramble the same sentences on their own), and so on.
Now, let’s move on to the ideas!
French Literacy Center Ideas
The ideas are divided by skills.
Most of the ideas are zero prep, but some require that you prep in advance.
For some of the centers, you’ll need to prep a few things:
- Bag of words: a zip lock bag with cut-out words. Just type in words and print them out. Then, cut them out and keep them in the bag. You can include French sight words, or words that you’re currently teaching, e.g. winter words.
- Bag of pictures: a zip lock bag with cut-out images from old magazines. You can create bags with different “themes”: animals, people, places, objects, etc.
Word Work/Word Study Centers
1. Write a word on the board, or have students randomly pick a word from the bag of words (see description above). Next, you can have students:
- tally how many times that word shows up in a book (or magazine, newspaper, etc). This is good practice for sight words, e.g. un, je, est, etc. You can call this “hunting for words”.
- count how many letters the word has and search a book for words with the same number of letters.
- find words in a book that start OR end with the same letter as the word they have.
- choose a sound from the word and see if they can find other words with the same sound in a book. You can choose the sound for them if they need help with this. This works best for more “general” sounds, such as consonant sounds, or vowel sounds. It might be disappointing for them to search for words with the sound “un” in a book because they might not find many, if at all…
2. Build words with magnetic letters, play-dough, torn paper, pattern blocks, snap cubes, paint and q-tips, etc
3. Grab a bunch of words from the bag of words and sort them into categories. The point is for students to find things that those words have in common, either in the spelling or in the meaning of the words. Let’s say they grab these ten winter words: la neige, un bonhomme de neige, un flocon de neige, la glace, des bottes, des gants, and un manteau. They could sort the words into singular/plural, masculin/féminin, more than/fewer than 6 letters, etc. Even if they think of a category that includes all the words (like words that start with consonants), that’s okay. The purpose of this activity is for kids to think about words and to develop critical thinking skills.
Writing Centers
- Have students grab 3-7 words from the bag of words and write paragraphs using those words.
- Tell students to copy the first paragraph of a book they haven’t read before. Then, have them write a story (or just a couple of paragraphs) to follow that first paragraph.
- Have students grab images from the bag of pictures and write paragraphs about or captions for the images. For older kids, contextualize the activity by asking them to write the sentences/captions as if someone were sharing the images on Twitter or Instagram. Tell them to include appropriate hashtags.
- Give them pictures of famous people/characters and have them come up with 3-5 questions they would like to ask that person/character in an interview. Then, students give the set of questions to a partner who will answer the questions as if they were the famous person/character.
Reading Centers
Reading centers are all about, well, reading and what students need to do is, you guessed it!, read.
- kids read by themselves.
- a student reads to a partner, so this is actually both a reading and a listening center. One student is working on reading skills while the other is working on listening skills. Then, they switch roles.
- choral reading: a pair or a (very) small group of students read a text choral-style, meaning, at the same time. This works wonder if you have one student who is either introverted or a little behind the others because the student will feel great about being able to read, thus building up the student’s confidence.
Listening Centers
- students listen to audio versions of books they already know.
- kids can listen to a recording of you reading sentences you’ve been working on. This, of course, requires a little bit of prep, but it’s actually simpler than you imagine. Most smartphones have good-enough microphones that will record your voice with decent sound quality. If you’ve never tried it, the trick is to keep the phone from your mouth at a constant distance and, preferably, record it in a room that doesn’t reverberate the sound. For example, don’t make audio recordings in a tiled room; record audio in a room with dry wall, curtains, etc. My friend Alison ( teacher-blogger at Learning at the Primary Pond) records audio for her Boom cards in her closet(!), weird but super effective.
- students listen to videos. You can play a video that you have already watched as a class, but cover the screen so that students get to only listen to the video.
Read: Listening assessment ideas + Free PDF
Speaking Centers
- give students short sentences that they know how to read. It can even be the lyrics to a “comptine” they know by heart. Then, have them practice reading that same sentence but with different “voices”. For instance, they can read the sentence as a robot, a clown, a superhero, a pirate, etc. If your kiddos need more help, provide them with a list of different voices they can choose from. If your students are more independent, have them think of their own choices of different voices; you can even challenge them to come up with a specific number of characters, say 10 different voices.
- in small groups, students can sit in a circle and create sentences as they go round the circle. The rule is that each student can only say one word, but the sentence needs to make grammatical sense. For example, first student says “Je”, second student need to think of a word to follow the first one. It could be “suis”. Third student needs to say a word to build on the previous two. It could be “un”, and so on. You can limit the number of words in the sentence to the number of students in the group (or a multiple of that). If the group has four students, the sentence could have 4, 8, or 12 words. One key point is that they need to repeat the entire sentence in the end before moving on to the next round of sentence making.
So that’s it for today! When I have more French literacy center ideas, I’ll add them to this post.
Bookmark (or pin) this page and use this list when you need some inspiration.
Which French literacy center ideas will you try out? Let me know in the comments.
Thank you for stopping by!
Merci!
Lucy 🙂
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