French for Families 1 – Northern Alliance

Welcome to LEVEL 1 of our PowerLanguage online French course for Families. This programme has been created specifically for those of you who wish to embark on an exciting Language Learning Journey ALONGSIDE a primary-aged child or children! These resources were developed for the dual purpose of learning French for yourself and using the language at home with your own children or
other members of your family.

At PowerLanguage, we have been involved in training and supporting teachers in schools across the UK, Europe and Australia since 2001, and are now making our resources and methodology available to the general public. We believe that parents and carers can send a strong message to their children by embarking on an online course to develop their own language skills whilst learning, playing and practising alongside their children. This is what lifelong learning is all about!

To teach is to learn twice….

Parents and carers will not only exemplify Lifelong Learning to their children, they will also be able to share their own learning with them. Part of the homework at the end of each lesson – which we have called “Challenges” – is to apply your newly acquired knowledge to your children. This will reinforce your learning, work as a way to assess your progress, and of course benefit other members of your
family too! You may take as much time as you need after each lesson to complete your Challenges, before you move on to the next lesson. We have also included Suggested School Challenges which are designed for parents and children to work together on then for children to share with their teacher and peers.

The course consists of 6 lessons which contain a mixture of videos from our French tutors, short films shot on location in France, animations and PowerPoint documents, which will all combine to help you and your children discover French, or revisit what you might have learned at school when you were a pupil. We have
also included a number of songs as well as some arts and crafts activities. Throughout this course, you will be learning French in meaningful contexts, moving away from having to learn lists of words which can be difficult to string together in a sentence…!

Do not hesitate to watch the videos and animations with your children or other members of your family. Please pause the videos at regular intervals to practise a word or a sentence. You should try to say those out loud several times: don’t just say them in your head, the words have to come out!

Finally, feel free to download the booklet accompanying the resources in order to write down some of the words and sentences that you have discovered. We have included flashcards at the end of the booklet, which you can cut out and use to practise your French with your family.

We hope that you enjoy your course! Please do not hesitate to send us some feed-back at: info@powerlanguage.net.

Amusez-vous bien !