Francophone Countries Around the World

This was a lesson to “demonstrate basic awareness that there are Francophone communities around the world.”  BC Core French Curriculum – Grade 7

Resources

• Flags of the World cards 
• Une Liste des Pays Francophone (Worksheet)
• https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ag.html
• http://www.frenchlearner.com/vocabulary/countries/
• https://www.francophonie.org/Cartes-du-monde-de-la-Francophonie.html
• French Language Across the World (Video)

Lesson

I wanted the students to ““demonstrate basic awareness that there are Francophone communities around the world.”

Each student was assigned a Francophone country (Une Liste des Pays Francophone). I was given a list of countries to research by another teacher who had discovered that some countries are very difficult to research online.

I have done this lesson twice.  In one school, I asked the students to draw a picture of themselves in front of a school that exists in their Francophone country.  The other school was asked to draw their family in front of a tourist destination.  (I forgot to ask the second school to name the tourist destination. Next time . . . )

On the front of their picture, they were to write a few targeted sentences in French and images of an animal that lives in the country, a popular sport, what the natural world looks like (ex: desert, tropical waters, mountains), a flag and anything else they discovered.  On the back they were to write two interesting facts about their country in English.

I learned that asking for the national animal, food, and sport is very difficult to research online for some countries.  For me, it was not worth the time to seek this information.  There are some countries I could not find the information.  Also, I was also very flexible on what level/type of school the students would use in their project.

(This lesson was also a great opportunity to discuss how a Google image is not to be trusted blindly as a subject search.  One must go to the source of the photo).

The lesson took one or two classes for research/design and one for the presentation.

If you discover any Francophone country that you think I should add to my list (based completely on how difficult it is to research online), please let me know!