As we near the end of May, I love to find new and creative ways to encourage my French students to speak en français in an authentic setting that gives them an opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned throughout the year. And what can be more authentic than playing a game, am I right? The current theme in our grade 1 Dimoitou program focuses on the farm and there is one story that follows a mother hen in her search for Petit Poussin. It's a cute little story and the students love playing the role of Maman Poule and, using their best hen voice, shouting out: "Petit Poussin, Petit Poussin, où es-tu?"

Yesterday, I had the idea of creating a game board in Google Slides made of eight tiles that covered a hidden image in the background. I thought I could use animations to have the tiles slowly fade away "on click" and reveal a part of the image but, as I soon discovered, when using this method in "present" mode, the tiles would fade away in the order they appear on the animation panel. This simply wouldn't work if I wanted students to randomly pick a tile since there is no way to have that specific tile fade away by clicking on it directly. 

Today, I resigned to playing the game in "edit" mode and decided to manually delete each tile to reveal the hidden image. While not the perfect solution, it worked out well. I did have to hide the menu bar, maximize the window and adjust the view to make it fill the screen as much as possible. And, because my first trial run revealed the barn that I had originally hidden in the slide master, I chose to use a tractor instead. Initially, I thought I would have the students try to figure out what was hiding underneath the tiles but I am fairly certain that would be too easy. Instead, I took inspiration from the Petit Poussin story and hid a chick either on, under, beside, behind, inside or in front of the tractor. This would afford an opportunity for students to demonstrate their understanding of prepositions. Score! Then, to make game play even easier, I created different layouts in the slide master and adjusted the location of the chick, added additional slides with the new layouts, copied and pasted the tiles on top of each of them and voilà! Six rounds ready to go!

So how does the game work?

For now, I left the tiles the same on each slide so students can build their confidence in describing the images. I can, however, easily change the image on each tile to vary the vocabulary, which makes this game board pretty much adaptable to any theme or grammar concept. Or, I can create a more difficult board by filling it with smaller tiles. Care to have a peek? I have included a "view only" link below and if you like it, feel free to make a copy (click on File - Make a copy) and edit at will. 

Petit Poussin Google Slides Hidden Object French Game

The slide I used for the preposition à côté de confuses the students because they want to say derrière le tracteur so I'm thinking of creating another version with a stable or a barn where the front of the building is facing the viewer. You can do that, too, by replacing the tractor in the slide master (click on Slide - Edit master). Be sure to change it on the "Master" slide if you want it to appear on all slides. Then, you can adjust the chick on the individual layouts. I also chose to rename each layout based on the preposition just to make it easier to select the layouts I want to use.

You might be wondering how I hid the chick behind the wheel in the last slide. Since the tractor appears in the Master slide, I cannot layer anything underneath it in the subsequent layouts. A simple solution is to copy and paste the tractor on to that layout and sandwich Petit Poussin in between. You can adjust the layers by right-clicking on the images and reconfiguring their order.

You may notice that the images I have layered on top of the tiles are attached to them. I did this by selecting both the tile and the image while holding down the "shift" key, right clicking on one of them, and selecting the "group" option. To replace the image on the tile, click on it twice and delete it. When inserting a new image, resize and reposition it, then regroup the tile with the new image.

Hope you get a chance to try the game in your class. And should you have any tips, suggestions or extension ideas, I would love to hear from you. As always, feel free to leave a comment below if you'd like to share or if you ever have any questions.