On Monday, Feb. 11, French Honor Society went to Kaiser Elementary School for part of the day to teach teacher Nancy Gitter’s Project Challenge students about French. They discussed facts about the Eiffel Tower, had the kids build a model of the tower, and finished with a discussion on why the students should go on to study French.

This is the first year for French Honor Society at RHS, and the main goal of the club is to get outreach to the community about the benefits and fun of learning French.

French teacher and club advisor Amy Bourgeois and club president Evan Mortier chose reaching out to some of the Project Challenge kids as the winter service project. Mortier thought it seemed fitting as the third, fourth, and fifth graders are learning about enormous entities this year in Project Challenge, and the Eiffel Tower is just that.

The club began with a presentation involving pictures, statistics, and overall facts of the Eiffel Tower which then led into the main activity—building the Eiffel Tower. The kids were split into groups of four and were then given dry spaghetti noodles and mini marshmallows with the challenge of constructing the tallest and most accurate Eiffel Tower in 20 minutes.

Many towers fell over and the kids had to keep strategizing, but in the end, their final towers made it through. The club ended with a small presentation on why the students should go on to study French in middle school and beyond.

“I loved seeing how engaged all of the kids were on learning about the Eiffel Tower and French culture,” French Honor Society member Meghan VanDamme said. “Hopefully, if we get to go back, I’d like to see us be able to teach them more of the language as I saw that was something they were super interested in learning also.”

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