Homeschool Foreign Language

Elementary French from

Middlebury Interactive Languages {Review}

Middlebury Interactive Languages makes learning French so much fun! My daughter has been working through the Elementary French 1 (Grades 3-5).

Middlebury Interactive Languages offers a completely digital way to learn French! My 4th grade daughter has thoroughly enjoyed studying Elementary French with this subscription. As you can see from the graphic below is that this course offers a wealth of French vocabulary through each unit. It covers French greetings and numbers to names, clothing, food and even jobs and professions. It won’t give her the necessary skills to replace the translating company I use (Jonckers Translation), but at least she’s on her way to potentially building a career by doing translating.

The Elementary French course is a great homeschool foreign language curriculum to teach French vocabulary to your student. However, in addition to the amazing amount of vocabulary that they will come away with, they will also be exposed to the French language, the sentence structure and verbs. This is because of how Middlebury Interactive Languages sets up their homeschool foreign language curriculum.

With each lesson the students are exposed to a video about the subject matter. However, the video isn’t a “do this, say this” type of instruction. It is a full language immersion video featuring sentences, the vocabulary and it is all done with a narrator who speaks French fluently.

The students are given plenty of practice exercises to test their knowledge of the vocabulary. Pictured above is one of the “numbers practice” pages. The student is taught the spelling and the pronunciation of the French numbers. They are then asked to identify them by matching the French number word to the digit on the right.

One of the features my daughter liked best was the opportunity to use the computer’s microphone to record herself speaking in French. This is part of the lessons. When presented with new vocabulary the students will be given the opportunity to try out the French words for themselves.

The lessons are very cute, as well. They feature fun graphics, engaging little songs and videos about the subject matter. My daughter has never once complained about completing her lessons and in fact she has enjoyed it very much.

I loved that it isn’t a dry homeschool foreign language curriculum but a very fun and creative one! I was so excited to see that it isn’t something that seems boring and out of reach to the student but in fact it is quite the opposite. Middlebury Interactive Languages is very interactive and immersive for young students and I feel that this is probably the best way to learn another language (short of going and living in a country which speaks it fluently.)

I asked my nine year old daughter to tell in her own words what she likes about this homeschool foreign language program. Here is what she wrote, “At first I didn’t like that they show you a long video of someone speaking French and they expect you to understand it. But I did like that they make it fun by adding Fairy Tales. I also enjoy recording and learning French. I like learning cool and interesting facts about French, too.”

This program is meant to be completed a couple of times a week to be completed in a year’s time. I definitely recommend this curriculum. I think it provides a very unique experience for the student.