Table top activities

Activities to do in groups

mini word and picture cards - lots of variations
Trouvez des paires! Trouvez une paire! Tu as combien de paires?
1 Matching cards face up, in turn, match the cards saying the French
2 Pelmanism face down, turn 2 over, keep if a match replace if not and try to remember where
3 All the words face up and try to find the pictures and vice versa
4 Kim's game With all the pictures only, remove one and the others have to say which one. Qu'est-ce q'il manque? Kim's game. Have the words spread out nearby for reference.

Dominoes
made on toolsforeducators.com

You could even do words only. Here it's French to French but it could be French - English especially good for words for which you can't get pictures easily like adjectives.
Split words
This works very well with animal words of more than one syllable. This is made up in Word using 2 columns, left right aligned and right left aligned. When cutting them up, you could do an irregular jagged line so that only the right one fits, but then you couldn't make up imaginary animals eg serodile! These are colour coded for gender, but might be easier if the first half of word was a different colour from the second half.
Half sentences
This was initially to practise the construction j'aime les …s. 10 starters and finishers.
I had the sentence beginning on a different colour card. Start with cards face down. In turn pick up 2 cards. Read them out. You should get some funny combinations. Note down the best ones to read to class later.
Then with cards face up, choose a good sentence, maybe one that is true for you and note it down.
Sorting
with a large number of cards eg animal words, ask pupils to sort them as they see fit. Could be all birds, all farm animals. Or it could be words with the same French sound in them!

The files we used are in ANIMALS folder in our GLOW group.