Learn French as a Family

Providing French homeschool lessons can be a challenge. Fortunately, there are resources that can help children to learn French online and some truly innovative products that make the entire process much easier. These programs oftentimes incorporate music, a powerful educational tool that is left out of most language programs. Learning to speak French is no easy endeavor, but learning to sing French can be a lot of fun, in addition to being one of the most effective ways to foster comprehension and retention of the lessons given.

A French homeschool lesson can be a lot more fun than a public school lesson. For one thing, there’s sometimes the factor of the teacher perhaps not being a fluent French speaker themselves. Far from being a hindrance, this can be a lot of fun. Learning with your children is a great way to teach them. Instead of just teaching them the materials involved with the lesson, you’re actually teaching them how one goes about learning a new thing. You can make this part of your lesson plans, learning to speak French along with your children and having fun the whole time.

A French homeschool lesson can also be much more profound than a standard public school lesson. Because singing, music and stories are involved, there is cause for the child to learn beyond passing their exams. You can make it truly fun by following along with the story, seeing where the twists and turns of the plots lead and, most importantly, noticing your own progress along the way. As you understand more about the lessons, you’ll find that you understand more of what’s being said and that you become sensitive to subtleties in the language that usually take a very long time to even notice, much less comprehend.

Teaching French in homeschool classrooms is well worth the effort. There are over 80 nations where this language is spoken as a means of fostering commerce and understanding. In some of these nations, people speak other languages in addition to French and French serves as the lingua franca. If you hope that, someday, your child will be able to travel the world, you’ll find that you’ve equipped them well by teaching them this important language. The best way to go about it starts with having the best materials possible, and these oftentimes employ innovative techniques, such as music.

There are products for homeschoolers that enable you to learn French online along with your students, or simply to provide the resource for them to use. These products are not all made equally and not all of them are as effective as the others. In general, the least effective are those that encourage reading before listening and speaking. In fact, it’s usually more effective to keep the listening and speaking components, to add a singing component and to scrap the reading portion until the student has a good grasp on the language.

Online learning,because of the format, is largely reading-driven. This is fine for more advanced students, but language is easy to muddle if you’re learning it from the written word and you haven’t much speaking experience. It’s fine to teach a student the French vowel sounds but be aware that, when they start reading French, they’ll likely be substituting various English vowel sounds in their heads and this can lead to bad habits. Music, specifically singing, is a great way to give kids an advantage where pronunciation and comprehension of the written word are concerned.

For homeschoolers, there is always the challenge of learning new materials without a large body of other students to provide cues to those who fall a bit behind. Singing is a good way to make up for this. Our speaking voices are adapted to our native tongues; this is where accents come from. You can learn French online and still develop excellent pronunciation habits by learning simple songs that teach basic words and phrases. Your singing voice is not so attached to the conventions of your first language and, therefore, it’s easier to learn new pronunciations by singing them than it is by speaking them, in many cases.

There is the additional benefit that the best programs that allow you to learn French online through music employ musical theater. >Musical theater is one of the most enduring ways to tell a story. The songs reinforce the major plot points and the story keeps the listeners engaged between songs. Where language is concerned, the also reinforce the major points of the lesson in a way that isn’t at all tedious, making it easier for students to keep alert, absorb what they’re hearing and, in the future, to recall what they heard and what they learned.