I began this school year with a desire to create greater engagement and buy-in with my Grade 7 students. I liked the vocabulary and language skills that students were taking away from our “J’achète… ou pas?” unit, but found that in the past few years students struggled to engage meaningfully with the idea of budgeting because it is not something that (largely speaking) most of them have first-hand experience with. By reframing their learning about budgets to be about supporting…
The Challenge I started with a critical observation: your Grade 7 French students weren’t engaged with budgeting when it felt abstract (“planning a hobby budget”). The unit lacked relevance. So I asked: How might we adapt the budgeting unit for Grade 7 French so that there are greater opportunities for interdisciplinary connections and greater engagement from the students? The Insight Through iterative questioning, you identified what would actually matter to your students: **helping others**. Pivoting from hypothetical scenarios to authentic…