An eye-catching poster to aid your students in using the days of the week. Can be printed A4 or A3 (or bigger, if you have the printing equipment).

An eye-catching poster to aid your students with their days of the week in Spanish.

It's vital to provide extension tasks for those new Y7s who already know some French, whilst others are still grappling with the vocab, so I created a worksheet to get them thinking about where the words for the days of the week come from and then asks them to work out the order of the Spanish and Italian days of the week too. The aim is to show them that by learning one language they will be able to understand a little of other languages too!

It's so important to be able to provide some extra for those Y7 students who've already learned some French, whilst the rest of them are still learning the vocab. I've put together a sheet which breaks down the greetings words and gets them to start using the vocab they've learned in other contexts.

This aim of this resource is not only to provide something for those students who have already learned their numbers at primary to do, but also to get them thinking about the fact that the English language has many words of French origin in it and many words of latin origin which are shared by both languages. It explores words such as trio, unique, quadrangle, decade and asks students to link each word to a French number.

An authentic resource - an article from 1jour1actu.fr about the collapse of a clothes factory in Bangladesh with comprehension activities to help students to understand the article. I find that students are always really proud of themselves when told that the article has come from a real French newspaper! I don't tell them it's a newspaper for kids!

A worksheet which requires students to demonstrate that they understand a wide range of days, months and numbers, plus a few phrases for saying what the day or date is. Students identify the same word or phrase in French and English and colour both boxes in the same colour to show that they have matched them. Students may need to use patterns as a means of showing matched pairs unless they have a huge number of different coloured pencils!

A useful resource for getting students to speak spontaneously. In small groups (4 players) students roll a dice and move their counters to the relevant spot on the board. They have to say the phrase in French shown on the square they've landed on. If they can't say it they go back to their original square. In my experience students really enjoy this opportunity to use spoken French in a small group, rather than in front of the class. As the teacher I can move around the groups checking what the students are saying. To help them last longer we laminate the boards. Counters and dice are required too, but can be bought very cheaply.

An excellent way to get students giving spontaneous spoken phrases at the end of a lesson. To uncover a cell (to find out if there's a battleship hiding) students have to give a phrase that includes a phrase from the top of the screen and one from the left of the screen. When they've said the phrase you click on the blue rectangle to show whether there's a battleship beneath it or not. I've found this works particularly well with boys' classes. This resource is made using Active Inspire software, compatible with Promethean Interactive Whiteboards.

A useful resource for getting students to speak spontaneously. In small groups (4 players) students roll a dice and move their counters to the relevant spot on the board. They have to say the phrase in French shown on the square they've landed on. If they can't say it they go back to their original square. In my experience students really enjoy this opportunity to use spoken French in a small group, rather than in front of the class. As the teacher I can move around the groups checking what the students are saying. To help them last longer we laminate the boards. Counters and dice are required too, but can be bought very cheaply.

Three 'Challenge Tasks' on the topic of music. These are all based on authentic French resources (mainly infographs found on Pinterest) with comprehension questions added. I put these up on my 'Challenge Wall' in the classroom for the term and direct any students to them who finish their work early. To save photocopying costs I encourage students not to write on the sheets and to put them back on the wall when they're finished. I find that students get a huge sense of achievement from knowing that they are reading and understanding real French literature! As an extra incentive to try more difficult work I offer 'challenge stars' in return for tackling these tricky tasks. These are converted periodically into merits.

An eye-catching set of posters to aid your students in using the four most common irregular verbs in French: aller, avoir, être and faire. Can be printed on A4 or A3 (or bigger, if you have the printing facilities).

A selection of eye-catching posters to aid your students with their tenses. The posters include -er verbs in the present, perfect, imperfect and conditional tenses. Can be printed on A4 or A3 (or bigger, if you have the printing equipment).

It's really important to be able to provide those students who've already learned some French at primary with something to do while the rest of the class are still learning the vocab, so I've put together a worksheet with 11 sentences in French describing something that happens in each month (except 1, obviously!). There is vocab to help the students work out the meaning. It's a good exercise in reading comprehension and in teaching students that they don't need to understand every word of something to be able to get the gist. The second exercise is about the circumflex and recognizing that there used to be an 's' in the word, which may help them to understand more vocab.

A huge crossword that requires students to revise all of the vocab they have learned in term 1 of year 7, including months, numbers, days and greetings. Students will have to consider their spelling carefully and spell words correctly if all of the words are to fit in. The first tab of the document contains the crossword and clues. The second tab contains a word bank for the students who need the most support whilst the third tab contains a slightly less comprehensive word bank. Obviously the most able students should not be given a word bank. Classes love the challenge of one of my massive crosswords and will happily spend the whole lesson revising in this way!

An extension task which I keep on the wall of my classroom throughout the year. Students can go to the Challenge Wall whenever they have completed a task which the rest of the class are still working on. This task contains a text about the solar system and activities which will help students to break the text into chunks and begin to understand a great deal of it. A good way of getting students to practise their reading skills independently and a good way of extending their vocabulary.

Eye-catching posters which can be printed up to A3 size to aid your students with their Spanish common irregular verbs. Verbs included: Hacer Tener Ir Ser Estar

Eye-catching posters to be used as a visual aid for your students when conjugating in the present tense, plus a poster for the near future. The PDFs can be printed up to size A3 or larger, if you have the specialist printing equipment.

Challenge tasks or extension work on the topic of clothes. These are all based on authentic French resources (mainly infographs found on Pinterest) with comprehension questions added. I put these up on my 'Challenge Wall' in the classroom for the term and direct any students to them who finish their work early. To save photocopying costs I encourage students not to write on the sheets and to put them back on the wall when they're finished. I find that students get a huge sense of achievement from knowing that they are reading and understanding real French literature! As an extra incentive to try more difficult work I offer 'challenge stars' in return for tackling these tricky tasks. These are converted periodically into merits.

This resource is used by every teacher in my department and it's all about getting over that motivation barrier in the very first lesson. There's a settling activity which requires them to consider where French is spoken (thereby giving them a reason to learn the language), then a few of slides about the expectations we have of them (these can be taken out if preferred, or amended to suit your needs). The first 'real' task required students to identify the same word in four languages and to group them accordingly. This shows students how similar many languages are and that once they have begun to learn one foreign language, learning another one is easy! It also introduces them to the concept on cognates. Following this there are three pictures with a short phrase in French. Where necessary there are a few items of vocabulary. Students are to translate the meaning of the phrases, using cognates, the vocab given and the context of the picture to help them. I emphasise to them that in their first lesson they are already showing that they can understand whole phrases and practising important reading skills. The next slide shows a sign in Norwegian and asks students to apply the skills they've just learned to translate it, thereby showing students that although they are learning French, the skills they are learning can be applied to any language. The final section of the powerpoint shows a number of amazing places around the world (an attempt to broaden students' horizons beyond the region they live in), interspersed with reasons to learn a foreign language. I ask students to make brief notes of these reasons and then at the end of the ppt to select the 5 reasons which are most important to them. We discuss these reasons briefly at the end of the lesson.