For more than five years, French immersion students in Huntsville have been participating in their own version of The Amazing Race, a popular reality TV show that has competitors solving clues in a race around the world. The student version, La Course Incroyable, keeps students closer to home, but using their imagination to travel to far-flung destinations in both space and time. It was originally created in English by Trillium Lakelands District School Board (TLDSB) teacher Peter Youngblut and then was adapted by local French immersion teacher Anne Lindsay.
On Friday, June 9, Huntsville Public School was host to the TLDSB finals of La Course Incroyable, with 18 teams of students in grades four to six – 12 from Huntsville and three each from Lindsay and Haliburton – competing to be the fastest to solve the clues and get to the finish line.
“It’s a really authentic context for practicing French,” says Lindsay. “We took the original English version of the finals and made it our own. A lot of our volunteers speak French to them when they get to the different centres.”
HPS teacher and fellow La Course Incroyable organizer Matt Beaton added that helping students make connections for speaking French outside of the classroom is a positive benefit of the race. “That’s why we pull (volunteers) from the community so the kids can see, hey, here’s kids in high school that are still fluent and this is what you could be.”
Each year follows a theme related to Canada – this year it was Canada across time in honour of the country’s 150th anniversary.
The first topic was the discovery of dinosaurs. Once students drew a dinosaur and told Lindsay the origins of its name, the met the ‘paleontologist’ who discovered it and searched for dinosaurs hidden in the sandbox.
The next stations honoured Canada’s Aboriginal peoples and included a voyageur barrage routier (roadblock). Teams of two students learned about the difficult life of voyageurs and had to draw a map of a typical route from Montreal to Thunder Bay. Then they completed an obstacle course while being besieged by black flies and mosquitoes – both the real thing and fuzzy balls thrown at them by a student volunteer.
Noah Bell and Jackson MacDonald complete the “voyageur” barrage routier (roadblock)
For the Canadarm roadblock, students had to build a Canadarm – Canada’s contribution to the International Space Station – with the materials provided and retrieve Colonel Chris Hadfield, former commander of the space station, who was lost in space. Much to their delight, when they tweeted about the activity and shared that Hadfield had been saved, he tweeted back his thanks.
When Colonel Chris Hadfield learned via Twitter that he’d been successfully returned to the International Space Station he tweeted back his thanks
Other La Course Incroyable activities included learning facts about Canada’s prime ministers and then placing them on a timeline according to their time in office, and recognizing Canada’s immigrants by learning from recently arrived Syrian students how to say and write their names in Arabic.
The final stop for teams and their volunteer helpers – who ensured they remained safe while crossing Huntsville streets – was The Nutty Chocolatier for ice cream.
“We emphasized that it’s not about what place they finished, and the importance of collaboration,” said Beaton. “It was neat to watch them persevere.”
HPS teacher organizers of La Course Incroyable (from left) Matt Beaton, Steph Lemay and Anne Lindsay, who ran the event with the help of many parent and student volunteers
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