French camp

By OBHS French students | Posted: Tuesday May 30, 2023

Last week, the OBHS Senior French students joined up with five other Dunedin schools and attended French Camp.

French Camp involved two days and one night last Thursday/Friday filled with lots of different activities involving not just French language, but culture, games and lots of great food! 

The camp was organised by French teachers in Dunedin who are members of the New Zealand Association of Language Teachers. This was the first French camp to have taken place in a number of years. The hope is to regenerate this fun immersion experience for senior students in Dunedin and help build networks amongst learners and teachers of French in the region in the coming years.

Thursday morning was an early start at the University of Otago Languages Department. We met with our group (which was all up about 60 students), and joined our ‘francophone’ country group. As well as participating in a session with Frederic Dichtel, one of the university tutors, we took part in french games, tahitian dancing, kahoots and playing songs on the guitar, and also enjoying coffee and crepes at lunch.

We then caught the bus out to Camp Tirohanga near Outram, which was our base for the rest of the time. The remainder of the afternoon was spent playing games, completing a very hard escape room and doing a French social media activity based around a hit song by the Belgian artist “Stromae”. Dinner was then served, and we enjoyed “Poulet Basquais” and “Ratatouille”. Dinner had been prepared by one group of students whose late afternoon choice activity had been to get their cooking instructions in French - luckily for us, they understood well and dinner was délicieux!

We enjoyed the cakes that students had baked for the French cake competition for desert. We then finished the night by competing in a quiz, all in French where we had to answer questions based on the Trivial Pursuit categories but all related to Francophonie and by watching the Three Fugitives Movie starring Gérard Dépardieu.

The next morning was an early start with a typical french breakfast of croissants, tartine (baguette with butter, jam or nutella) and yaourt. After cleaning up cabins, a New Caledonia and Wallis et Futuna representative from Auckland University came to teach us more about the two pacific island french territories. However the teachers had saved the best until last, providing each group with a bag of props and 1 hour to come up with a skit in French, proving very entertaining! The results of the cake competition were announced as were several other prizes including Rohan O’Shea who was named “Meilleur Sous-Chef de Cuisine”. After that we headed back over the hill to Dunedin.

French Camp was an excellent experience and great opportunity for us all to practice all skills across listening, speaking, reading and writing, as well as meeting many other keen French learners from other schools, having lots of fun and eating what the French are arguably the best renowned for, great food! 

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