GERALDTON — Superior North Catholic District School Board proudly congratulated St. Joseph Catholic Elementary School for their outstanding achievement, in the Education Perfect Language Competition.
This competition is held several times a year and is for French as a Second Language learners. Under the leadership of Karen Gardiner, FSL teacher for the school, who spearheaded the competition and guided students through each of its stages, students from several grades took part.
Gardiner explained that this process began last year. SNCDSB had acquired a program known as the Education Perfect Program, which the Board had asked Gardiner to pilot at her school. She shared that, “I had used it periodically for language learning throughout the year,” and describes it as an online French learning program, using the Common European Framework.
She spoke about how the Education Perfect Program puts on this global competition a few times a year. Unfortunately, last year because of the global pandemic, and the fact that her school like many other schools in the province went into lock-down, it was too challenging to prepare and offer this competition to her students.
This year she said, “We used class time for this and grades 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 were able to participate. The students signed up for it and worked as a school to gain points which would accumulate throughout the competition and eventually determine winners.”
The students eagerly worked together so that all points gathered from their work would result in points earned for the entire school.
Gardiner spoke proudly about how dedicated her students were to not only participating in this competition, but also how they devoted so much extra time to it. She described how some students in Grade 7 and 8 loved the competition aspect of this so much that, “They worked during the lunch period and during their digital choice time.”
One Grade 4 FSL student worked at gaining points for her school during the March Break and even spoke about how she worked on this on her birthday. Their FSL teacher recognized how challenging this competition was even this year because of the pandemic. This represented quite an achievement for each of the students competing, as they won first place out of a number of schools with less than 50 students in FSL.
Gardiner spoke about how she set up an “International Leader Board” as a continuous reminder of how well her students were doing and as added incentive to keep working on the program and the competition. She described this as, “an active period of time when students could cheer each other on. People they didn’t know cheered each other on.” In fact, according to Gardiner, some Grade 8 students between other schools cheered each other on.
She commented about the leader board, saying, “For the International leader board, I think it's really cool to see that our little school placed fifth in the world out of small schools. It's kind of a big deal.”
Students from the Grade 7/8 FSL class also commented about participating in this international competition and stated that, “We loved it.” One of Gardiner’s Grade 4 student said, “I’m really competitive and I liked the competition. I even played on my phone on my birthday.”
In terms of what the next steps will be, Gardiner mentioned that SNCDSB has this program which the Board purchased out of New Zealand, who offers this Global competition at least twice a year. However, for now she sees herself going back into the program and as the FSL teacher, just letting students advance at their own level.
St. Joseph Catholic Elementary School achieved first place at in their category against other schools in Canada. Gardiner confirmed that, “For the Education Perfect International language competition, our little school came in 5th in the world out of 242 schools of under 50 students (world wide!) and firstt in Canada out of 26 schools of under 50 students.”
Individual students were also awarded badges for their achievement. For those individual achievements, the school had two students earn a bronze medal and three earned a credit.
