Today I’ll be sharing two things: a new twist to the well-known tic-tac-toe game, and some very useful French question words posters.
The first will offer tons of fun practice for your students, and the second will serve as visual reference so they remember what question word to use in order to build the question they’re trying to ask.
Fun way to practice asking questions in French
I’ve never met a second language teacher that hadn’t used tic-tac-toe as a learning game in their classroom.
I’m pretty sure you have, too 🙂
But I’d like to share one way to play the game AND really get your students thinking hard about the purpose of a question and the structure of an interrogative sentence.
So you could say this twist is like “tic-tac-toe meets Jeopardy”.
The general idea is the following: you’ll be providing your students with a sentence. Then, you’ll select part of the sentence as an answer to a question. Next, they have to tell you which question (based on the context of the sentence) would lead to that answer. That’s why I said it’s a bit like “Jeopardy”. If they ask the right question, they get a point (a square in the tic-tac-toe grid). See example below:
Sentence: Le chien de mon voisin mange toutes les fleurs de son jardin.
Answer: toutes les fleurs
“What’s the question that leads to that answer?”
Students should ask: Qu’est-ce que le chien de mon voisin mange?
Instructions (for playing as a competition between teams)
- Make a list of tons (ok, maybe not tons but a lot) of sentences that include at least an agent, an action, and a time. If possible, include a place and other details as well. Some examples: “Hier, Marie a acheté beaucoup de livres pour sa fille.”, “Tous les dimanches, mon meilleur ami, qui s’appelle Daniel, va à l’église avec ses parents.”, etc.
- Draw a tic-tac-toe grid on the board. Then, number each square, from 1 to 9.
- Decide which team is going to begin playing the game.
- Dictate one of your sentences so BOTH teams can write it down. If you don’t have much time, you can write the sentences on the board yourself, or print a bunch of sentences and just display them when playing the game. That helps them visualize the questions they’ll be asking.
- Ask the team who’s going to start to choose one of the squares (that’s why we numbered them…)
- Now give the team a piece of information, extracted from the sentence, and ask them which question would lead to that answer.
- If they get it right, they win the square. If not, the other team has a chance to try. In case the other team doesn’t get it right either, nobody wins that square for now. You can pause the competition to discuss as a group what the right question would be.
- Now it’s the other team’s chance to win a square.
- Continue like that until you have a winning team.
Play as many rounds as you’d like. I like to play the game at least three times.
In case a sentence no longer offers possibility of generating questions, move on to the next sentence. That’s why I always prepared a long list of sentences beforehand.
You can also have some kind of “wild cards” by offering “oui” and “non” as answers. That would lead to many question alternatives for your students to create. For example:
Sentence: Le petit papillon vole dans le ciel bleu.
Answer: oui
“What’s the question that leads to that answer?”
Students could ask many questions: “Est-ce que le papillon vole dans le ciel?”, “Est-ce que le papillon est petit?”, “Le ciel, est-il bleu?”, etc.
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French Question Words Posters
We might forget how hard learning question words is. But for a student learning a second language, those words can get all mixed up.
So that’s why having reference posters with sentence examples around the classroom helps!
I’m sharing a free set of French question words posters with you today.
These posters will help your students when playing the game described above and all throughout the year.
You can also print them at a reduced size and turn them into reference cards. Then you can add them to a writing center.
Hope you find these posters useful! 🙂
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Merci!
Lucy 🙂
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