Students Use Multiple Resources in French Class

June 5, 2020

Academics

GNS

Students in Madame Hall and Madame Maycock’s French 6 classes have been using new resources to complement their online learning. Lately, the classes have been using the website ‘Education Perfect’ to learn new vocabulary for their last unit of the year, Bon Appétit!

They have been working in pairs in a Google Meet to complete the exercises assigned in each class. One lesson gave students a chance to practice their speaking skills by recording their voices as they read sentences. Madame Hall and Madame Maycock could then use the website to listen to their recordings and provide feedback.

“Education Perfect is a website that offers smart lessons based around various themes and skill levels,” explained Madame Hall. “The website shows when students are having difficulty in particular areas, and then the teacher can either go in and give feedback or incorporate those aspects into the next class if many students are having the same problem. The usual learning activities for this unit were difficult to adjust to online learning. Education Perfect was tailored to learning similar vocabulary and sentence structures online. I could see from student engagement with the platform that they were learning and motivated to stay focused on the various activities.”

The students haven’t been using the website in every class, but it’s been a welcome addition to their resources.

“The websites we work on are really fun, and we get rewards from them if we complete all the tasks,” said Arav Ishwarlall. “But, I have found this tool fun to do and easy to work with.”

The unit the students have been working on is about the culture of food and celebration, and how people, families and countries have different traditions. This leads up to the final project, where students get to act as both waiters/waitresses and customers in a cafe, and they interact in French in both roles. While students won’t be able to have their traditional cafe, they are still making do.

“I think that everyone is kind of disappointed that we can’t do that anymore but we are still having lots of fun learning about the culture of food and how people celebrate it,” said Kate Marriette. “I find this unit quite helpful and so far we have learned how to say lots of different foods in French. I can’t wait to learn more about the relations between French celebrations and food!”

It’s more difficult to simulate the authentic practice of speaking French in an online learning environment, but the students and teachers have been able to adapt and keep learning new tricks.

“This Grade 6 group is already keen and enthusiastic,” said Madame Maycock. “They have been very helpful to me, as well to each other. For example, students in this group are eager to present their screens in Google Meet and to assist peers in troubleshooting. It has been really neat to see these students take on a leadership role in the online platform.”