Wednesday, November 13, 2013

French Essentials {A Review}

About The Company:

French Essential’s is a company that offers French lessons especially for homeschoolers!  YAY!

 

About The Product:

French Essentials is divided into modules.  6 of them to be exact. Each module is divided into units.  Each module includes audio, video and workbook, along with evaluations.

I am mostly going to discuss the first module since that is the one we used.  I did take a look over all the available modules and will touch on those as well.

The first module teaches over 160 words and sentence structures over 20 lessons divided into 5 units.  This module teaches the basics of French such as:

  • The French Alphabet
  • accents and markings
  • pronunciation
  • numbers
  • basic conversation phrases
  • many vocabulary words

Module 2 teaches over 150 words and sentence structures over 25 lessons divided into 5 units. This module teaches things like:

  • time
  • days, months, seasons, weather, temperature
  • more numbers
  • more in depth pronunciation rules

Module 3 has 15 lessons divided over 3 units and teaches things like:

  • Thematic vocabulary words in these themes; the house, the city, the clothing, transportation, devices and things in a room.  
  • general conversational phrases
  • pronunciation rules

Module 4 has 15 lessons over 3 units and teaches:

  • Thematic vocabulary words in these themes; family, relatives, restaurants and drinks
  • Introduction to prepositions
  • many review of previously learned French.

Module 5 has 15 lessons divided over 3 units and teaches:

  • Even more conversational phrases; things like offering your opinion and adverbs.
  • Even more pronunciation rules

Module 6-10 are still in the works.

The way a lesson works is that you will log into the student area.

You will download the student workbook.  We chose to print and bind ours with the module checklist as the front page.

P2032335

Once downloaded you are then ready to begin a lesson.  The first 3 lessons of module one are done using the interactive pdf file you downloaded. Beginning on lesson 4, you will work in the online exercises which include flashcards, learner, spelling, a test and 2 games.

 

The culture area shows you about the French culture and is actually very interesting and informative.

 

A day/week in our life:

I assign Emily French about 4 days a week.  The first day she learned the French Alphabet and then the interactive PDF spelled English words in French and she had to write the words out.  I thought this was one of the neatest foreign language lessons I had ever seen.  P1202265

The website had a learning curve for us, it was difficult at first for us to navigate what we are supposed to do. Once we discovered the getting started page and checklist and printed and bound the entire workbook, we found our groove and it became easy. P2032337

Each day she does a lesson using the interactive PDF with her workbook page.  The next two days she does the online lesson, the 4th day she takes the online test. 

Final thoughts: 

After the initial “getting to know the website” this has been a great multi dimensional French Curriculum.

I appreciate the fact that she is learning to read, write and speak French as well as learning about the French Culture. 

French is a language Emily has always wanted to learn and we have tried other French curriculum and it wasn’t a good fit for her.  The fact that this is geared for homeschoolers and has the different ways of teaching and review is built in.  This has been working so well for us.

Some details:

There is an online placement test if you are not sure what module to start in.

The 10 modules count as 2 years worth of high school credit.  However this can be used with children grades 2-12.  Obviously the older students can move faster through the curriculum than the younger ones.

The modules can be purchased for $69.95 each and are valid for 90 days. 

Full access to modules 1-5 with a one year download timeframe are priced at $149.95.

We are not the only ones to use this, to see what others think, check out this post:

Photobucket
To see a wide variety of reviews check out our crew blog.

Photobucket
 
 


No comments:

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...