Meeting at 8.00am on Mondays before School, the Barbreck Early Birds French Program combines foundation French vocabulary with language games. The Program helps beginner French learners feel more confident when engaging with the language during class time.  

Early Birds focuses on the core language required to move about the classroom, as well as vocabulary areas such as colours and numbers which may have been covered before the student’s arrival. 

Early Birds started in 2019 in response to a large influx of students new to French. As Barbreck’s enrolment numbers continue to expand, the Early Birds Program expanded with it. The Program is filled with a positive group of new students learning together to play games and engage with the French language, whilst having some fun! 

Students particularly enjoy ‘frappes les mots!’ (see below image), a frenetic game with two fly swatters and a lot of written vocabulary or pictures. In this ‘head-to-head’ scenario, the teacher either asks a question or says a particular piece of vocabulary. The students must then ‘frappe,’ or hit, the correct answer or word with their fly swatter. The swatter that gets there first has an opportunity to say the vocabulary correctly or place it in a sentence. The winner stays on, so stakes are always high! This activity encourages the fast interpretation of input, followed by a decisive action when swatting the word.