Though they aren’t traveling to France, French students are experiencing the native culture through pen pals.
Della Thompson, French teacher, said right now her students are working on video projects to show the students in France what school in America is like. Students can either make a video showing them talking, or they can use Photo Story with pictures and voice overlay.
“The 84 students in French three, four and five, will be one on one with a correspondent,” Thompson said.
Thompson said the students were writing to different schools in France. The French four and five students have pen pals in one school, while the French three students work with another.
“One is in Versailles and the other is in Savoie, which is in the south of France by the Switzerland border,” Thompson said. “So some students are writing to people in an urban area, while the others are writing to a rural area.”
Thompson said she has been organizing this for the past four or five years. She gets connected with the schools in France through epals.com.
“Teachers can look for pen pals for their classes from all over the world,” Thompson said. “I have used ePals the last three times to connect with a school in France.”
Thompson said her students stay connected with their pen pals by sending letters throughout the year, Christmas cards and their video projects. The relationships created with French students carries out side of the class room too because Thompson said that many students connect with their pen pals through Facebook.
“Last year, a teacher in France used an article from the school newspaper about no shave November and used it to prepare a national exam,” Thompson said.
Thompson said students from both France and MHS are able to gain many insights about other world cultures through the pen pal program.
“The whole point of a foreign language is communication,” Thompson said. “I want to show them that they can speak with other people besides me. Global community awareness allows my students to see kids that are just like them.”
Though they are very similar, there are still many differences between school and France and school in America. Thompson said the French start school latter in September and they get out in June. Plus, in France, they teachers don’t stay at the same grade level, but they stay with their students for the two to three years that they are in high school.
“The grading system is different,” Natalie Cibulka, junior, said. “They don’t have letter grades, they get a number from one to twenty on their report cards.”
Though they haven’t yet received a letter from their pen pals, Cibulka said it is pretty cool that they get to learn about people from another country. Right now, she and a group of other French three students are filming the school in places like the commons, the gym and the football field to show the students in France what school is like. Cibulka said they are using the vocab words about directions from their current unit.
“We speak French in our videos and they speak English since we are both using it for class,” Cibulka said. “We get to learn about culture. We learn how people live in other places, not just vocab words.