French for Kids: 10 Helpful Online Resources

Looking for some French resources for kids? You’re in the right place!

You can learn a new language at any age. You don’t need to be a toddler, or a kindergartener, or some other “magic age”, to become fluent in more than one language. But there are still plenty of reasons to start your children on the path to bilingualism from an early age. And French is an excellent language to start with.

Fluent in 3 Months team member Ashley wrote about how she’s raising her daughter to be bilingual. You can do it too!

No matter what age your children are, it’s not too late (or too early!) to get them started on French. Here are a few ideas to help them on their way:

These resources are also ideal for beginner French learners.

French for Kids: Infant and Up

French Lullabies and Nursery Rhymes

It’s no secret that babies start to recognize language from a very early age. They’re also highly responsive to music.

If you have a very young child, it’s not too early to expose them to French through songs and lullabies. And older children will enjoy them as well, and will probably learn to sing them before you know it.

The easiest places to find lullabies on the internet are Spotify and YouTube.

You can download Spotify on Android and iOS. It’s one of the best free music apps in the world, and is really useful for learning languages. Among other things, it has pre-made playlists for almost every situation or mood you can imagine.

Want to lull your baby to sleep with French lullabies? There’s a playlist for that! It’s called Mes 100 Plus Jolies Berceuses (“My 100 Prettiest Lullabies”). It has, has - you guessed it - a hundred different French lullabies to play. Just enter the name of the playlist in the search field when you launch Spotify.

YouTube is full of great resources to learn French.

Comptines Pour Enfants is an absolutely brilliant set of nineteen French nursery rhyme songs in one YouTube video. It’s better than so many others: instead of just the audio, you get some simple cartoons to help your child see what the songs are about.

Plus for many of the songs the lyrics appear on screen as each line is sung. Be warned, they can be pretty catchy! If your children have reached speaking age, they could be dancing around singing Un, deux, trois, j’irai dans les bois all morning before you know it.

French for Kids: Toddler and Up

French Cartoons

Most kids start watching cartoons (dessins animés, in French) before they can fully understand their native language. They find the moving pictures, music, and laughter of the characters very engaging even if they don’t understand every word being said.

The higher-quality cartoons are usually so good at putting the dialogue in context with the characters’ actions that it’s quite easy to understand what’s going on. It’s even easy to understand what the characters are talking about without being fluent in the language.

This means your toddlers won’t get bored with watching French cartoons. They might not even know the difference!

Caillou is a Canadian cartoon. It follows the adventures of an energetic four-year-old who loves to have fun! With over 400 episodes available on the Caillou YouTube channel, you’ll never run out of new stories to explore in French.

Radio-Canada, Canada’s public broadcasting network, puts tonnes of its television shows online free of charge. The website had a separate section just for cartoons and other kids’ shows.

Unfortunately there’s a catch: you need to be within Canada to view the content, or else use a VPN application to make your location appear to be in Canada.

French Flashcard Apps

You can find French Baby Flash Cards for Android and iOS.

This is one of the few good, free French early learning apps out there. It lets you pick a category and then scroll through the photos one at a time, listening to the French pronunciation of the object in each photo.

Categories include food, numbers, letters, colours, and more.

French for Kids: Starting School (Age 5 and Up)

French Games and Activities

If your children are old enough to play games and puzzles on a tablet or computer, then they can do some self-directed learning on their own time without any help. The following apps are a good place to start.

Duolingo is an old favourite here at Fluent in 3 Months (Fi3M). Duolingo is an incredibly useful app for building basic vocabulary and grammar skills. It’s so easy to use that even a child can play.

It doesn’t only quiz you on a variety of vocabulary. It also identifies your weaker areas so you’ll know which words to practice more often.

Next up is Hello-World French Children’s Activities. Hello-World is a free project whose goal is to teach world languages to children through fun and educational immersion activities. They have succeeded phenomenally, with over 700 activities for French alone!

If your child is close to Kindergarten age, then I recommend starting with the Children’s Games section. It has some easy, basic games such as finding the object that doesn’t belong, or connecting the dots in alphabetical order.

When you click on any object in a game, you hear its pronunciation by a native French speaker. The spelling also comes up in a caption at the bottom of the screen.

For older kids, other activities include vocabulary Bingo, number matching, logic puzzles, and about 695 others!

French Kids' Books

Are you looking for books to read to your child in French? Or maybe your kids read to themselves if their level is high enough. Look no further: International Children’s Digital Library has a collection of thousands of online children’s books in dozens of languages, including nearly 60 books in French.

Miscellaneous French Resources for Kids

Monde des Titounis is an absolute gold mine, containing a little bit of all of the above suggestions.

What I love most about this site is that it has a lot of the classic children’s songs and stories that your kids probably already know in English. That includes Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Little Red Riding Hood.

Hearing a story in one language that you already know well in another is a very useful way to make connections.

What’s more, this resource isn’t just stories and songs. Click the Apprentissage (“learning”) icon. It leads you to some very simple activities to help young children learn basic French vocabulary, such as the alphabet, colours, names of animals, and much more.

There isn’t much reading required to enjoy this site if your child is too young to read French. The fairy tales and other stories are actually narrated videos that let you turn the captioning on or off.

French for Kids: Any Age

Start a French Bilingual Playgroup

I bet you’re not the only parent in your area who is interested in giving their kids a head start in French. Depending where you live, there might also be some French-speaking families nearby who would love to give their children some exposure to French outside their home.

So, why not start a French playgroup?

There are resources all over the web on how to go about starting a bilingual playgroup. The website Intentional Mama has put together some very useful guidelines to help you start your own local group.

You’re All Set to Teach French to Your Children!

These resources are a great starting point to teach French to your kids. If you would like more options, here’s a list of the best online French resources on the internet.

And if you’re planning on learning alongside them (or on using these for your own learning), you should check out my tips on how to learn French faster!

Au revoir!

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