Create New Teaching Materials for French Class

Teaching Vocabulary

Early language instruction relies heavily on pictures to convey new vocabulary. Think of the textbook pages that depict all the objects found in a classroom, or a house with all its rooms and objects labeled in French. Naturally, after teaching this vocabulary, you will want to provide ways for your students to practice it. While you can certainly set students to work on storyboards, you can also build some yourself, print them off, and use them as vocabulary practice worksheets.

The storyboard below illustrates a simple way to provide uniform graphics on a worksheet. Instead of searching for images online, just drag down settings or objects into storyboard squares and print off the storyboard. In this particular storyboard, the text box with the blank line provides a place for students to identify the French name of each room displayed. For an alternative version of this assignment, you can create a template with the names of each room and have students create an image that depicts the vocabulary word.

You can also create visual vocabulary posters to hang in your classroom so students are currently exposed to the new words they're learning. The posters can be rotated for each lesson, or you can keep a standard set up all year. Students will find these to be a handy reference if they're struggling, and a constant visual reminder is often better than a list of words in a textbook or their notes! These are especially useful in early language classes or when there are vocabulary words that are similar to each other (like homophones) and can be visually represented.

Teaching Grammar

Storyboard That graphics can also be used to teach grammatical concepts. Try putting together images in a rebus-like format to have students practice French sentence structure. Provide images to represent a subject + verb + indirect object + direct object sentence and then have students write out the sentence in the proper French order. With thousands of images at your disposal, you can create endless grammatical combinations, giving your students important practice in critical thinking and language application.

Another way to take advantage of the Storyboard Creator is to present students with partially completed storyboard printouts to use on worksheets. Students will love the fun graphic handouts that add welcome variety to the typical worksheet format. Write out your own sentence starters and an accompanying picture to prompt oral or written sentence completions. The sample worksheet below provides sentence openings that will require students to complete the sentence by conjugating in the subjunctive mood.

If the colored images do not reproduce well with your printer or copier, remember you can edit the coloring and line thickness by using some of the image filters. The “Art Pen Drawing” or “Remove Color” filters will prepare your graphics for black and white printings, a well as the "Greyscale" filter.

If you’re looking to engage your students even further with creative worksheets, consider using their work on your printouts. After assigning students a storyboard activity, tell them that the best scenes will make their way onto an upcoming homework assignment. Just remove some of the text of the original storyboard and ask students to employ their French knowledge to complete the text on their homework.

Student classwork and homework image with text and tense instructions removed:

Teaching Oral and Listening Skills

No language class is complete without practice in speaking and listening. As you search for images to facilitate these oral and auditory skills, consider the graphics on Storyboard That. With the flexibility the image database provides, you can create an unlimited number of scenes to present to your students. Adapt the images to include avatars of your students or faculty members, or change the scenes to reflect a particular story or video you are covering as a class.

One common way to facilitate oral language practice is to present a short scene for students to describe. Instead of relying on textbook images, story cubes, or other pre-made scenes, create your own pictorial stories, like the lost dog tale below. Present students with the visual scenes and have them retell the story in groups, in front of the class, or on a digital recording. The scenes can also be created on our worksheet layout if you want students to make notes prior to practicing their speech.

If you’d rather practice listening skills with your students, storyboard squares provide a way to do that as well. Write up a script including the desirable text you’d like your students to listen to, then create squares depicting different scenes from the text. Present this on a printed handout and have students number the images based on the order in which they hear them. This can make an effective review activity or even appear as part of a quiz or test.

Listening Activity Images

Accompanying Script

1. Je me réveille à sept heures du matin.
2. Je prends le petit-déjeuner dans la salle a manger.
3. Je me brosse les dents tous les matins.
4. Je me couche à dix heures du soir.

Given the many ways Storyboard That can be adapted into teaching materials, it is sure to provide the multi-use platform you’ve been looking for. With its wide variety of scenes, objects, and characters, you can adapt the imagery to any lesson you’re teaching and personalize your handouts to suit your classes. Paper-sized and poster-sized layouts make creating what you need easy and easy to customize. It’s time to say “adieu” to those boring worksheets and “bonjour” to the engaging handouts made possible with storyboards, worksheets and posters!

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