This will be brief as I know everyone is mentally occupied with adjusting to drastic change on many levels. WE WILL CONTINUE OUR EPAL PROJECT INTO SEMESTER 2 AFTERALL! The French teacher in France and I have organized a wonderful project together (from home!) We have matched my Block F (grade 8) and Block A (grade 7) French classes with individual French ePals to correspond with. Letter#1 was posted to student Online Learning Work Logs on their Google Classroom. If you haven't already sent me your response PLEASE do. Also, there are links to the FLIPGRID social learning sites on our Classroom as well! Please take a look and search for your ePal's video, create one so that they can learn about you as well. Come to our hangout sessions and ask any questions! Or type your questions IN YOUR ONLINE LEARNING LOGS :) à bientôt!
We had a really good semester connecting with our French ePals and learning about life in their middle school and in their families. We hope to communicate with even more francophone countries in our 2020 semester 1 epal project!
This month we received correspondence from our French ePals. They told us about how they celebrated Halloween, Christmas and other seasonal holidays. They also shared with us what they did during their end of October vacation. It was interesting learning about Le Bûche de Noël tradition, as well as sharing with them about the traditions we have at this time of the year. Since our French class is only one semester, the next time we correspond with them will be on social media, or maybe one day, we will visit them in France! Here are some photos of the French holiday foods, and of us responding to their letters. Bonne Année 2020! It was a very exciting day in French class, as we got a call from the office during C block that our Culture Box had arrived and was waiting for us to pick it up. Several students went down and got it. Then we all watched as students were called up to pick an item from the box and say what we thought it was. It was neat to see the jar of Prune jam because we sent them Blueberry jam. Here are some photos of this exciting day!
This year our ePals come from Montcornet, France. We have traveled to Montcornet virtually on Google Earth, and located our ePal's school. It's name is Collège Charles de Gaulle. It's cool that in France middle schools are called colleges. We are hoping to find out from our new French friends some interesting places in their city.
We have been very busy in French class this month! This week we are wrapping up a "Noël en France IPA" Assessment. IPA stands for an Integrated Performance Assessment. There is an interpretive listening piece, an interpretive reading piece, a presentational speaking, and writing piece. All are connected to the theme: Christmas in France. All use authentic materials so the students analyze and use French resources created by the French and for the French. As our final task we created written holiday cards for our ePals in France. Here are some samples from grades 6 & 7.
After 2 long months of anticipation, the moment arrived. The moment where we look inside the boxes arriving from France, and discover a new culture, a new way of life. Here are some photos from grades 6 & 7 today. We discovered that the French cookies have a LOT of butter, and some are very light and not too sweet. We also noticed they have candy which seems more like real fruit flavors than ours.
Today was an exciting day in French class. We got to watch videos of our ePals opening OUR culture box in Toulouse, France. It was neat to see their expressions as they took the different items we'd included out of the box. We could hear the teacher asking them, "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" Which means, "What is it?" We also received our first hand-written letters, half in French, and half in English, from Toulouse. We are going to share our letters, have Mme. Utz help us read them, and write back. These are the 6th and 8th grade classes we are corresponding with this semester. They are outside of their middle school in Toulouse, France. They are also in their classroom.
Grade 8 students were excited to finally receive our box of cultural artifacts from northern France where we correspond with a middle school French class located in the city of Montcornet. We received a special cookie made in that region of France, which Chris Simard & Haley Lamb are displaying below. We also received detailed letters from the French students explaining in both English and French about themselves and their school days. We look forward to emailing them back and explaining our holiday traditions.
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