This will be my last post for 2015. See you again in January!

For our last French Club before Christmas this year, we played a few vocabulary games.

Christmas survey

All of the kids asked each other what their favourite Christmas dessert was. They kept a tally of the responses and at the end we discussed which desserts were the most popular. Such a simple activity, but it encourages speaking with repetitive vocabulary so they tend to remember the words they used.

Devinettes

Each child took a turn… I assigned them a Christmas themed item, e.g. une étoile (a star), un cadeau (a present), etc. They gave the other children one hint about their word and then the rest of the kids could ask yes/no questions and try to guess what the item was. They always love this game! The goal is not to turn it into a 20-question deal where each item takes forever to guess. To that end, they give reasonably good hints and once a few questions are asked, the item can usually be guessed in a minute or two. That gives each child the chance to take multiple turns and nobody gets bored.

Christmas Bingo

In the bottom of my French club drawer, I found the bingo cards that the kids had made last year so we used them to play again.

Les douze jours de Noël (The Twelve days of Christmas)

I found a fabulous literal translation of this song here : https://www.french-test.com/blog/the-twelve-days-of-christmas-in-french/

I printed two copies of the images I found on the site above – one image for each day of the twelve days. We sang the song through together a few times to practice, while looking at the images for prompting.

Then, I hid each image individually around my house. The girls were one team; the boys the other. With their teams, they had to go and find the image for day #1 first, come back and sing the first day of the song, then go find #2, come back and sing day #2, etc. All the days had to be in order – they couldn’t pick up any days they found that weren’t the one they were looking for. They had to leave them and come back when they reached that day. This was a lot of fun, but my goodness the song is a real tongue twister sometimes – especially day 8!

4 on the couch

If you haven’t played this game before, there is a great summary of the rules here: http://www.greatgroupgames.com/four-on-a-couch.htm

We had the girls plus 2 moms as one team and the boys plus another mom be the second team. This game wasn’t as vocabulary intensive as some of the others, but they did learn the words for couch (le canapé), the empty seat (le siege vide), to sit (s’asseoir), and a few others.

They all really enjoyed this game too. I wasn’t sure how it would go because the kids are younger than is recommended for the game, but it went really well. We’ll probably do it again in the future.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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