I can’t believe our second month has passed so quickly. School for the girls has changed from being fairly radically new to being a comfortable routine. The struggle of not knowing anything has become the practice of learning a little more each day, and seeing the progress. Work for me has been busy and filled my days. We’ve not done much exploring, but have mostly still been acclimating. The dawn, and days and evenings and nights, the tropical surrounds, and regular swimming, the warm rain showers, all of these are now sweet new norms for us. I love running past the bananas and thinking of that as normal.
Colette and Olivia are adapting well to French school. I marvel at how they’ve improved in their writing and reading. French schools place a strong emphasis on note-taking of lessons (le dictee) in well organized notebooks. Lessons are written in French style cursive beginning in 2nd grade, and include using blue, red, and green ink and ruler-perfect underlines for emphasis. The lessons are very concise and complete summaries that capture the essence of a many subject areas. Students have notebooks for each subject, and notebook paper here is lined horizontally and vertically, with 3 fainter horizontal lines between rows, helping to emphasize correct letter positioning.
Mon école étaît comme ça aussi. Il n’y a pais neçessaire d’avoir des livres! Les cahiers sont formidable!
Comment by Sue Spencer — January 17, 2009 @ 9:21 pm |