School days

Since the frantic, wonderful first day of school, things have been running (mostly) smoothly for us. We're noticing several significant differences between school here and back home, most of which are pretty great.

Ecole Intercommunale de Pont du Loup. Image by JenVeltsos

The composition of the school day
School starts later and ends much later in France. Here in Pont-du-Loup, the day begins at 8:30 am and ends at 4:30 pm. That seems like a long day, but it really isn't.

For one thing, there are morning and afternoon recess. One of my biggest complaints about the school system in Mankato is that kids get very little time to move around, play, and expend some of that limitless supply of energy. In kindergarten, the Boys had a couple of short recess breaks, and all of the students at our elementary school get 15 minutes of recess before their 15 minute lunch break. In particular, Boy1 has long struggled with too much energy, so I'm glad he now has an outlet. 

For another, the lunch breaks are really long. On Mondays, the boys come home for a 90-minute lunch break, and on Thursdays and Fridays it is two hours. On Tuesdays, they remain at school and eat in the cantine with their friends. They get at least 30 minutes to eat and then the rest of the time to play. This has gone so well that we're going to add Mondays to their schedule to give them more time to socialize, because this is apparently where the "real" French language learning occurs.

My dad likes to ask how the Boys are expected to learn anything if they're always taking breaks, but the French system has 27 hours of instruction per week, which is nearly the same as our elementary school in Mankato. Out of the eight-hour day, the kids spend about six hours in class; in Mankato, the kids also spend six hours in class between 8:00 am and 2:40 pm.

Because the school day here lasts until 4:30 pm, parents need to arrange less after-school care, but the garderie (daycare) is available before and after school for older kids whose parents work.

The curriculum
The village school follows a pedagogy by Celestin Freinet (pronounced fren-ay), who was born next door in the town of Bar-sur-Loup. Freinet pedagogy emphasizes inquiry-based learning, collaboration, and exploring student interest. It sounds kind of like Montessori, but with a little more structure.

In addition to the usual reading, writing, arithmetic (or maths), the students also get English as a second language, music appreciation, history, arts and crafts, and sort of an "open space" activity called Nouvelles Activités Pédagogiques Scolaires, or NAPS. (That's the name in our commune. It's called TAPS at La Cousine's school, and I don't know what it's called elsewhere.) On Monday afternoons, the children walked across the street to the community center (named Le Bigarade after the bitter orange tree that grows around here). In the first six weeks, the students learned la escrime (fencing). In the second, they will learn gardening. In January, they will begin dancing, and I think tai chi may be under consideration for the end of the year.

And NAPS is not officially Phys. Ed. Every Tuesday morning, all of the kids hop on a bus and ride to the stadium in Tourrettes-sur-Loup for three hours of physical education. The Boys called the first one simply "balls," which seemed to involve a lot of running followed by either basketball, soccer, or just throwing balls at each other. Starting in December, their Tuesday exercise will turn into all-day skiing at the nearby ski station of Greolieres les Neiges. And our petit école is not unusual in this respect. I have heard from others that children around the country go skiing if a station is nearby. 

French language instruction for non-native speakers
All children must attend school in France, which makes sense because a socialist country would want as many of its people to be working, and it would want those workers to be educated. (That's a little jab a the U.S., which tends to ignore its own socialist elements of government and culture.) To help new students succeed in school, France offers special French as a Second Language instruction to all first-year non-native school children. Parents simply need to contact the mairie (town hall) to let them know that they want this accommodation. The program, called L'Unité Pédagogie pour Eleves Allophones Arrivants (UPE2A), assigns FSL teachers to work with students as part of their normal school day.

In our case, our American Boys and the two Danish boys meet with T every day for one hour. They watch videos, listen to music, study maps, and play games that help the boys learn language and culture. For example, in the first week, the boys used Google Maps to find their own houses and their old schools and learned basic school terms. Next, they studied the geography of our region, Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur (PACA) and located the villages that they had visited or heard people talk about. Later, the boys studied flags of countries around the world and then played a game in which one boy would choose a flag and describe its colors, shapes, and symbols, and the other boys would guess which country it represented. It's a way of gamifying vocabulary and learning geography. 

Extracurricular activities
Wednesday is a half-day, so everyone goes home at 11:45 and most kids participate in extracurricular activities.  Mine do not. They refused to sign up for any sports, saying that they did not want to be yelled at by a coach in a language they did not understand. Given my ongoing nervousness about speaking a language I studied from grades 4-10 (and 3 semesters in college) I cannot blame them. The system here requires everyone to sign up in September for year-long activities so there wasn't the opportunity to change their minds once they became more comfortable in the language.

So here is an instant of homesickness: I miss the ability to sign up for a six-week course sponsored by community education. Boy1 experimented with lots of activities as we tried to find "the thing" that really interested him. (It turned out to be archery.) Boy2 thinks his might be baseball.

So far, we have filled our Wednesday afternoons with trips to the beach when it was warm, shopping when it is necessary, and popcorn and movies whenever we can. We eat an early supper (5:30-6:00 pm in Mankato, 6:00-6:30 here), but Belle Mere, Hubby and I usually stay at the table talking about everything and nothing until 8:00 or 8:30 pm, and then it's time to start the bath time/bedtime routines. Moving movie night to movie afternoon has suited all of us quite well.

Holidays
Perhaps the biggest difference is that all French schools alternate six weeks of class with two weeks of vacation. The four holidays are Toussaint (end of October), Noel (end of December), Hiver (mid February), and Printemps (early April). The country divides the regions into three large groups for these holidays. The first two breaks are the same throughout the country, and the last two holidays are slightly staggered. Our Hiver and Printemps scolaires overlap with Les Cousins' breaks by one week, so we're hoping to be able to see them each time. (And it's not lost on me that the first two school breaks are named after Christian holidays, even in a country that claims laïcité (secularism) to be one of the four tenets of the government and culture.)

Having just returned from our first holiday, I can admit that I was fearful that the Boys would forget all of their French because the family (ours and Beau Frere's) speak English to each other. Boy2's first day back proved me wrong, though, and he had no problems with what everyone laughingly called la rentrée.

As for Boy1's ability to slip back into French, I have no idea because...

Field trips
Boy1's class left at 7:30 am Monday for a five day field trip. That's right: the entire class (23 kids in the equivalent of grades 3-5) are on a sleepover field trip! My recollection of field trips as a kid were strictly one-day affairs, with the exception of a senior retreat in high school.

The class is attending an école de la mer at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. [Hint: open that link in Google Chrome and it will ask if you want to translate it.] From what I could understand at the parent-teacher conference, this is a colonie (summer camp) that organizes programs for schools in the off-season. The students will be learning about underwater biodiversity, water activities, maritime transport, fishing and marine farming, maritime heritage, pollution and nuisances, coastal traffic, urbanization, and more. They will then use this information in class projects throughout the rest of the year (that's the Freinet pedagogy, after all). It's an amazing opportunity that was completely unexpected when we enrolled in the school.

Boy2's reaction to being left home alone with Mom and Dad? "FINALLY!" He's enjoying the extra attention from Mom, Dad, and Belle Mere. But he will also have an adventure when his class takes a field trip to the Ils des Lerins in the spring. Their trip will be only one night (I think), but it's still quite exciting. 

 Boy1's reaction to the trip was initially excitement, but the day before departure was quite emotional.  He was so nervous that it was like the first day of school all over again. His fear was threefold:

1. It's the first time he will be away for so long,
2. things will be 100% in French, and he's still a beginner, and 
3. no personal technology is allowed. 

THE HORROR! I'm not sure which was worse, the language immersion or the lack of Minecraft! But I suspect his French comprehension will make a huge jump this week because he won't be able to get away from it and escape back into English.

We talked to Nik's teacher this morning because my impression before the break was that he isn't trying very hard to learn French, but le directeur assured me that Nik is right on track. He is trying to speak in class, and it's totally normal that he does not try to speak it at home. In fact, Boy1 was placed in the kindergarten group because of his total lack of French, but Pierre is now thinking of moving him up to first grade (meaning: move his chair to the other side of the room). So if he says thing are fine, I have to believe him...

Organization
I hesitated before writing this one because the criticism is too pointed, but our elementary school in Mankato ran like a well oiled machine. With more than 500 students across 5 grades, it had to do so. By contrast, our little school with 63 students has considerably less structure. (Hubby and I debated the appropriate wording there. I think this is honest yet kind.)

Making matters worse is that Hubby and I are having trouble adjusting to new roles in managing school activities. In Mankato, I was responsible for checking backpacks, signing permission slips and returning them to the backpack, noting deadlines and marking them on the family calendar, reviewing homework, and throwing out the piles of extra papers that came home in the "Tuesday folders." I think a lot of moms take on (or are given) this responsibility, but it still caused friction when Hubby misplaced papers or failed to let me know that something needed action. However, we eventually settled on a system that (mostly) worked for us.

When we arrived in France, however, I took the opportunity to reverse the roles: Since I cannot understand most of the papers that come home and I do not understand the system of notebooks for organizing materials, Hubby would be the point person for anything school-related. After six weeks, we're still looking for a good system to make this work, and the school isn't making it easy. Let me try to explain how it works.

Each student has a cahier de texte, a personal planner. Fine, that's perfectly normal. But the ones our school uses has the pages grouped by day of the week: the first cluster is lundi, then mardi, mecredi, jeudi, and vendredi. Each page has a perforated tab. So on Monday, the students write the homework assignment (if any). They are also given slips of paper of varying sizes (and typefaces--don't even get me started) with announcements. They must glue the announcements onto the page as well. When we check the cahier, we are supposed to make sure they do the homework, initial the announcement, and then tear off the tab.

Reading that over, it's not difficult. It's just different. Why in the world would we group things by Mondays? Why make it so difficult to track activities over the course of a single week? And until Hubby pointed out the perforations, I was complaining that I could never find the latest entry.

This is not an obviously logical system, and that bothers me.

But it is very French.