keep on top of my kids' homework

Roman ruins
Archeology
Enluminure du 13eme (no idea what that is in English)
Gravure (ditto) July 1500
Traces of prehistory
A stone grinder thingy (meule de pierre)
Scribes from 2,700 years ago
Hat and Statue in bronze from antiquity
Various cars through the ages
Airplanes through the ages with which to match cars

Homework is learning about the past, and there are pictures of each of the above. I know not one thing about any of those things. And neither does he.

Oh my.

is learning the words to a Yannick Noah song. Pretty nice homework. Does this mean we are going to get his alternative version of La Marseillaise to learn too?

There’s hardly been any homework lately. My son still can’t spell but he can think okay, and spelling is hard. I get the feeling a LOT of time must be spent in French schools drumming in the logic of the é, ée, és, ées, ait, ais, ai, aie, aient, er, ayent (did I miss any)...loads of French adults still don’t get the difference, and I can write the right ones if I think really hard about it, but not say them right, so I can’t blame him for needing a little more time.

What a shame they have to spend time learning that. I bet it won’t make sense until they’ve done all the tenses. There’d be so much more time for other things if they just changed them all to one big “Eh”!

Not that I’m suggesting that is a particularly desirable thing to do to a language.

despite having fill in teacher filling in for the fill in teacher and me not being very good at it they have survived another term with pretty good grades.

And they didn’t get in trouble with the police for saying bad things about Misters Bush & Blair.

Vive la France.

I’m obsessing about this doesn’t it? But it’s fascinating now.
Have a plan. I do maths with daughter and French with son. Papa does French with daughter and maths with son.

Don’t ask me how that works but there is a really good symmetry in there. Am going to try to stick to this for two weeks and see what happens. My little one cracks me up, he’s like ‘sod the files de boites, I’m doing it in my head’. I just realized it doesn’t matter too much how you get to the answer in maths as long as you get there. But good on the teachers for trying visuals, I know it would have helped me.

It may seem like we’re the flipping oxo family thesedays. Maybe we’re just savouring the last moments of being here, being together before all the big changes come and wack us over the head.

Optimistic as ever :)

am so excited daughter wrote her first story i need to record it because we’ll lose the piece of paper or the hard drive as usual.

il est venu dans zin magasin inès voi mathilde fé une bétize lénne arive est èle est sale est jean est sel dans la coure.

The spelling is of course, atrocious, in case anyone trying to learn French sees, but it’s too cute. Her first attempt at creative writing. And she’s got lovely handwriting. Girls always get handwriting better than boys for some reason.

You Go Girlie.

Beams Proud Mummy Stylie.

thin on the ground, this homework business lately. Lots of replacement teachers. So as I have to go on a work jolly for a couple of days and can’t face the wardrobe-related issues of preparing for it I’m written them a lovely long letter (no bullet points! god that was fun!) so they’ll have to read it. Hehe. I hope to come back to find it with the spelling corrected.

asks son. A dictionary that has all the objects in the house in it, and tells you where they are. When they move, the dictionary automatically changes.

Well. Yes. I’d love one of those too. But I can’t think of any way of doing it that doesn’t involve RFIDs. Which I hate the idea of. Unless I were to make my own and that’s hardly likely as a working mother of two with zero knowledge of nanotechnology or computing.

So anyway, I thought I could put my database obsession to good use and make him one. We’d both learn lots of French spelling and maybe everything would have its place for once? At least for a little while because we’d be thinking about it.

Like all good plans, we’ll probably do it for ten minutes and get bored but well, why not? C’est pas con.

la cigale ayant chanté tout l’été
se trouvant dépourvu
quand la bise fut venu;
Pas un seul petit morceau
De mouche ou de vermisseau
Elle a crié famine
chez la fourmis sa voisine
La priant de lui prêter
Quelque grain pour subsister
Jusque la saison nouvelle.

We’ve had to look up cigale, vermisseau (I didn’t know what either was, despite having written entire essays about this fable) and famine for him.

I tried to write it from memory cos it’s not very fair to expect him to learn something I can’t. But I failed. I confess, I looked it up.

Studying is so much more interesting the second time round.

not thanks to me, but my husband. I’ve had two weeks off homework duty and it’s been fantastic seeing them respond to a different way of learning.

I got them tonight, and it was fun again! Son had to write out a dictionary entry (dictionaries! lovely!) on ‘arbre généalogique’ which of course had me looking up words and getting all etymologistic, and I was able to make one and show him who all the wrinklies at Granny’s 90th were, and how those strange nice English people they met were all cousins and aunts and great great uncles and all that (I wasn’t too sure myself, it was a good exercise).

And then daughter had to learn a poem, called Bonne Année. It didn’t say who wrote it so looked it up and it’s someone called Rosemonde Gérard and we read another of hers and it talks about growing old too. And it’s a lovely poem. Sort of reminiscent of the “Chanson des vieux amants” without the cynicism.

‘Old’ and ‘family’ are recurring themes at the moment. It’s nice. Need to remember this. We need to see more of our oldies, we really do.