Nous sommes Novice French Curriculum | Level 1
The Nous sommes Curriculum for Novice learners, Level 1
$275.00
$285.00
The Nous sommes Curriculum
Where language and culture connect.
A complete, proficiency-oriented French curriculum that helps students communicate with confidence while exploring the cultures of the French-speaking world.
Everything You Need to Teach French
Designed for Novice and Intermediate learners, Nous sommes provides daily lesson plans, cultural content, assessments, authentic resources, and step-by-step teacher guidance so you can focus on teaching instead of planning.
Why Nous sommes?
French is more than a language. It's a global community.
The French language connects people across Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and beyond. Nous sommes helps students discover the diversity of the francophone world while developing real-world communication skills.
Communication First
Students learn to understand and express meaning, not memorize isolated grammar rules.
Culture Throughout
Every unit explores products, practices, and perspectives from French-speaking communities.
Acquisition Focused
Lessons are designed to support proficiency development through language acquisition.
Designed for Teachers.
Spend less time planning. More time teaching.
Teaching French should be about connecting with students, not spending every evening creating materials from scratch. Nous sommes provides a clear path forward with ready-to-use lessons, engaging content, and practical teacher support so that you can focus your energy on helping students communicate and grow.
Planning takes hours.
→ Daily lesson plans are already written.
Students struggle to stay engaged.
→ Stories, discussions, games, readings, and authentic resources keep students involved.
It's hard to know what to do in French.
→ Teacher scripts and guidance support target-language use from day one.
Assessment creation is overwhelming.
→ Ready-to-use proficiency-oriented assessments are included.
Meaningful content creates meaningful communication.
Students use French to learn about people, traditions, issues, stories, and perspectives from across the francophone world.
Example topics:
- Festivals and traditions
- Music and popular culture
- Food and regional cuisine
- Legends and storytelling
- Social change and activism
- Daily life across the francophone world
- Sports and community
Testimonials
A very thorough and easy to follow resource as always, with the Comprehensible Classroom. Anxiously awaiting more French units to follow in Nous Sommes 2!
There are many creative activities and plans included in this unit. Using the Nous Sommes lesson plans and activities never gets stale.
Great resource. I've used in a classroom Somos Flex and Nous Sommes is great too and very engaging.
Love the Storybuilder and how seamlessly they work with the each of the Nous Sommes Units in terms of target structures. Great resource. Merci!
This is a great unit to continue getting students used to the Nous Sommes way of learning French. The activities are engaging and fun for both teacher and student.
This is a great resource even if you have already bought the traditional Nous Sommes 1 Unit 4.
I LOVE the stoyrbuilders for each Nous Sommes Unit. Since there is not a full U10 for Nous Sommes, I used this in my French 2 class. We then made a past tense version of the story as part of our unit on past tense. I am hopeful that this resource means there is more Nous Sommes to come!
As all the rest of the Nous Sommes curriculum, it was great. I am as always amazed at seeing my students' progress. I hope we get to see the continuation one day.
I love the structure that the Nous Sommes curriculum provides me, and there are wonderful and engaging activities to use with students. I've see great results!
The FLEX curriculum has become a must-have for me, as it allows me to expand upon the original Nous Sommes curriculum. My students enjoy the stories and story builders and I love that there are extra (no prep) resources there to extend the unit when I need it.
Proficiency-oriented Curriculum
Proficient language learners can talk about topics, for purposes, with accuracy; The Nous sommes Curriculum is designed to achieve this result. In every lesson of The Nous sommes Curriculum, learners engage in real-life communication on many different topics that help students to develop linguistic proficiency and interculturality.
Authentic resources
Authentic resources create a context for the language, motivate the learner, and offer students an insider’s view to the target culture. In each unit of The Nous sommes Curriculum, students engage meaningfully with authentic resources, which reinforces the direct relationship between the language classroom and the outside world. The authentic resources used in Nous sommes are aligned with the task models from the AP Language and Culture Exam, including promotional materials, literary texts, articles, charts, letters, audio reports, conversations, interviews, instructions, and presentations.
Natural Acquisition
Different from a traditional curriculum, Nous sommes does not have a specific grammar focus for each unit. The daily lesson plans provide suggestions for using contextualized grammar instruction such as Pop-up Grammar and Grammar in Context to help students understand the meaning of the grammatical forms that they observe in the language. All performance assessments are focused on understanding and being understood, not on mastery of specific grammar concepts.
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Tutorials from the blog
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7 End-of-Year Projects That Actually Make Sense
Jun 5, 2026If you're going to do a project, choose one that keeps the focus on what students can actually do with language at their current level of proficiency.
Here are seven end-of-year project ideas that do exactly that.
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The Problem with "Authentic" Names
Dec 4, 2025The Somos, Vamos, and Nous sommes curriculum are filled with stories, and the characters in those stories have a wide variety of names. Although the stories are used in French classes and Spanish classes, the characters often don’t have names that we’d think of as French or Spanish names. Teachers sometimes wonder… why?
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Why We Don’t Encourage “Repeat After Me” for Vocabulary Introduction
Nov 14, 2025When introducing new vocabulary, it feels natural to tell students, “Repeat after me!” At The Comprehensible Classroom, this is a habit we have worked hard to break. Now, we recommend a different approach.