Kindergarten Workbook: French is a 125-page book (PDF) that parents can use to introduce children to the French language. In spite of its title, it should work well with children up to seven or eight years of age. The book has 20 lessons that should each take about one week to complete. Lessons are arranged topically, addressing food, clothes, common expressions, days of the week, and other such topics.
This workbook is very colorful, and it uses a large font that should be easy for children to read. It is written primarily in French, showing the English translations when it introduces new words. The brief instructions on some pages are also written in French, which will be an extra challenge for parents who don’t know the language. But for most pages, it is obvious what you are to do.
There are six pages per lesson. The first page of each lesson introduces the new vocabulary words including images whenever possible. Ideally, parents will help children practice saying the words out loud. There is no pronunciation guide in the book, but you can use one of the many online translation tools (e.g. https://forvo.com/languages/fr/) if you need assistance. (Theoretically, you could use the book only for the written exercises, but I don’t see much point if children are exposed to the written forms of the words and don’t learn to pronounce them.)
For most lessons, the rest of the pages include a matching exercise, a page with the French words to trace, a coloring page, a page on which children will write the new words, and a page where they will circle the image that matches each French word. Lessons that are not easily illustrated with images have slightly different activities such as a word search puzzle and a drawing activity. Children should learn up to nine new words each week.
Two pages at the end of the book have flashcards of famous French monuments such as the Eiffel Tower, but there are no instructions for using them.
Kindergarten Workbook: French will probably work best for parents who are at least somewhat familiar with the French language since they will have an easier time using the new French words in the lessons and in casual contexts with their children. The approach used in this book makes it simple to teach children beginning French vocabulary as well as how to read and write the words.
