In the context of the Shared Histories programme, St Margaret's College had started a virtual letter exchange with the Lycée Senghor in Evreux.

Travelling up from the beautiful southern areas and having visited a lot of Roman historic monuments and sites there,

On 3rd April nineteen year 11 and year 12 girls from St Margaret's College left Christchurch for a four-week French Tour.

Yeah, yeah, yeah!

The board of trustees has agreed that I take a group of 19 students to France - despite terrorist attacks etc.. The preparations are in full throttle, and the girls are excited to finally meet some of their French partners. I have changed the itinerary to make a longer visit of the North of France possible, and so we will stay a couple of days in Amiens. Watch this space! 

Salut tout le monde!

After a slow start in 2015 we are now back with new plans, new people and new partners: The exchange of fictitious letters has started with our first postcards. Our new partner for this project is the lycée Senghor in Etouvie, and we are excited to welcome Katrina and her team to the poppelicot project. 

We continue to cooperate with the collège Etouvie in Amiens with whom we are still planning the recipe book. This is becoming a truly interdisciplinary project, and at St...

The Logo competition for our poppelicot wiki finished.

We used a google form to vote (in French for the NZ students and in English for the French students to combine design with language acquisition). It worked really well at this level (year 8 are complete beginners in New Zealand), and all students have improved their reading comprehension skills heaps. They confidently ticked boxes to express their likes and dislikes and explained their choices. Repetition is always a successful tool in...

Just in time before the end of Term 3, the gorgeous year 8 French girls at St Margaret's got busy crafting poppies for their friends in Amiens. And as you can see in the picture, I put the envelope in the wrong slot (also: spot the typos!), but I completely trust the NZ post services, and hope the poppies will arrive on time for Armistice Day. Luckily, there is still some time before November!

The first year of using the WWI topic as part of internal assessment is over. It was a success! 

This year I tied the project to some of my internal assessment at level 1, and chose to craft a 1.5 Writing Portfolio task around Shared Histories. In cooperation with our partner school in Amiens, my year 11 class set up an exchange of letters and other texts that the students from both countries posted on our wiki (one of the last texts written is attached to this post: a poster).

While the...

I just posted this on student notices and sent it to France for them to publish, just in time for la rentrée to get back into Active mode! 

Hi students at St Margaret's College in Christchurch and Collège Étouvie in Amiens!

You know that our school takes part in the French - New Zealand history project "Shared Histoires" (Histoire partagée) which commemorates the centenary of World War I. In the context of this exciting 5 year project, a partnership between le collège Etouvie in Amiens and...

How can we integrate the project in our everyday teaching?

After receiving the attached collection of fictitious letters from soldiers to their loved ones and their replies, written by some of our exchange school's pupils (Troisième 5), I decided to use these letters for an integrated reading and writing exercise with my year 12 IB French class. Each student was paired up with their "relative" and read one of the letters. They then asked and answered some questions about the content of the...