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French Phonics Wheels

Getting your students excited about working with French sounds will be easier with these French phonics wheels!

French Phonics Wheels

When we’re talking about teaching French phonics, it’s a lot about learning to recognize and pronounce the sounds and also the way to write those sounds.

But, if you teach using AIM, TPR, or any other method that incorporates movement, you know that involving body movements makes learning more effective.

With that in mind, I set out to create a printable phonics resource that your kiddos could manipulate in order to work with and focus on specific sounds.

By spinning the wheel, two things should happen:

Students should feel less overwhelmed than if they were reading a long list of words including the focus sound. That’s because they take one word at a time.
The act of touching the paper and sliding the wheel into place (coupled with the brief anticipation of what the next word is going to be) is an active way of the body to work with words. For contrast, sitting down and reading words from the board would be a more passive way of dealing with words.

Even though the movement is small, the brain will remember the feel of the paper and the hand movements associated with sliding the wheels.

The file I created has more than 100 French phonics wheels.

You don’t have to print and use all the wheels. I took the time to add all of them so you can choose what works best for you and your kiddos.

For example, the sound /ɛ/ can be written many different ways. You can decide that you want your students to work with each grapheme at a time, or you want them to work with all of the graphemes at the same time. So you can print and prepare five wheels (one for each of the graphemes è, ê, ai, ei, et) AND/OR the wheel that shows all graphemes at the same time. See image below:

You can use the French phonics wheels during guided reading, or you can set up a French phonics literacy center.

during guided reading:
Pick 2-4 sounds that relate to the text you’re reading and use the corresponding wheels as warm-up. Kids will only see one word at a time and be able to focus on reading that one word. The illustrations help students understand what the words mean.

First, have them read the sound. Then, the word.

When they finish reading one word, ask them to identify the sound in the word.

literacy center:
Set up a French phonics center where students can practice reading the words and focusing on the sounds you selected. Prepare 5-10 wheels. They don’t have to work with all the wheels, but it’s nice for them to have choices. Choose the sounds according to the sounds you’re working that week/month in your classroom. From time to time, change up the wheels available at the literacy center.

Kids can then just turn the wheels and read each word at a time.

If you feel the need for accountability, have kids copy the words on their notebooks and underline the focus sound.

You can also ask them to draw the corresponding pictures, and write sentences with the words.

By assigning more, or less challenging tasks to each student, you can actually differentiate the activity.

Writing in their notebooks is great because they’ll be able to refer to the list of words whenever they need to.

However, if you’d like, you can also use the different versions of the answer recording sheets at the end of the file (see one example in the image below). There are versions with and without guiding writing lines.