Monday, November 3, 2008

School Update - End of October

I have updates on three family members and their “school” experiences: Josey, Max, and Dado!

Josey

Josey’s teacher, Madame Denaes, is spectacular! She has gone out of her way to help Josey adapt to French school. Her first idea was to have Josey attend the “grammar” part of the day in Max’s class. The reasoning was, Josey has no French grammar knowledge, so she could understand the basics in “kindergarten” better than at the 3rd grade-level. Unfortunately, this didn’t work out. Josey’s class does math when Max’s class does grammar, and no one wanted Josey to miss out on math.

Madame Danaes’ second idea was to have Josey work individually with a tutor. Awesome! Now, every Thursday afternoon, Josey works with a tutor to learn French. Josey is also assigned different homework than the rest of the class. So, Josey is learning to conjugate the basic verbs, and she is learning basic vocabulary. She is keeping up with math, thanks to Dado School at home. We see what she is doing in class from her math notebook. Since all the class work is in French (although Madame Danaes does translate some for Josey during school), Dado goes over everything with her in English at home.

Josey is also a teacher’s aide for the English class! She does all the pronunciation. For Halloween, we printed 1 song and 1 poem in English for the class. Josey sang the song for them until they all knew it. Then, her class went to each of the other 3 classes and performed. Cool!

The song was 1 Little, 2 Little, 3 Little Witches, and the poem was 5 Little Pumpkins.

Right now, Josey is supposed to know her times tables by heart up to the 7s, and she is learning fractions and basic geometry. Dado was quizzing her on denominator, numerator, diameter, and radius on our fossil hunting trip. He also found a great math game on the iPhone. It’s multiplication for Josey and addition/subtraction for Max!

Max

Max seems to be doing really, really well! There is little new to report for him. He’s still kickin’ butt in math, he’s learning French, and he’s learning cursive. Yep, they start cursive in “kindergarten” here. Max’s cursive is now better than his printing. When we were doing his homework yesterday, he told me that he didn’t remember how to print some letters. That was after he told me that printing is what you do with the computer and it has nothing to do with writing. Sheesh!

I think Max represents 6-year olds worldwide. I just asked him what his favorite part of school is. Guess what his answer was: “When it’s time to play!”

Dado

Dado is now certified to teach English in French schools. How cool is that? That dreaded “class” in Montpellier turned out to be a simple 30-minute interview/test where the three French people spoke English. Dado passed quite easily. When vacation is over, he will arrange his “teaching” schedule at the kids’ school. I’m still hoping that they will let me attend, too.

Love to all!

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