vive le vent

Winter is definitely here in the Somme. The snow has stopped falling, but temperatures are still frosty and the pavements still treacherous. This week has been a busy, festive one for me: Hannukah began last Wednesday night, my birthday was on Thursday, and I've been teaching Christmas songs to most of my classes all week in preparation for a soirée at the Centre de Loisirs next Friday night. My birthday fell on a good day - I don't have to be in until 1330 on Thursdays so I spent the morning in bed eating chocolate sent by a friend and watching Eastenders. Once I got to school I got sung to in various degrees of fluency and gifted with a wristful of Silly Bandz, the preferred currency of the primary school.

On Thursday I also had my most challenging class yet. One of the CM1 (9-10yrs) classes had been to the cinema that morning to watch The Snowman, and their teacher had purchased the anniversary DVD which had a documentary about the film that the children wanted to watch - except it was in English without subtitles. On the spot translation turned out not to be too difficult, with the English teacher offering vocabulary where mine was lacking. However, because neither of us had seen it before, we weren't prepared for what one woman said: "We get some odd requests for licensing. I suppose the strangest request I've had [and here I knew what was coming] was for a Snowman condom, where the condom was, well, his body." I looked at the teacher and we tried not to laugh too hard; in the end I said didn't know how to translate it, and she said that she didn't understand it properly. Luckily the attention span of children is such that they soon became interested in the next sequence and forgot about what it was we found so funny... I daren't imagine how long it would have taken us to stop the laughter.

Friday's challenge came in the form of handwriting. The songs we're learning are quite short (Jingle Bells, and We Wish You A Merry Christmas) so I would write them on the board and the kids copy them into their notebooks. I have never had "good" (ie: consistant, always legible) handwriting, but here I really tried to be neat. However, lots of the kids were totally baffled by it. When they start school they learn script (essentially what we in the UK would call calligraphy), which the teachers use to write on the board too, but they read books in regular book print. Anything inbetween is a mystery, as illustrated below. The first "ride" is in script, the bottom one is my regular handwriting.

In one class the kids asked me to try and write in script, so while they were copying the songs down I painstakingly drew an elaborate "Christmas" on the board. After many restarts, my efforts were rewarded with a somewhat patronising round of applause.

Getting old, not growing up:



and a loving Latke: