By evadumonteil Last updated: January 17, 2021

Plan Your Next French Lesson with These 7 Excellent Resources

Is your French classroom feeling a little monotonous?

Or maybe you’re having great results, but the excitement just isn’t there anymore?

Have you been struggling to find inspiration and come up with the perfect lesson plans for your French learners?

We get you. Finding fresh and exciting lesson plans isn’t a walk in the park. The internet is chock-full of content, but if you’re picky and have the highest standards—like we do!—it may take you endless hours of searching to get your hands on lesson plans that consistently meet your standards.

Whatever your situation, you’ve come to the right place.

We’ve scoured the web for the finest French lesson plans to delight your students and reinvigorate your classroom.

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How to Choose Awesome French Lesson Plans

Cater to your learners’ fluency level. A great lesson plan should be appropriate to the needs of your students. Therefore, you may want to start browsing content that’s relevant to their ages and situations. Most pre-made lesson plans specify whether they’re designed for preschool children, teens or adult learners—and include activities designed accordingly.

Opt for plans with structure. The lesson plan should walk you through an entire session and include clear sets of activities and a list of resources that you need to use in order to have a productive lesson. There should be consistency between these exercises, generally through a common theme and knowledge that students can build upon. This should make it interesting for them to proceed and to remain engaged throughout the session.

Focus on fun themes and seasonal activities. Shy away from lesson plans that are bland and generic. To capture your students’ attention, a good strategy is to look for lesson plans with a special theme or flair. French holiday-themed lesson plans or lesson plans with a strong emphasis on French cultural content do a great job of engaging your students during the lesson and beyond. That’s because they help to stir up their curiosity by adding fresh, lively, happy elements that will grab their attention and pique their interest in the French language.

Aim for plans that target all four skills. Ideally, your lesson plans will give your students lots of practice in all facets of the French language. Concretely, that means that they should include a good dose of speaking exercises, plenty of opportunities to listen to the French language as spoken by French natives (preferably by using authentic French content). In fact, you can find authentic French content on FluentU.
FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language lessons.

You should also include some reading element where they can practice reading out loud and familiarize themselves with the proper spelling and punctuation of the French language, and a decent amount of writing practice so they can develop their creative potential to the fullest. This will guarantee that your students make equal progress in all areas of the language and that no aspects are neglected.

7 Incredible Resources to Find the Web’s Finest French Lesson Plans

Vouloir, C’est Pouvoir

This website is a goldmine for high-quality, well-structured open-source French lesson plans. It was designed by Wendy Stephens (aka Madame Stephens), a teacher who has been teaching French at Spring Valley High School for ten years. On her site, Wendy uploads the lesson plans that she uses in class—and they’re all spectacular.

Rich in cultural elements and incredibly methodical, the plans are organized by fluency levels, from beginners to honors students and everything in between. Plans are arranged into a grid for the entire year’s syllabus, making it very easy to follow and understand the rationale, and to see how lessons are organized. That way, you too can implement them and accompany your learners in their journey with French. Better yet, they’re replete with goals, activities and even homework, and each section also lists the structures and resources that accompany each lesson.

Lesson Planet

Lesson Planet is a subscription-based service for K-12 teachers that compiles lesson plans and worksheets along with videos, presentations, apps and other resources. Their staff of qualified teachers review all the materials that go up on the site to ensure that they’re of the highest quality and sort them by subject, grade and Common Core and state standards.

You can easily search for French lesson plans and materials with whatever specifications you need, whether you’re looking for a worksheet on gerunds and infinitives or a full lesson plan that allows high school students to explore the cultural and practical aspects of a trip to Paris.

Different subscription plans give you different levels of access and support, but are generally very affordable and all include access to online storage space where you can save and organize materials for your classes. If you want to make sure you can always find quality materials in a short amount of time, Lesson Planet is a great option for you.

BrightHub Education

This terrific site offers a vast collection of French lesson plans for learners across all level of fluency, including preschoolers, elementary school students and teenage learners. Plans are created for and by teachers and feature an abundance of tips that truly walk you through each activity so you can use them in the classroom without breaking a sweat.

We particularly love how each lesson plan is targeted, so your students can truly focus on assimilating and digesting a grammar point or the theme for a given lesson. What’s more, they’re also highly engaging and do a great job diversifying the activities from one lesson to the next, including everything from songs and poems to games.

Take a look at their great lesson plan for a tense that’s oh-so-useful but oh-so-difficult to teach: passé composé. In a single place, this very descriptive and pragmatic lesson plan features a recap of the rules of the tense and the challenges inherent in teaching it, while also giving lots of ideas and examples for your conjugation lesson.

Quia

This especially helpful platform lets French teachers share lesson plans that can be used by other French teachers around the world. Interactive and colorful, lessons often include a gamified approach to keep your students engaged throughout the session. This offers them plenty of practice while also making lessons more targeted, effective and fun.

What’s more, you can truly customize your lesson plan by including different activities. By searching for a particular keyword in the search bar, you can see all the activities for a given topic, such as Halloween. You’ll have plenty of games, quizzes and other cool activities to support your lesson.

Bishop Wordsworth’s School

What’s not to love about this no-frills website with its equally straightforward, well-constructed French lesson plans that actually deliver? Specifically designed for primary school students, this collection of lesson plans is available for download without registration. They’re nicely organized and follow a strict week-by-week curriculum so learners can assimilate new knowledge and make progress from one session to the next.

Each lesson plan details the focus of the particular lesson and lists the corresponding activities, including a warm-up and an extension. Most importantly, they include all the supporting resources, targeted skills and teaching strategies so you can truly implement your chosen plan. Their very first lesson plan is terrific in this respect: It’s concise and very clear and features lots of great ideas that you can easily apply to your older learners’ introductory French classes.

Civilisation Française

This illuminating French website features an extensive list of lesson plans that are accessible directly from the homepage, and which are organized by themes with a strong cultural focus. The site’s mastermind, Marie Ponterio, is a native French speaker and teacher who emigrated to the United States in 1975.

Her credentials are impressive: in addition to being named a Chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes académiques (a Knight of the Order of Academic Palms, an award given to distinguished academics) by the French government in 2014, Ponterio taught at prestigious universities including Saint Lawrence University, Middlebury College, The University of Vermont, and Cornell University.

Each lesson plan is designed to improve your students’ French language skills by combining immersion with highly visual activities. They include lots of pictures, text, videos and exercises, and a list of external resources to help you go beyond what is offered on the site. We particularly love her lesson plan for French food, which offers lots of captivating aspects about French dining etiquette and gastronomy.

AP Central

Are you frustrated that you can’t seem to find quality lesson plans for your AP French students? If so, you’re in luck. The official AP Central site features a comprehensive selection of lesson plans that can give you peace of mind when preparing your learners for this challenging exam.

Written by AP teachers, the site’s course planning and pacing guides showcase numerous ways to prepare for the AP French Language and Culture curriculum across one academic year. Take a look at the first guide to get plenty of ideas, tips and resources to help you structure your AP French class—or you can even use the AP curriculum to teach your advanced learners.

Now that you’re equipped with the right French lesson plans, all that you need is to get started. Bonne chance ! (Good luck!)