aujourd'hui (French) – Structured Vocabulary Support
£2.00
'Aujourd'hui' is one of the first words a French learner writes down, and one of the strangest to spell - an apostrophe in the middle, a silent 'd', a run of letters that don't sound the way they look. There's a reason for every piece of it, and it starts with a small word hidden inside: 'day'.
'Aujourd'hui' didn't begin as one word. It was built up over time from a short Latin phrase, and by the time it settled, the word for 'day' had ended up inside it more than once. The cards follow how that happened - and why French, alone among its neighbours, made the long version when Spanish and Italian kept theirs short.
• An illustrated black-and-white word-history in comic form - stage panels, one idea to each, following 'aujourd'hui' back to the short Latin phrase it grew from
• The word-history breakdown, Latin to modern French, with a date at each stage the record allows
• A sources page listing where every claim comes from
• A short guide for the adult on how to use the cards
The PDF prints two ways, and you choose which suits you. The large cards - one idea to a page - are made to be laminated and clipped onto a single binder ring, so a child can handle them, turn them over and lay them out in order. You print, laminate, trim and bind these yourself; the cards are numbered, so a loose deck goes back in sequence. The single sheet at the end holds the whole word on one page - print it and it's ready, no laminating or cutting. You'll need a printer; a laminator and a ring are needed only for the deck.
Because the large cards come apart, there's more to do with them than read. Shuffle the stage cards and rebuild the timeline. Deal them face-down and turn them over one at a time. Hold up the two halves of the word and ask what each one brings to it. Match a Latin stage to the modern French it turned into. If you own more than one word from L'atelier des mots, clip the shared cards onto one ring and line the day-family up together. It's the same cards, talked through and handled differently - adult-led, a few minutes at a time, never a drill.
'Aujourd'hui' is usually learned as a shape - a hard-to-spell block a child copies out and hopes to remember. Learned that way it slips, because nothing holds the letters in place. Shown as a phrase that was built up piece by piece, with a reason behind every part, the spelling stops being arbitrary and starts to make sense.
Designed first for my own son's French, but it suits a wider range:
• Anyone who likes where words come from
• French learners in Key Stages 3 and 4, and GCSE students meeting 'aujourd'hui'
• Home-educated children
• Learners who find vocabulary hard to hold when it's taught as isolated words - including dyslexic and working-memory profiles
• Parents brushing up their own French, or studying alongside a child
• Adults coming back to French after school
This isn't a first step into French. A learner should already be meeting 'aujourd'hui' in lessons or reading - the cards explain a word a child is encountering, they don't introduce the language from scratch. If a child hasn't met it at all yet, this will come too early.
Related resources
• In L'atelier des mots: 'jour' is the nearest neighbour - the same day-word standing on its own.
• For anyone who likes the links across languages: 'oggi' (Italian, L'Officina Radice) and 'hoy' (Spanish, El Taller Raíz) are the same word as the 'hui' buried in 'aujourd'hui' - all three from one Latin phrase.
• In the Compendium: the post on why word origins help dyslexic learners with modern languages.
• Free in The Wordhord: the English cousins from the same family - 'diurnal' and 'journal' - each as its own word card.
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
Available now as a PDF download.
'Aujourd'hui' is one of the first words a French learner writes down, and one of the strangest to spell - an apostrophe in the middle, a silent 'd', a run of letters that don't sound the way they look. There's a reason for every piece of it, and it starts with a small word hidden inside: 'day'.
'Aujourd'hui' didn't begin as one word. It was built up over time from a short Latin phrase, and by the time it settled, the word for 'day' had ended up inside it more than once. The cards follow how that happened - and why French, alone among its neighbours, made the long version when Spanish and Italian kept theirs short.
• An illustrated black-and-white word-history in comic form - stage panels, one idea to each, following 'aujourd'hui' back to the short Latin phrase it grew from
• The word-history breakdown, Latin to modern French, with a date at each stage the record allows
• A sources page listing where every claim comes from
• A short guide for the adult on how to use the cards
The PDF prints two ways, and you choose which suits you. The large cards - one idea to a page - are made to be laminated and clipped onto a single binder ring, so a child can handle them, turn them over and lay them out in order. You print, laminate, trim and bind these yourself; the cards are numbered, so a loose deck goes back in sequence. The single sheet at the end holds the whole word on one page - print it and it's ready, no laminating or cutting. You'll need a printer; a laminator and a ring are needed only for the deck.
Because the large cards come apart, there's more to do with them than read. Shuffle the stage cards and rebuild the timeline. Deal them face-down and turn them over one at a time. Hold up the two halves of the word and ask what each one brings to it. Match a Latin stage to the modern French it turned into. If you own more than one word from L'atelier des mots, clip the shared cards onto one ring and line the day-family up together. It's the same cards, talked through and handled differently - adult-led, a few minutes at a time, never a drill.
'Aujourd'hui' is usually learned as a shape - a hard-to-spell block a child copies out and hopes to remember. Learned that way it slips, because nothing holds the letters in place. Shown as a phrase that was built up piece by piece, with a reason behind every part, the spelling stops being arbitrary and starts to make sense.
Designed first for my own son's French, but it suits a wider range:
• Anyone who likes where words come from
• French learners in Key Stages 3 and 4, and GCSE students meeting 'aujourd'hui'
• Home-educated children
• Learners who find vocabulary hard to hold when it's taught as isolated words - including dyslexic and working-memory profiles
• Parents brushing up their own French, or studying alongside a child
• Adults coming back to French after school
This isn't a first step into French. A learner should already be meeting 'aujourd'hui' in lessons or reading - the cards explain a word a child is encountering, they don't introduce the language from scratch. If a child hasn't met it at all yet, this will come too early.
Related resources
• In L'atelier des mots: 'jour' is the nearest neighbour - the same day-word standing on its own.
• For anyone who likes the links across languages: 'oggi' (Italian, L'Officina Radice) and 'hoy' (Spanish, El Taller Raíz) are the same word as the 'hui' buried in 'aujourd'hui' - all three from one Latin phrase.
• In the Compendium: the post on why word origins help dyslexic learners with modern languages.
• Free in The Wordhord: the English cousins from the same family - 'diurnal' and 'journal' - each as its own word card.
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
Available now as a PDF download.
