November 7, 2024
MPA Middle School French teachers Evelyn Johnson, Jessica Blue, and Liz DesLauriers were searching for a possible project to bring out a collaborative effort by their students.
“At the beginning of the school year, Liz DesLauriers, Jessica Blue, and yours truly were discussing a project that we wanted to work on together and collaborate with our Middle School French students,” said Evelyn Johnson.
They chose a project on Toussaint, a Catholic holiday celebrated on November 1, dedicated to all known and unknown saints.
“We came up with the idea of assigning each of our students a notable French-speaking person who had passed. The information needed was when they were born, where they were born, when they died, and what they were known for.”
From there, the project kept growing. With the help of Makerspace coordinator Keith Braafladt, students created tombstones for their historical figures and learned how to set them in the Glowforge laser cutter. Then, Sean Andrews, curriculum and technology integration specialist, lent a hand.
“Sean Andrews came in and showed our students how to record their voices, post images on the recordings, and create little avatars, speaking in French of their person and adding more details,” Johnson said.
Nearly finished with the project, the videos needed a way to be linked on the tombstones. To link the two components of the project together, students added QR codes as a finishing touch. This allows anyone viewing their projects on display to have a seamless experience between the multimedia and physical aspects of their biographies.
Once completed with their videos and tombstones, all Middle School French students received a passport to accompany visiting the cemetery outside Johnson’s classroom. Here, they studied and collected information from their peers’ projects on five notable French people, testing the QR codes, and examining the tombstones to finish the passports.
“Watching them today as they were scanning these tombstones and collecting information, they were really getting into it,” Johnson said. “They took ownership of what they had done, and they were also mindful and serious about what other people did and recognized that they had done cool work.”
The celebration of Toussaint provided a variety of rigorous and creative opportunities for the Middle School French program. Collaborating with educators and students alike, Johnson was pleased with what the project brought during its second try.
“Jess and I had done something similar years and years and years ago. Just being able to take it to another level was a cool opportunity,” Johnson said.
If you are interested in viewing the full cemetery of Toussaint projects, they are located right in the hallway outside of room 159 at MPA.
