L’atelier des mots

Your child has learnt 'beaucoup' for the test. They can say it. But on the page it's seven letters that don't match the sound, and by next week the word and its spelling have come apart again - if they stuck at all. French is hard to hold on to partly because it doesn't look the way it sounds. Endings fall silent, letters do nothing you can hear, and a learner who already finds reading effortful is being asked to remember a shape that seems to have no relationship to the word they say out loud. Or you're teaching French at home, going over the same word three lessons running and watching it slip away each time.

There's a reason French looks the way it does. French spelling was largely fixed around the way the language sounded eight or nine hundred years ago, and it has stayed close to that ever since while the spoken language carried on changing underneath it. The silent endings and the letters that don't seem to do anything aren't random - they're an older pronunciation left on the page, and often a record of where the word came from. So the difficulty isn't that French is illogical. It's that the logic is historical, and a struggling reader can't see it without being shown.

How the packs work

The packs in L'atelier des mots work with that. Instead of asking a learner to memorise the whole word, they show how the word is built, where it comes from, and how it connects to others - the roots, the patterns, and the links to English that turn up again and again across French. Once a learner can recognise a root inside a longer word, or spot how a French word connects to one they already know in English, a French word stops being a string of letters that won't behave and becomes something with parts they recognise. This is the same structured approach I use in tuition, applied to French. I'm a specialist literacy teacher and a linguist, and these resources were originally created to support one of my own children's learning once the school day had ended. They were shaped through real use - I changed them as I went, based on what helped and what didn't.

The packs are made to be picked up for short sessions. They support whatever else is happening - school French, or a course you're running at home - rather than replacing it.

How the packs print

Each pack is a PDF that prints into two forms, and you pick the one that suits you. The large cards - one idea to a page - are made to laminate and clip onto a binder ring, so a child can handle the deck, turn the cards over and lay the stages out in order. The single sheet at the end holds the whole word on one page - print it and it's ready, for the pencil case or the middle of a lesson. You'll need a printer, and a laminator and a ring if you want the deck; the single sheet needs neither. Full instructions are inside each pack.

Why seeing the structure helps vocabulary stay put

For many learners, and particularly those who find reading hard, vocabulary taught as isolated items rarely settles into memory. Teaching words through their structure - their roots, their patterns, the families they belong to - helps recall. The evidence for this is strongest in English, with children and struggling readers, and the application to French is a reasoned extension rather than something proven to the same degree. I've written about where the evidence is strong and where it's more reasoned than proven over in the Compendium.

The French word packs

Each pack takes one common French word and makes its structure visible - meaning, roots, and the connections that tie it to other words and to English. The panels are laid out to keep the page uncluttered, so a learner isn't fighting the format as well as the language. Each one is a short printable PDF - a single word broken into its parts, with the meaning and the connected words set out clearly enough to use in one short session. L'atelier des mots is the French branch of The Wordcrafter's Bench, applying the same approach to French - teaching language explicitly and in a clear order, the method known as structured literacy.

Browse the individual packs below. Each is £2. Click any one to see what's inside. There's a free sample - 'Salut' - if you'd like to see what a pack looks like before buying. If you want to search for an individual word, you can do that by using the search bar.