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Kindergarten/Grande Section:
My kindergartener is named B. Usually I am not a believer in early academics, because simply playing and exploring is how children learn at this age. However, since her three older sisters are doing school every day, she wanted her own work to do. Also, after having done grade 1 with three other children now, I got to thinking that it would be really nice if my child started grade 1 already knowing how to write and read some. A lot of grade 1 resources seem to assume that they can. Furthermore, I asked a friend of mine from France and she said that over there students start learning cursive at age 5. So why not give it a try?
Except….I didn’t even know what kids are expected to learn in kindergarten! Anyways, hopefully this post will clear that up.
Writing:
I think the first thing to do is teach the alphabet and then introduce each letter one at a time and have them practice writing it, spotting it, and expose them to words that have that sound. I STILL mix up g and j in the French alphabet, so we ended up watching this short 3 minute video on repeat.
You can sing the song in French, too.
Then, to get the children started in (cursive) writing, French people do a thing called “graphisme”. If you simply google “graphisme maternelle” or “graphisme grande section/moyenne section” you will get a ton of results. They are just sheets where kids practice tracing different types of lines, zig-zags, swirls, loops, etc. It is really important to get them doing the loops (“boucles”) to prepare them for cursive writing. I found two really wonderful videos by a French teacher who explains her method of teaching the “boucles”. These videos are genius. Part 1 here and part 2 here.
You can do les boucles on a little whiteboard or slate, too. My kids love that, because I don’t often let them use the whiteboard markers (on account of them always getting destroyed!!! J thinks the whiteboard markers are actually a hammer.)
Bout de gomme also has a really nice graphisme booklet you can print out here. Bout de gomme, what would I do without you?
Then I plan to get them tracing real cursive letters. I found a website that I really like called Mon école, which has letters that start out very big, and then get smaller and smaller, using the French lines called “lignes seyès”.
Bout de gomme also has some good letter tracing pages, also using the lignes seyès. I highly recommend you check out this page on Bout de gomme, where the entire progression of learning to write cursive with lignes seyès is explained, and an entire printable workbook is provided for free. On this page from Bout de gomme you can find the giant cursive letters for kids to colour and trace. That same page also has alphabet banners you can print, laminate, and hang up where you do your school, using the lignes seyès (that’s important for moms who forget the exact “seyès size” of each letter *ahem*).
I looked and looked for a writing workbook from one of the major publishers that had letter tracing BEFORE free-hand writing, but I couldn’t find any. All the books I looked at or bought have the student dive straight into free-hand writing through copying the model, but not tracing it first. So Bout de gomme and Mon école will have to suffice. I prefer the actual physical workbooks because then I don’t have to click all over the internet to find what I want and then send it to the printer.
(By the way, I started B and J (the pre-schooler) on writing regular stick letters in an English book, because it was really good and I didn’t have an equivalent French one. I have a couple books coming from Les Libraires, I will have to update once they’ve arrived!)
Once you feel ready for the child to move on to an actual daily workbook, I plan on using these for now, from La librairie des écoles:
Reading:
For the first time this year I am trying out Destination Lecture GS by La Librairie des écoles (my other children learned English reading first, but now I am switching to French first). I think it looks very promising. It starts with some oral comprehension and identifying what a word and a sentence are. Then it has letter recognition with circling specific letters (I’ve noticed the French often start with e, not a!), recognizing that sound, and circling pictures that contain that sound. It also has some simple syllable work.
I also have found some good things on Ma maternelle, like this:
Or things like this:
We also have a subscription to Pomme d’api magazine, but I don’t actually expect my kindergartner and preschooler to start reading it on their own anytime soon.
General French:
Mon année de grande section by Bordas.
This book has a little bit of reading (which is mostly oral comprehension and understanding what a word and what a syllable are), a little bit of science, and some math. It just arrived in the mail and I am excited to try it out! I bought this book because I have a similar type of thing in English, and it is so easy to just grab it and photocopy it, no need to guess what I should be teaching that day or spend precious hours looking around the internet (not that I wouldn’t do that anyways lol).
I also ordered this book about the DELF Prim, which I will use with both B and J, to test their overall French speaking and listening abilities, to see where they are at and if there are any holes to be filled:
I got it used for only $7.93 (plus shipping fees)! I saw the current used price (shipping not included) is $28.91, yikes!
Lastly, we have too many French picture books to post them all here. That will have to be another post for the future! But I do try to read in French to the littles. I also let them watch some French cartoons like Petit Ours Brun (free on YouTube), Yakari (Amazon Prime), and SamSam (Bayam). Don’t forget fairy tales!
Pre-school/Moyenne Section:
Well, this section will be pretty short, because my pre-schooler simply does the exact same things as my kindergartner. I dare say he’s even better than she is! He is really quite remarkable. He is my fifth child and I’ve never before had a child so interested in writing and reading letters at such a young age. Since I have no idea what a child in “moyenne section” is expected to do, I bought this book from Bordas:
Don’t you love the smell of a new workbook? It looks like it will be pretty fun, and it has a lot of oral exercices, such as describing pictures.
Can one ever have too many books?
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