As I mentioned in my post introducing these French 7 thematic units, there are pros and cons to teaching "language agnostic" units. Without having the Shelby Country Schools' (SCS) models to lean on, I could never have designed units that were as intentional and focused - and for that I am very, very grateful. At the same time, I love the distinctly French/francophone flavor of Laura Terrill's units and how they really center around authentic resources. So, having written three units based on SCS, I chose to conclude the year by adapting a unit from Terrill. I love the international elements to this unit, the fact that students learn new information, and that we wrap up with a real-world task. The unit template for this 8-week unit can be found here, plus there are lesson plans and my Pinterest board of resources. Everything's centered on this performance objective: "I can have a conversation about my life at school and life at schools in the French-speaking world."
My Life at School
Since our first Can-Do is "I can tell someone about my school schedule & compare it to school schedules in France," we begin by reading and viewing a number of resources that address school schedules, types of schools, and various classes (see interpretive packet here). Next, for "I can describe my school, my classes, and my teachers" and "I can give my opinion of my school, classes, and teachers," I introduce many new adjectives and students take a brief look at the history of French schools (the song Sacré Charlemagne, and a BD version of his first medieval schools) in this packet. Students interview one another to discover how they feel about school, and we read the book Je veux pas aller à l'école (interpretive tasks for the book are here). In this packet, you'll also find questions to accompany an English-language blog post about French schools and several authentic documents about school lunch, including an English-language video; students read/view English materials at home so that we can stay in the target language during class time. Students view a humorous video about middle school life (interpretive tasks here) in order to observe characteristics of French middle schools, and practice giving opinions. Since we had ePals, students were able to reach out to their ePals and ask follow-up questions they had about the French school system.
My Life at School
Since our first Can-Do is "I can tell someone about my school schedule & compare it to school schedules in France," we begin by reading and viewing a number of resources that address school schedules, types of schools, and various classes (see interpretive packet here). Next, for "I can describe my school, my classes, and my teachers" and "I can give my opinion of my school, classes, and teachers," I introduce many new adjectives and students take a brief look at the history of French schools (the song Sacré Charlemagne, and a BD version of his first medieval schools) in this packet. Students interview one another to discover how they feel about school, and we read the book Je veux pas aller à l'école (interpretive tasks for the book are here). In this packet, you'll also find questions to accompany an English-language blog post about French schools and several authentic documents about school lunch, including an English-language video; students read/view English materials at home so that we can stay in the target language during class time. Students view a humorous video about middle school life (interpretive tasks here) in order to observe characteristics of French middle schools, and practice giving opinions. Since we had ePals, students were able to reach out to their ePals and ask follow-up questions they had about the French school system.
Education Around the World
At this point, students were very familiar with talking about their own lives at school and had some basic information about school in France, so we began to look at global education with a particular focus on the French-speaking world . My department head Tim Eagan shared some great resources and tasks with me that he developed for a Spanish class, which I incorporated into my planning. For this Can-Do from Laura Terrill, "I can describe the current status of education for young people here and globally," I relied on several highly visual resources such as images of classrooms around the world, school yards around the world, and children going to school in different ways. Students reviewed modes of transported, practiced describing, and learned the words for many different school supplies as they discussed what they saw (and what they didn't see). They started by simply building sentences with this hands-on card-sorting task, then graduated to writing their own descriptions. In order to capitalize on the interculturality here, I used the See-Think-Wonder strategy for students to write and speak about their observations and questions. This is a powerful strategy because it meets students where they are at. For example, students noticed in one video that students in Mayotte weren't wearing shoes to gym class. One wondered if they were more comfortable without shoes, while another wondered if they lacked money to buy sneakers. To paraphrase Laura Terrill, "Simple words, deep ideas." My interpretive tasks can be found here, and the accompanying Okapi article Une rentrée autour du monde here.
The next two Can-Dos, "I can describe why going to school is important to me and to young people around the world
and "I can identify and categorize economic, political, and social reasons why young people cannot go/stay in school globally," relied heavily on UNICEF's #emergencylessons video campaign, infographics and other simple interpretive reading for students to complete a series of tasks here. They also did a card-sorting task to group reasons by type.
For our final Can-Do, "I can give examples of initiatives that support schooling for all young people globally," I focused almost exclusively on the PEPA (Pas d'Education, Pas d'Avenir) campaign by Solidarité Laïque because their materials were so rich, appealing, and comprehensible. PEPA runs a Donorschoose-style campaign where they publicize a number of education projects in the French-speaking world and appeal to donors to donate to the project they find most compelling. The website uses a set format for each project, which makes it highly comprehensible for Novice learners:
At this point, students were very familiar with talking about their own lives at school and had some basic information about school in France, so we began to look at global education with a particular focus on the French-speaking world . My department head Tim Eagan shared some great resources and tasks with me that he developed for a Spanish class, which I incorporated into my planning. For this Can-Do from Laura Terrill, "I can describe the current status of education for young people here and globally," I relied on several highly visual resources such as images of classrooms around the world, school yards around the world, and children going to school in different ways. Students reviewed modes of transported, practiced describing, and learned the words for many different school supplies as they discussed what they saw (and what they didn't see). They started by simply building sentences with this hands-on card-sorting task, then graduated to writing their own descriptions. In order to capitalize on the interculturality here, I used the See-Think-Wonder strategy for students to write and speak about their observations and questions. This is a powerful strategy because it meets students where they are at. For example, students noticed in one video that students in Mayotte weren't wearing shoes to gym class. One wondered if they were more comfortable without shoes, while another wondered if they lacked money to buy sneakers. To paraphrase Laura Terrill, "Simple words, deep ideas." My interpretive tasks can be found here, and the accompanying Okapi article Une rentrée autour du monde here.
The next two Can-Dos, "I can describe why going to school is important to me and to young people around the world
and "I can identify and categorize economic, political, and social reasons why young people cannot go/stay in school globally," relied heavily on UNICEF's #emergencylessons video campaign, infographics and other simple interpretive reading for students to complete a series of tasks here. They also did a card-sorting task to group reasons by type.
For our final Can-Do, "I can give examples of initiatives that support schooling for all young people globally," I focused almost exclusively on the PEPA (Pas d'Education, Pas d'Avenir) campaign by Solidarité Laïque because their materials were so rich, appealing, and comprehensible. PEPA runs a Donorschoose-style campaign where they publicize a number of education projects in the French-speaking world and appeal to donors to donate to the project they find most compelling. The website uses a set format for each project, which makes it highly comprehensible for Novice learners:
We began by studying the song On veut with these tasks and then watching a 1Jour1Actu video about the PEPA campaign for global education. Next, students explored the PEPA website by doing a webquest and then studying a few projects in greater depth before creating a detailed presentation. The packet for all of this is here. You may notice that this progression mimics how I approached the study of pets in Unit 3 - I really love starting with a webquest and then building real-world tasks from there. Once students had selected one project to study in detail, they created pitch projects to present in class with the promise that I would donate to one project of the class' choice. Students listened to another's pitches, took notes, and then voted with paper euro bills. This was, by far, my most real-world conclusion to a unit and overall, a great success. Here are some examples of students' work: