The reason it’s the “end of year” celebration is because in France the end of the school year is in July. But anyway, back to the normal celebration stuff. The school had been practising for the celebration all term with Ollie’s class doing gymnastics and singing while my class were practising homework-excuse jokes, singing, drums, guitar, and recorder.
Last night I confronted my fears and phoned the principal of the primary where we would like the boys to attend school in Quillan. Continue reading Straight to the principal’s office
On Friday we left school early at about 1:30 pm so that I could go to a movie. All my friends were jealous until they found out it was a french movie. Continue reading French film festival
The boys are looking forward to their trip to France, but it is fair to say they are not especially excited about the prospect of going to school… 😉
When presented with the most common French words, I confidently know about 60 of the top 100. Does that indicate enough vocab to get by for three months in France? I know some basic verb contructions. Je mange. J’ai mange. Je vais mange. And I often listen to teach-yourself-French through headphones while scootering around the Wellington waterfront. Is that enough?
We are going to Singapore for one night on the way back, to the hotel where I learnt to swim. We are also going to Paris, Quillan, & Spain. I can’t wait to go… apart from the school part. It will be the hardest thing ever in my life. But the good thing is, there will be two-week holidays before and after, there will be more holidays in the middle, we will get Wednesdays off, and we get to come home for lunch. it will be awesome.
The title of our blog putitontheslate has its origins in my first school slate.
My diary from our 1983 year in France records that we went to Mammouth (French hypermarket chain) and bought the slate, some chalk and a pencil case on 12 October in preparation for my use in class. I also had a cahier (exercise book) for school work that needed to be marked.
Every so often the debate about parents taking their kids out of school for a ‘holiday’ raises its head. There’s been a bit more coverage about that today.
So let me be clear: this is not (just) a holiday!
During the time that I’m away I’ll be updating you with my posts on this blog so I can tell you about all the cool stuff that I’ve been doing.We leave on the 23rd of April so yeah its not that far away.I’m really nervous about going to France because i’ll have to go to school for a whole term and i’ll have to speak french the whole time. (at least we get Wednesdays off).So yeah keep reading the new posts that all of us will send.
