ABOUT

About Our Class

We are a fourth grade class at the American School of Paris in Saint-Cloud, France. In our class, we have kids from all over the world and from here in Paris. Everyone speaks so many different languages! In our class, we like to do big, big projects together and go beyond. For example, this year we went on inquiry journey to answer the question, “Did the bicycle change the world?” We shared our learning at the Invention Convention where kids made inventions and shared about inventors that changed the world. We asked inquiry questions like, “Why are poorer countries more impacted by natural disasters?” and “Is climate change causing more dangerous extreme weather?” We share our learning by using green screens, making stop motion animations, and writing essays. We share all of this learning on our class blog. We also recently made a 3-D Timeline of the American Revolution you can watch below!

Making This Project

We started this project with a walking tour of monuments to Americans as a kick off to this unit. We followed a map to different statues and monuments in Paris. At each stop, we wrote what we noticed, what questions we had, and what we inferred. When we got back to school, we wrote down our biggest questions and sorted them. Our three biggest inquiry questions were:

· Why are there monuments to Americans in Paris?

· Why do people decide to go to war?

· How can we teach others this history?

We noticed that all of the statues were either from the Americans to the French or from the French to the Americans thanking them for helping in the American Revolution. So then we set out to learn about it.

We started by thinking about why the American Revolution started. We did research stations and figured out the subtopics of the events before the American Revolution. We started to create a class timeline of the important events. While we were researching, each student author wrote their own chapter book about their subtopic.

After finishing our first books, we prepared for a debate. Some students were loyalists and others were patriots. Everyone researched a reason why we should or should not go to war. Then we debated at a mock Second Continental Congress. You can see a picture from that day above.

We wanted to find a way to teach others this history, and decided to make a walking tour guide book. Every single kid chose a subtopic to work on such as George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, or Admiral De Grasse. Their subtopics were connected to the statues. Students started researching their subtopics and drafting their books. We know that historians tell the many different sides of a story. We realized that statues in Paris don’t tell the whole story. We asked, “What about the women? What about the British? What about the people who were enslaved?” We wanted to include their stories, too, so we made a stop called “Missing Statues.”

We studied a mentor text, Paris in Stride by Jessie Kanelos Weiner to plan how our book would go and to learn how guide books usually go.

That’s when we had to close school because of COVID-19. Now our class had to work on finishing our project from home! Each person continued drafting their individual subtopic. We started typing our writing on Google Docs so that we could collaborate on our writing.

We wanted to publish our book and lead a walking tour, but with France in confinement, we couldn’t do that anymore! So we decided to make this website for you!

Then, our mentor author, Jessie Kanelos Weiner Zoomed with us! Zoom is a video conference tool that lets you meet with a lot of people. A lot of schools used it during the COVID-19 pandemic. We asked her questions about making illustrations of our monuments and statues.

Then we started drafting our own illustrations by studying photos we had taken during the walking tour. We met with our art teacher, Mrs. Dalla Santa on Zoom who gave us feedback.

Usually in class when we do group projects we make committees. So now we made Zoom committees. Each committee worked together to make different parts of the website.

Even though we could not work in the same classroom, we still managed to make our guidebook together.

You can contact us by visiting our class blog.

Our tours can be given in English, French, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Italian, and German.

All About Page by Ana and Kendall

Website Layout Committee: Kendall, Shakked, Vincent