Teachers' Notes for Jean Talon Does a Count
(use "Side-by-side" link to view the Student Task)

Historical Census: Life in New France

You may wish to use the Jean Talon material as interesting background for the idea of a census, or you may wish to spend more time with students interpreting the data he collected.

Jean Talon started a process in Canada that people still follow today: when we want to find out what life is like in a community, one way we can do this is to count things that we think are important. It's quite a different way of telling a story from a winter count, and it's another way of painting a picture for others. Here are some suggestions:

• Look at the kinds of things Talon decided to count. What can you about what life was like in early Canada from his charts?
• What questions do you have about these people and how they lived when you explore what Talon decided to count?
• Explore Role Playing Jean Talon on the Statistics Canada site
• Write a story, a diary or an exchange of letters between New France and Europe