By Kitty Chen V Form, Stephanie Moon III Form, and Rosanna Zhao III Form

Un jour typique

French 2 assessments this year have been largely project-based, and following each project, students submit video reflections through Voicethread. After finishing a video project this fall, their reflections offered three pieces of feedback: 1 – “We’d like to do bigger projects over longer periods of time. Sometimes it feels like we just do one project after the next.” 2 – “Working with others is fun, but sometimes it would be nice to do our own projects.” 3 – “What if we had more choices in HOW we present what we know?” Armed with this information, all 16 students and Ms. McCulloch brainstormed.

Given a call for more time for a project, the work needed to cover two units of vocabulary and grammar. The requirements for the project were: 1 – to use the household routine and healthcare vocabulary to talk about two different days in their lives (one typical day using the present tense and one day that stood out, either for bad or good reasons, using the past tenses) and 2 –  to have both a spoken and a written component for their projects. The rest was up to the students. As a full class, we shouted out different ways to present – paper storybook, digital storybook, animation, cartoon, radio show, video, Twitter feed, Snapchat feed – the list went on. How many vocabulary words should we use? 30! Should we be graded on creativity or French language? Both! In the end, the class wound up with sixteen vastly different projects, each meeting the criteria and aligning to the rubric the students created themselves. Here are three examples:

Kitty Chen – Digital Story Book with spoken presentation component in class

Stephanie Moon – Radio Show with flyer advertisement 

Rosanna Zhao – Screencast of social media updates