In April and May we attended a free French class taught once a week by a lady in our church. This presented learning opportunities for all of us…and for more than just the French language.
It was very hard at first because she spoke only in French. The kids didn’t understand at all what was going on, even when she used pantomime to try to demonstrate the words she was trying to teach. I understood a little, but after a while my brain was tired of working so hard trying to follow along and went into “shut down” mode. Some of the kids had gone into shut-down mode long before I did. I knew they were frustrated and I was frustrated because I couldn’t really help them. Also, I instinctively felt that this was not really the way I wanted to teach/learn a foreign language with my kids.
But we had recently been trying to teach the kids to keep trying and not give up even if something is hard at first. So, after talking with Ronnie we decided we would keep going in order to model this lesson. After all, it was only going to be for 6 weeks and it was free.
It got better after a while, and we did learn a little bit of French. (We only made it to the first 4 lessons due to illness in late May.)
I also (re)learned why I have not gotten involved in outside classes and activities yet in our homeschooling adventure. It is just WAY too stressful at this point in our lives to get everybody ready to go somewhere, be out all morning, come back just in time for lunch, and have the little one fall asleep on the way home and mess up the nap schedule.
This experience did, however, provide direction for our next unit of geography after we finished with South America…France, of course.
The Language
We watched some French vocabulary videos on YouTube, French Lab, and a children’s site used by our French teacher. Later I found FrenchPod101.com which I think would have been good too. We watched these while we were eating breakfast and lunch. As frustrated as the kids were in class, I was surprised that they enjoyed these and kept asking to watch them.
I also checked out some French learning language resources from the library. I liked this one the best.
Learn French Together by Marie-Claire Antoine and Gretchen Patterson
It came with 3 books and CDs, learning a few words with each lesson. Each lesson had some activities and games to go along with it. We only listened to a little bit of it, but it did help me with some of the words our teacher was trying to teach us. (I am a visual learner more than an auditory learner, so it really helped me to be able to SEE the words in print. Also, with my exposure to Spanish in high school and my English vocabulary, I was able to see the similarities in the words and guess at the meanings just by looking at them.) If we ever decide to go back and really try to learn French, I would check this out again.
The Country
We read through most of this book.
Getting to Know France and French by Miriam Chapman. It introduced some of the geography, history, and culture of the France.
We also watched a small part of a travel DVD called Rick Steve’s France. I learned a lot about the different regions of France while previewing it, but I could not show much of it to the kids because of the immodesty shown in the “classic art” in the museums and on tours of the the famous beaches.
The Food
We had fun watching some of Julia Child’s French Chef cooking shows on DVD from the library. We laughed at her bloopers and marveled at how much butter she used! We didn’t really try any of her recipes, except she did inspire me to experiment with crepes again… and at least some of us enjoyed the results. (You can read more about that experiment in my earlier post.)
And Travis and I looked through a French cookbook…The Cooking of France by Matthew Locricchio. It gave very detailed directions for young cooks, and even emphasized used natural rather than processed food.
Books Set in France
We read a number of books set in France (Paris mostly) during our read aloud times. I found a good list of children's books set in Paris, complete with reviews. I couldn’t find all of the books on the list at the library, and a couple of them I didn’t like so well, so we didn’t read them together.
Here are the ones we did like.
Family Under the Bridge by Natalie Savage Carlson
We had read this a year or two ago as part of our Sonlight curriculum. This is a chapter book, suitable for my 9 and 7 year olds to read on their own. It is relatively short, but not one to be read in a single sitting.
It’s about an old hobo who likes being a hobo and does not want to be “tied down” with work or a family. But he reluctantly becomes involved with a homeless family in Paris – a mom, 3 kids, and a dog.
We were even inspired to act out part of the story… pushing a cart with all a hobos belongings, building a fire, and cooking a meal in a can over that fire.
Dodsworth in Paris by Tim Egan
This was a BIG favorite. An easy-reader chapter book (suitable for my 6 year old to read on his own). There are actually 4 books in this series about Dodsworth’s adventures with a trouble-making duck in different cities (New York, Paris, London, and Rome).
Here’s the review from StoriedCities.com which says it better than I could:
Tim Egan's Dodsworth easy reader series does a great job of introducing young readers to famous cities but without taking them on a boring walking tour. The delightfully quirky Dodsworth and his stowaway duck sidekick reminded me of a screwball comedy duo. Each humorous book follows the pair on their misadventures through each city. I liked the details Egan slips in, like how everyone on Fifth Avenue is smartly dressed, or how the duck inadvertently creates an impressionist painting in Paris by dancing on his artwork
La La Rose by Satomi Ichikawa
This picture book was a favorite, especially by the 2 year old. It is quick to read, but you can also spend a long time looking at the beautiful artwork and the maps.
The review from Storied Cities:
Stuffed bunny La La Rose is "the inseparable friend of Clementine." But one day she falls out of Clementine's backpack during a visit to the Luxembourg Garden. Even though La La Rose must endure the trials of being tossed in the pond, losing her skirt, tumbling down a hill, being picked up by various strangers, she finally finds her way back to Clementine. In the process, we get a tour of one of the world's most famous and beautiful urban public spaces….
For kids who love maps (don't all of them?) the author has provided an illustrated map of the garden in the end pages.
Come Fly With Me by Satomi Ichikawa
Another picture book by the same author as La La Rose. This one is about a toy plane and a stuffed dog who go on an adventurous trip through Paris. We read it several times, but not as much as
La La Rose.
The Cat Who Walked Across France by Kate Banks
I think I found this one while browsing through the library catalog online. A cat’s owner dies and the cat is displaced to another home. But it longs for its own home and walks across France back to its old house, only to find a new family living there. Good ending – the new family adopts the cat and they all live happily ever after.
Anatole by Eve Titus
Another popular picture book among my crew, readers and non-readers alike. I had to practice what I learned about French pronunciation in order to read this out loud.
I just noticed that there are more Anatole books…I’ll have to see if our library has any of them…
The review from Storied Cities:
Anatole, who regularly rides his bicycle into Paris to look for food scraps learns that humans do not like mice at all.Mon Dieu! Anatole, conscientious mouse that he is, decides that in return for a few morsels of cheese from a Parisian cheese factory he will leave his suggestions for improvement for each cheese variety. As you can imagine, the mouse's opinions are right on target, making the cheese factory incredibly successful. The factory owners make Anatole the VP in charge of Cheese Tasting, thus the little mouse is free to bring food home to his family, making Anatole the "happiest, most contented mouse in all France."
A Spree In Paree by Catherine Stock
A French farmer decides he wants to take a vacation to the city (like the city folks do at his farm in the country). His animals decide to come along too to see the sights of Paris. By the time they get home, the farmer has decided that vacation is a lot of work! An amusing picture book.
Adele & Simon by Barbara McClintock
Adele and her little brother walk home from school, but little Simon loses all his things along the way. This picture book was BY FAR my favorite! It is a great “find the hidden picture” book and the illustrations are excellent! It’s also a good memory-exercising book as you try to remember all the things Simon started out with and try to figure out what has he lost now! In the back of the book are maps and also descriptions of each of the locations in Paris that the children visit. The illustrations are fantastic! After we spent some time in this book, I was watching a French travel DVD. When they showed a brief shot of one of the galleries in the Louvre, I instantly recognized it as one of the places Adele Simon visited! I highly recommend this book! It would be a nice one to own too.
Mirette on the High Wire by Emily Arnold McCully
Another oft-read picture book in this household. A young girl helps the great Bellini overcome his fear and return to walking on the high wire above the streets of Paris.
Chasing Degas by Eva Montanari
I thought this picture book was a great, gentle introduction to some famous artists and their paintings. I’m not sure the kids were too excited about it, but they did recognize one or more of the paintings when we went to Hobby Lobby and saw poster prints of them.
The review from Storied Cities:
In the painting The Dance Class, Degas captured for posterity a yellow-sashed dancer scratching her back. How embarrassing. Eva Montanari makes this dancer the central character of her book Chasing Degas.
After a rehearsal, the young dancer finds that Degas has left his bag of paints in the dance studio. She chases all over Paris after Degas, knowing that she must get back to the Opera House in time for that night's performance.
Along the way our dancer meets other artists: Renoir teaches the dancer about seeing color, Cassatt is busy painting her famous Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, Monet bemoans the changing light.
Several of the Paris scenes are cleverly inspired by famous Impressionist paintings (they are identified in the author's note). Montanari's Impressionist-style illustrations are lovely.
Picasso and Minou by P. T. Maltbie
A picture book story about Pablo Picasso and his cat and how he moved from his unpopular “blue” period to the more popular “rose” period. I thought it was interesting, but some of the pictures of his later weird artwork were disturbing to some of my kids, so we didn’t read it but once. (The main complaint, I think, was that some of it looked like idols and the grotesque masks he had on his wall were kind of scary and reminiscent of things used in pagan worship.)
A couple of others that I read from the Storied Cities list but did not read to the kids were Oops! by Jean-Luc Fromental and
Oops! shows how one simple accident (losing a bar of soap) leads to a long chain of events. As I recall, it was a little hard to follow. It might have been OK, except it ended up with space aliens in a UFO coming to rescue the family and bring them to their vacation destination and I didn’t think we needed to waste our time on that.
Secret Letters from 0 to Susie Morgenstern is a story about a boy who lives with his grandmother and housekeeper. His mother died when he was born and his father has been missing since he was one day old. He leads a very quiet, protected life, not knowing much about the world outside his own apartment. Then a new girl shows up at school and introduces him to her family of 13 brothers, the rest of the world. Eventually he finds his father and they all live happily ever after. I didn’t particularly care for the way the girl was pursuing the boy in a romantic way and dominating him. We could have dealt with that through a discussion of what is and isn’t appropriate and biblical in such a relationship. But this book was no-go for me (at least at this time) because of several unnecessary and inappropriate comments/observations between the boy and girls in the story.
One last book…
Pasteur’s Fight Against Microbes by Beverly Birch and Christian Birmingham
Another title from our Sonlight curriculum from a couple of years ago, which we had not read yet. It’s a picture book a little beyond the “easy reader” category. I think it’s rated for 9 years/4th grade and up. But my younger kids enjoyed listening to it and looking at the pictures. A good story about how Louis Pasteur discovered the microbes that cause disease.
Well, that’s about all I can remember for now…we did all this back in May and June. I’ve been wanting/trying/planning to write this post ever since then, but just have not had time. My awesome husband took the kids (yes, ALL 6!) out to feed the ducks and play in the park this morning, then out to eat and explore this afternoon, giving me a much needed and longed for day off. I was SO tempted to go with them this afternoon, but knew I really needed to have a break. My soul has been refreshed by some worship music, my ears refreshed by quiet, and my mind refreshed by finally getting this blog post written!
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