One of my favorite parts of my job is creating displays for student work. Mostly because it means we are finally DONE with a project, but also because it's such a fulfilling way to show learning to families and the students themselves. When kids can see a final product that's visually appealing you can just see their pride shoot through the roof and spill over to other students. I love to see a group of students crowded around a new display, noticing how each child worked a little bit differently.

Today I got to put up one of those new displays for a writing project my 4/5s just finished. And this time I figured out how to make it interactive! I have been trying to incorporate more technology into my classes--to varied levels of success--and found inspiration in this article. We had already been working on using frequency words and conjugating -ER verbs, so it seemed like the perfect moment for a writing project.

This was the prompt: Choose a character. Think big... it can be anything from a cartoon character to a person from history to an inanimate object! Write a paragraph describing your character and include two things that she/he/it ALWAYS does and two things they NEVER do.

I loved seeing what they came up with. I had flying pigs, Samuel Eto'o, Snoopy, multiple unicorns, and even lead... literal lead, as in the substance. Once they were finished writing and decorating their sheet, I had each of them practice the pronunciation of their paragraph for about ten minutes before using a recording app to create a clip of their reading. Finally, I generated QR codes for each composition and put them together. Et voilà, c'est tout! You can find more detailed instructions for making the QR codes on this blog article I referred to earlier.

So far it has been a big hit! Parents love hearing their kids speaking French and there haven't yet been any problems with the technology piece. How have you been most successful incorporating technology into your foreign language classroom? I'd love to hear from you!

The term calligramme was invented by Guillaume Apollinaire, French writer and poet of the early 20th century. His collection of calligrammes demonstrates the art form of turning words into images by manipulating their size and form. My favorite is the lady with a hat, but he's also known for his Eiffel Tower and horse poems. I just love how whimsical they are!

My 4th and 5th graders were learning adjectives to accompany their study of the verb être and I realized it would be the perfect occasion to whip out Apollinaire's calligrammes. The assignment I gave them was to use only words to create a self-portrait, including "Je suis" with a list of adjectives describing themselves.

I had them go over in sharpie and add color to add some finesse. They had just selected their French names, so I backed the portraits on construction paper and labeled them with the new names. The result was a beautiful display that hung outside their classroom for the better part of the year. I was so happy with the way they came out!

Lots of kids struggled with the challenge of not using traditional lines for their contours, but they were all happy in the end with their likenesses. It was a practice in refuting the notion of "realistic" in their art—some of them could just not deal with it and included lines anyways! Next time I may have them prepare the list of adjectives ahead of time, as some of them were having a hard time scrounging for words as they went on in the process.