What’s happening in our French classrooms?

Our Year 10, 11, 12 VCE & IB French students are sitting their mid-year French exam this week. These exams are designed to be true to VCAA examination guidelines and require students, for example, to use their knowledge on French cultural heritage in their response. This is great preparation for the end-of-year exams. Good luck to all our French students in this busy period, and don’t forget to bring a dictionary!

French IB

As part of their theme on Expériences, our High Level IB students have been working more specifically on the various aspects of tourism. They were asked to research in detail one particular form of tourism, such as ecotourism, culinary tourism or sustainable tourism, and prepare an informative brochure on their chosen topic. Here is an example of a brochure on “Le slow travel”!

Berthe Mouchette French Poetry Competition

This week, our Year 7,8,9 French Partial Immersion students will participate in the annual Berthe Mouchette Poetry Competition organised by the Alliance Française de Melbourne. Over the last 100 years, more than 1 million Victorian students have participated in this competition - a unique experience and wonderful opportunity to practise their French pronunciation! Good luck to all our students!

See below the Year 7 poem selection this year:

Kangourou des Maths Award Ceremony

Last week, we were pleased to present the Kangourou des Maths Award ceremony in celebration of the extraordinary achievement of our French Partial Immersion and Binational students. Kangourou des Maths is an international Maths competition, held in French, with over 255,000 students taking part from over 40 countries worldwide. We were also delighted to welcome Camberwell Primary School award recipients to Auburn High School to receive their award and prize.

Congratulations to all 70 AHS & CPS students who received Credit (top 33%), Distinction (top 20%), High Distinction (top 10%), Gold (top 5%) & Elite (top 1%) awards. After the ceremony, CPS students were invited to stay for another period and take part in a virtual escape game, with the help of our Year 9 Binational students. A fantastic example of students' collaboration and a little taste of high school for the Grade 6 CPS students!

What’s happening in our French classrooms?

To celebrate the end of a very successful first semester of French, our Year 7 students watched a French movie (the first one ever for most students!), Belle et Sebastien (2013). This is the endearing story of six-year-old Sebastien who lives on the mountainside with a kindly but gruff caretaker and no real family of his own. As such he is left to his own devices and is often found roaming the countryside. Belle is a wild mountain dog who has escaped from her cruel owner. When Sebastian first crosses paths with Belle, he must keep their new friendship a secret. Highly recommended!

Our Year 8 students also enjoyed watching a classic French comedy, La guerre des boutons. Set in the south of France in the 1960s against the backdrop of the Algerian War, a gang of young boys are at war with the kids of the neighbouring township, their sworn enemies. A classic movie for the whole family! On another topic, students are now able to say the time in French! “Quelle heure est-il? Il est 9 heures”!

Our Year 10, 11 and 12 students are enjoying a little bit of relief after finishing their mid-year French exam last week. Bravo les élèves!

The Year 10 students have started exploring regional differences in France, and with this in mind, they watched the acclaimed French comedy Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis! (Welcome to the sticks! 2008). This is the story of a French man who helps run the post office in a picturesque small town in the south of France, but he is then exiled to the north and must leave his family behind with the firm intent to quickly come back. A film not to be missed!

Finally, our Year 12s have just started to study a Famous French person for their next SAC. Eventually, they will become specialists of the famous person of their choice, such as, Lucie Aubrac, Simone Weil, Zinedine Zidane, or Charles de Gaulle, and will need to be able to talk about them for 8 minutes!

French Partial Immersion Program

In Physics this term, our Year 8 Partial Immersion students learnt in detail about light, lenses and the eye anatomy. As part of one of their assessment pieces, they were given the task to research one particular eye defect, and the possible treatments. They researched topics such myopia, shortsightedness, amblyopia and dyschromatopsia. To finish off on this theme, they also had the opportunity to do an eye dissection in class! According to one student, “disgusting but fascinating!”.

As part of a unit of work on la vie quotidienne, our Year 7 French Advanced students were asked to produce an infographic presenting the advantages and disadvantages of living in the countryside and in the city. They were able to reuse their vocabulary and expressions learnt in class.

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Berthe Mouchette Poetry Competition

Congratulations to our 44 Partial Immersion students who recited their poem beautifully last week before a jury from the Alliance française de Melbourne. Official results to be announced early Term 3! Bonne chance!

French Binational Program

On Monday 19 June & Tuesday 20 June, our 9F students, as well as 4 Year 9 independent candidates from Glen Eira College, sat the written examinations of Brevet des collèges. These exams consisted of: 3 hours of French literature, 2 hours of Mathematics, 2 hours of Histoire-Géographie (Humanities) and 1 hour of Sciences. We are very proud of our students and of the way they conducted themselves during these two full days of French examinations. Bravo, and best of luck for the future results!

In Mathematics, our students in 5ème (7F) concluded their first semester with a Scratch project where they worked collaboratively to code a maze game. Students have applied their creative skills to develop their own game and learnt about conditionals, loops, motion in a 2-D plane with coordinates. Upon presentation of the projects to the class, students will vote for the project “Coup de Coeur” which rewards the best project’s team in terms of creativity and technicity. Well done to our “Scratchers” for completing this challenging activity !

About Scratch: Scratch is a block-based programming language developed by MIT in 2003, for students aged 8 to 16 years old. It is used as an educational tool to initiate students to programming algorithms through an intuitive and friendly visual interface. Scratch coding is included in the French mathematics program from 5ème to 3ème to develop reasoning, modelling and representation skills across multiple areas of the curriculum such as arithmetic and geometry.

In Science, 7F students learnt about climate change and its effects on the planet. They also learnt about the “10 gestes pour le climat” which were established following the Paris agreement in 2015. Following their investigation, students produced very creative infographics on climate change and the greenhouse effect. Here are a couple of examples:

Bastille Day Celebration - Friday 14 July

We look forward to celebrating Bastille Day with our school community on Friday 14 July! There will be on site French entertainment, croissants for sale and more! Stay tuned for more information soon!

La nuit du code

Last week, as part of our French Bi-National mathematics program, some of our passionate Year 7 and Year 8 students participated in the event of La Nuit du Code. This event is a 6-hour programming marathon where students work in teams of two or three to code a video game on Scratch using a given game environment. This NdC 2023 edition gathered more than 8500 students from 370 French schools around the world during the month of May and the best video games will be entering La Nuit du Code’s international competition in June. Our students worked really hard in this very first Auburn High School’s edition of this highly challenging event! Kudos to our students who really put their Scratch coding talents to test!

Madame Wong-Fat, French Binational Maths teacher

From the Canteen

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