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Simple French Writing Activity

Looking for ways to build up your students’ confidence in writing? Try out the simple French writing activity I’m describing in this post.

It’s supported writing practice that will help set up the foundations for freer, less guided activities later.

By offering structured practice, you’ll see your kids’ writing skills and confidence improve.

So let me share a daily writing activity your kiddos will love!

Simple French Writing Activity

There’s very little prep for this activity and you can start using it tomorrow in your French classroom if you’d like.

All you need to do is prepare sentences in advance. You should come up with sentences that are preferably related to other content you’re teaching in class.

This activity is so simple, you might think it won’t work, but try it out for a few weeks consistently and you might be surprised!

I’ll describe the idea at the simplest level first.

Then I’ll later share how often you can use it, what to do to differentiate, and how to make it more complex (for more advanced students and/or for higher grades).

Here’s what to do:

Write a sentence, which students would understand, on the board (or project it on the screen). It can be as short and simple as: “Le chien est blanc.” Then underline one word, “blanc” for example.
Tell students they should copy the sentence, but they should swap the underlined word for another word that would still make sense in the sentence. You could limit the option to color words only, or allow them to use any other descriptive adjective. That’s where the differentiating and the adjusting to grade level can come in.
Now tell them they should make a drawing to illustrate the sentence they wrote down. You could assign the drawing part as homework if you prefer.
And that’s it!

How often to do the activity and how to extend it

You could add this activity to your morning routine. If you have students write at least one sentence every day, they will have written almost 200 sentences by the end of the school year.

You could even create a journal dedicated exclusively to those sentences and, at the end of year, you and your students could take some time to assess and self-assess how much their writing has evolved over the period of one year.

You can make the activity longer by:

Telling students to make more word swaps by sentence. In the previous example, you could have them write more sentences exchanging the color word more times (and they’d be practicing vocabulary for color words in addition to writing.) You could set a minimum number of swaps, like writing 3 sentences by swapping the original word 3 times.
Underlining more than one word in a sentence and having kids write different sentences by swapping one or more words at a time. Again, with the sentence “Le chien est blanc.”, you could underline “chien” and “blanc”. Students could write: “Le chat est blanc.” (swapping the noun), “Le chien est gris.” (swapping the adjective), and even “Le poisson est bleu.” (swapping both the noun and the adjective). I guess you’ll have realized by now how many sentences students can create if you offer longer sentences and have them swap more words by sentence.

What to do to differentiate this simple French writing activity

In order to differentiate, you may provide a word bank so your students have somewhere to pull ideas from.

OR you may provide no word bank if your goal is to challenge students to remember words you’ve recently reviewed.

In the example above (“Le chien est blanc.”), you could provide:

No word bank, just tell kids to choose another color word and/or animal vocabulary word. They would have to know colors/animals and how to write/spell the words.
A word bank with animal names, but not a word bank for color words, or vice-versa.
Word banks for both categories (animals and colors).
A word bank with descriptive adjectives that are not only color words so students can choose words from different categories. In other words, they wouldn’t have to use color words only. This word bank could include words such as “petit”, “gros”, “heureux”, “triste”, etc.

The differentiation works by having students at varied proficiency levels using different word banks (or no word banks).

The use of word banks leads to everyone working on the SAME activity but being supported differently.

Another way to differentiate is to have different groups of students working with sentences at varied levels of complexity.

So one group could work with the example sentence above (“Le chien est blanc.”) while another group’could work with: “Le chien blanc est devant un arbre.”, with the words “chien”, “blanc”, and “arbre” being underlined so they can make the swaps.

How to make it more challenging for upper grades and/or higher levels of proficiency

If you teach upper grades and/or students at higher levels of proficiency, you can still use this activity.

The key is choosing a starting sentence with a more complex structure and content that is more relevant to students.

An example of a starting sentence is: “Marcel est allé au cinéma avec ses amis.” The words “Marcel”, “cinéma”, “ses amis” would be underlined and students would have to change them to create a new sentence.

NOTE: even if your students don’t need word banks, you might want to provide one just so that they don’t use words you don’t want them to use and end up with inappropriate sentences… It really depends on your students and nobody knows them better than you.

The example in the previous paragraph would also get your students working with verbs and adjectives because if they use “Marie” instead of “Marcel”, they’ll need to change “allé” to “allée”. If they use “Mes parents” instead of “Marcel”, they’ll need to change “est” into “sont”, “allé” into “allés” and “ses” into “leur(s)”.

Another way to make it more complex is by doing a sentence a day for a week, but choosing sentences that are somehow connected and would make up a story by the end of that week. So the sentences for them to work with could be similar to the following:

Day 1: Jessica a seize ans et habite à Paris.

Day 2: Tous les jours, Jessica mange un pain au chocolat.

Day 3: Elle aime écouter de la musique avec ses amis et sa chanson préférée est Mon précieux.

Day 4: Jessica a une chatte et un poisson. Ils s’appellent Madame et Monsieur.

Day 5: Quand Jessica est contente, elle danse.

With the example above, students would have used vocabulary for numbers (her age), cities or countries (where she lives), time frequency (how often), food (what she eats), song names, animal names, feelings, and action verbs.

By the end of the week, have students could use their illustrations to create a comic (“bande dessinée”) and wrap up the activity.

You could also create a similar sequence to the one above, but make it more complex by using sentences about the past with “le passé composé”.

Another fun alternative for more advanced students is for them to come up with sentences for their classmates to work with.