where did the año go?!

Griffin and Gwyneth in front of their school, Escuela Bilingüe Pioneer

I sent my second grader and preschooler to school yesterday and they didn't come home.  Instead, at the end of the day, a rising kindergartener and a third grader greeted me with hugs and overstuffed backpacks and paleta-stained fingers.

a peanut of a rising kindergartener who only weighs 31 pounds--the big kids won't even notice her in the hallways and she'll get squished like un insecto--and a third grader who has lost several teeth and gained a pair of glasses in the past month!

And I cried during the end-of-the-year pre-K slide show.

an unexpected result of a parent-teacher conference

I hate soccer. Je déteste le foot.

Griffin, par contre, adore le foot.

No, wait, that's too strong.  Rather, I am ambivalent about sports and I dislike the commitment that playing on a kids' soccer team requires--two practices a week, right at dinner time (which means that we can either eat early without my husband, who is still at work, or eat later, which throws off the kids' bedtime routine), plus a game on Saturdays which can be as early as 9:00 or as late as 4:00.

On soccer afternoons, Griffin has to walk home from school, decompress from his 7.5-hour school day (he craves time by himself most days), eat a protein-heavy snack, do his homework (20 minutes or so), practice his music (10 minutes), find his shin guards and cleats and water bottle and hat, and walk to practice, all in two hours.

This would, of course, be a piece of gâteau to a grown-up, but not for a lollygagging seven-year-old.  And not for the seven-year-old's mother and his little sister who must accompany him for all these steps.

He loves her very much, of course, but sometimes he just wants her to leave him alone.

So I feel confident in blaming le foot for the fact that it's been hard to get Griffin to do anything in French at home with me lately.  He's a busy little boy, and I don't want to push him to read and write in French if he doesn't want to; he'll resist and resent it.  (Fortunately, he still willingly snuggles and listens to me read aloud in French at bedtime.)

At his first parent-teacher conference of the year, as we discussed how to keep him engaged and challenged in second grade, I had a brainstorm: I asked the teacher if I could come in a couple of times a week to do French lessons with him during the school day.  And she agreed!

So far, so good.  He's thrilled to skip the school breakfast and calendar/circle time for half an hour at the beginning of the day while spending time one-on-one with maman. We sit at a table just outside his classroom and take turns reading aloud, then we discuss what we read, then he writes a little about it, and--his favorite--sometimes we play word games. It's low-key, and lovely.

It makes me so, so happy to spend time helping him explore this language that I love.  And not having to coax or cajole him to interact in French, not having to ward off and wrangle his inquisitive, imperious sister, not having to squeeze our lessons in between snack and soccer, or chores and bath, or homework and dinner--that makes our time together all the sweeter.

my smiley garçon, showing off the chameléon he made in art class

neither here nor there, ici ou là, acquí o allí

Sometimes carving the time out to read and write about raising my children bilingually is easy, familiar, fun, like slipping a spoon into soft-serve ice cream, each new idea and discovery and resource and online kindred spirit a colorful sprinkle that I devour.

(My husband is continually astonished by the number of websites I can have open simultaneously--but I can't close a page until I'm done thinking about it!)

Other times, carving out time to blog is the equivalent of scraping sheets of frozen ice off my car in a Colorado winter, a millimeter at a time, until I decide it's not worth it and just walk wherever I was headed (or more likely, decide the errand wasn't that urgent and go inside and make a new cup of tea).

my favorite gift to give this year--I love this book as much as my kids do!

You'd think that I'd know by now that for me, the month before Christmas (and several weeks afterwards) tends to be the latter.  Decorating, buying and wrapping and shipping presents for everyone, designing and sending cards, coaching the children through their handmade gifts, making my own handmade gifts, figuring out and following through on tips for those who have earned them and end-of-year charity donations, digging all the special once-a-year recipes and awkward appliances out of storage, plus all the shopping, holiday-party-and-church-service-attending, entertaining, traveling, hosting, and the packing and/or extra cleaning that traveling and hosting entails, not to mention working my paid and volunteer jobs, of course, plus the feeding, bathing, dressing-in-clean-clothes, cajoling-to-do-homework-and-practice-music, breaking-up-fights-between-siblings, scrubbing-sharpie-stains-off-the-dining-table, lulling-to-sleep that has happen, every single day, with small children….

small, beautiful children, to be sure

…all of which, fortunately, brings with it lovely quiet moments with family in front of a glowing tree decorated with memories, boisterous joy from happy kids on vacation, connecting with friends and relatives far away (I always leave their holiday cards up till spring break), cathartic sob sessions about friends and family who are gone, and a very good excuse to eat mountains of cookies and rivers of melted cheese.

Christmas Eve tradition inspired by my year in the Alps: raclette (melty cheese grilled tableside and poured over potatoes and ham)

Thus, blogging doesn't happen very often for me in December!

And it probably won't in January, not just yet, because I've fallen so far behind at work, and I still have a pile of Christmas New Year's cards to write and mail, plus thank-you notes, plus a massive pile of decorations and ornaments and wrapping supplies in the basement to organize and hide for the next eleven months, but right now, this very afternoon, I have carved out 1.5 hours to check in and tell you what blogworthy stuff is on my mind.

Like the successful completion of Carol's and my first French class for kids at Grandrabbit's, followed by our being hired for a new class this semester, accompanied by the worry that the manager isn't doing enough to publicize it.

Bricolage (arts and crafts) in French class!  

And trying to rework my weekly lesson with a five-year-old private tutoring client, whose dad is French, whom I want to challenge more while still keeping our time together fun for her.

Or how about the new games I've discovered or developed to enhance Griffin's and Gwyneth's French at home, the fantastic books we've been reading together, but also my reluctance to push Griffin to read and write more in French at home (he gets cranky about it after 7.5 hours in school every day).

And, oh my goodness, speaking of school, how freaking awesome it is that my kids are learning Spanish--really understanding it, even three-year-old Gwyneth with 11 hours of preschool a week.  Griffin is even writing one- and two-page narratives in the past tense, sprinkled with transition words, dialogue, and clear explanations of why the event he's describing was ¡fantastico!

And how freaking scared I am that the Spanish they and their friends are immersed every weekday in will supplant their French.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
Fruit and cookies for Santa on the potty chair.

homework from his Spanish teacher: practice writing in French!

At the urging of his teacher at his Spanish immersion school, my on-his-way-to-trilingual six-year-old son Griffin is now doing homework in French!

The teacher had issued a challenge to the kids at the beginning of the school year: to read 100 books in Spanish and write a couple of sentences responding to them in a sort of reading journal.  She even provided prompts to help the young writers get started--"my favorite part was...", "something new I learned was...", and so forth.

When Griffin brought her his completed journal a couple of weeks ago, she seemed a little surprised that he had finished the 100 books already.  She thanked him, took it from him, and said that she would keep it until she had collected the other students' journals.  

Just as she turned to go and Griffin started to dance with glee about having finished all his homework for the rest of the school year, I realized that not being required to read or write in Spanish at home until August was a bad idea.  I mean, he's a smart kid who loves to read, but he wants to read what he chooses and nothing else.  And as soon as he finishes a book, he's off and running to the next one--he's not going to take the time to write about it unless we bribe or threaten (or both).

And there's always a next one waiting.

Desperately, I asked his teacher if she had a new challenge for the students who finished their 100 books, like maybe to try to read another 100 before the new school year begins in August.  Griffin groaned; I winced.

But his teacher, wonderful lady, suggested that this time, instead of doing the 100 books in Spanish, he alternate among books in Spanish, English, and French!  So now, for the first time in his young life, he is starting to read and write in French.  And I get to watch it happen!

Actually, what I'm mostly doing is trying not to interfere.  He picks the text--one of his sister's board books, an easy reader from the Bidule series (downloaded to my iPad), an illustrated article from Youpi magazine--reads it aloud with my help, and then scribbles and scratches a sentence about it (while complaining that writing in French is harder than writing in English and Spanish).

An article from Youpi about a Frenchman who circumnavigated the globe in a sailboat decades ago

I know, I know.  Developing fluency in your third language is such a chore.

(But what a great problem to have, kid!)

While Griffin writes, rendering what he hears when he speaks French into consonants and vowels and the occasional feisty accent mark, creations that vaguely resemble French words, I sit on my hands or keep a mug of hot tea in front of my mouth so as to avoid telling him how to spell things or that he should add a transition word or just give me the pencil so that I can write what I want him to say!

And when he's done, and when I've found something to praise about the content of his sentence, and only then, do I pick out something to explicitly teach him about.  Tonight, for example, he asked how to spell "canoe" in French.  So I told him about the tréma, the two dots over the second letter in a pair of vowels that indicates that the second vowel gets pronounced separately, as in Noël, thus giving him canoë.

Griffin's writing journal entry about the Youpi article "Seul autour du monde": "Ma conexion est que je suis alle den une canoe avec ma maman.  et je vu un lacke."

And while where-to-put-two-dots is perhaps one of the least important rules to bother teaching someone who is learning to read and write in French, it's relevant to what he was trying to describe; he understood right away (comparing it to bilinguë in Spanish); and now he has an "Accents en français" page in his writing journal.  I hope that the next time we read together in French, we'll come across other words with that same diacritical mark, and he can add them to the list.

So I anticipate continuing this way for the next month or so--reading to him in French every day as usual, encouraging him to read to me more, and insisting that he write a sentence about it in his reading journal two or three times a week.  Each time, I'll find one thing to point out about grammar or syntax or spelling.  When appropriate, I'll make a new page of hints and examples and lists for his journal that we can add to.  (For example, "The Gazillion Ways to Spell the Sound 'Ay' in French," or "Consonants  at the End of a Word Which We Actually Pronounce, At Least Most of the Time," or "Hey, Look at That, What's That Adjective Doing in Front of That Noun?")

My notes for him about je vs. j'ai vs. jeu vs. G, which are all pronounced similarly but mean entirely different things

Over the summer, once he's out of school, I will try to increase gradually the amount and frequency that he reads and writes in French.  And the more we read and write together, the more I can point out how my previous teaching points appear in the texts.  And eventually--ideally--it will be Griffin who notices them and pays attention and incorporates them into his own writing.

So, no dictation.  No memorizing lists of irregular past participles.  No expecting perfection (or even coherence, in these early days).  Read what he wants to read, write what he wants to write, talk about it together, and hopefully develop in French the confidence and ease that he has in English and Spanish.  He's just a kid, an on-his-way-to-trilingual kid, and I want him to enjoy the journey.

bilingual? trilingual? try triliterate! and throw in some trying behaviors.

Friends near and far, in person and online, have asked me how Griffin is doing at Escuela Bilingue Pioneer, his English/Spanish dual language immersion school, and what that means for his French.  I'll tell you (and it might sound like we're showing off--but then you'll see that I'm not).

a trilingual letter for me in February 2014: "I love you a lot mom thank you for leving me notes in my lunch box.  gracias  Love, Griffin  P.S. Hope you have a graete day.  je teme mamon."  I think I'll leave this on the fridge until he graduates from high school!

Two-thirds of the way through his kindergarten year, he communicates clearly in Spanish, both orally and in writing.  He reads at nearly the second grade level--in his third language, mind you!--and understands his teachers and classmates as well as he reads, maybe better, although I'm not sure how he would handle, say, watching cartoons in Spanish, or conversing with people he doesn't know.

He can also communicate in writing in Spanish:

"I like to play with my friends at recess.  I like to watch Broncos games.  I like to read with my family."

This school year, Griffin has read 95 books in Spanish at home (easy readers at the G, H, I levels, plus some picture books) and written one, two, or three sentences about them using prompts from the teacher (mostly "what this book reminds me of") in his reading journal.

(Griffin goes to a first grade class for literacy instruction each day--the school doesn't actually expect kindergarteners to do reading and writing homework!)

90% of his instruction is in Spanish--the school teaches the kids to read and write in Spanish first, English later--so I don't actually know what his English reading level is.  But he devours books, both fiction and nonfiction, with the Magic Treehouse series being his hands-down favorite.

Griffin's first chapter book!  He picked it out as a prize at the library last summer and then started reading it to himself.

He also has started participating in my Reading Buddies program at the public library and meeting monthly for a parent-led book club!  (Both in English.)

Brainstorming at book club before acting out a readers' theatre version of The Stinky Cheese Man

His teacher has been giving him one-on-one math instruction in multiplication and division in Spanish, but he does the problems in English.  He and I play math games in French on my iPad, and he talks about these in English, too.  His numbers in French are weaker than his numbers in the other two languages, especially above 60.

In fact, it is fair to say that all his skills, except perhaps listening comprehension, are stronger in Spanish than in French at this point (and strongest in English, obviously).  However, he does read in French too, and he has even attempted to write in French:

a thank-you note to a francophone friend, February 2014

"Emile meci pur le livre de magic tree house jeme bucues les lir ton amis Griffin."  ("Merci pour le livre.  J'aime beaucoup les lire.  Ton ami Griffin.")

English is where he excels, though:

apology letter to a classmate, March 2014

"Dear Jorge, Sorry I hit you in the library.  I was trying to get to the palitos.  I should have waited for you to get out of the way.  And I am not supposd to run in the library or inside.  And David [the librarian] should pick who takes the palitos.  I am also sorry for when I tagged you too hard in china [a recess game] and the other times I hit you.  I wont do that again.  From Griffin."

"All the other times I hit you"???!!!

This is why I haven't written much about his schooling this year; we have been too busy dealing with his unexpected behavior challenges.  And this is why I can promise you that this post is not intended to brag about Griffin's school skills--because if he can't share markers with his classmates, chat with them in the lunch line, or ask to join their games at recess, it doesn't matter how many languages my son speaks.

it takes un village...

...to raise children in more than one language, especially when only one parent speaks the minority language, and--especially!-- when that parent is a non-native speaker.

A lot of circles have to intersect for me to succeed in this quest, and I'm so grateful to be a part of all of them:

My education: High school, college, and grad school teachers who made French language, literature, and linguistics come alive for me; summer camp counselors at Lac du Bois (one of the fabulous Concordia Language Villages) who helped me interact in French outside of a formal classroom; my professeurs at the Universite de Savoie who tolerated this terrified but enthusiastic American exchange student in their classes, evaluated my halting literary analyses, and graciously conducted oral exams with me as if I were any other student; Rachel, my co-locataire in Chambery, who with her friends and family taught me how real French people speak outside of the classroom; and the school year I spent in Mulhouse as an assistante d'anglais, where, truth be told, I learned much more than I actually taught to my high school students.

My family: In particular my Francophile mother, whose renditions of French folk songs made up a large part of the background music of my childhood; but also my extended family, who served as  cheerleaders as I studied abroad and went on to become a French teacher; and my in-laws, who never question my passion (or my ability, or the point) of raising the children bilingually (heck, my sister-in-law and her husband even offered me their son as my first guinea pig!); and, most importantly, Ed, the love of my life, whose "hopeless monolingualism" (his words) doesn't prevent him from enthusiastically supporting my efforts to raise our children bilingually, even though he doesn't always understand our dinner conversation and doesn't know what to do with the steady stream of books entering our home.

The Internet: Providing forums for me to connect with other multilingual families and teachers all over the world; offering used French books at bargain prices from eBay Canada; serving up French music and videos via YouTube, streaming radio stations, and more; tempting me with educational (and also uneducational) apps and games in French for the iPad; and giving me free access to French stories and books, lesson plans, and more Pins than I'll ever be able to read, much less implement!

The local community: The public library that let us use their space to offer a regular French storytime; the now-defunct Parenting Place who hosted a regular French playgroup; the parents from that playgroup who became my friends and whose children spoke French to my kids over countless puzzles, dump trucks full of sand, and crayons worn down to nubbins every Monday morning for years; CCFLT, the Colorado Congress of Foreign Language Teachers, which puts me in touch with nearby teachers and parents and creates a yearly convention where I can share what I know and learn lots more; the Alliance Francaise de Denver, which offers classes, cultural and social events, and most importantly to me, a library that includes lots of children's books, CDs, and even games; the area universities plus major local industries such as aerospace, atmospheric science, and Internet companies that draw students and employees from all over the world, thus making it a non-issue if strangers overhear me speaking French to my kids in the grocery store; and even our very own Pioneer Elementary, my son's dual-language immersion school (English and Spanish), which reinforces for him the importance of knowing more than one language.

Merci, mon village.  I owe you big.

kendrgeten!

Each year on the first day of school, Griffin will hold a piece of paper on which he has written his grade level for the obligatory annual photo! He didn't even have to ask me how to spell 'kindergarten.'  I think it's adorable.  And he put the hyphen in by himself!

Yes, Griffin is now a kindergartener at Escuela Bilingue Pioneer, Lafayette's public dual immersion elementary school.  Kindergarten!  Both his teacher and her aide--who seem wonderful--are native speakers from Mexico.  Thanks to his year of immersion preschool, he is unfazed by spending 90% of the school day in Spanish--it's the 7.5-hour school day that wearies him (understandably).

However, on the third day of school, his teacher pulled me aside to say that he had been acting out--even pushing the other kids!--because he was getting so bored during their literacy period (which is taught in English).  Normally she pairs up the students who already know how to read; they read books together and do worksheets and projects together.

But Griffin, who's already reading easy chapter books like the Magic Treehouse series, is so far advanced that the teacher can't do that this time.  She tried to arrange for him to go to another grade level class for reading, but it doesn't fit their schedule.  Her solution sounds reasonable to me: he will read nonfiction books on his own, then write about what he learned, how it connects to his life, and so forth.  (She's putting together a little book for him with writing prompts and places to draw pictures about what he reads.)  The teacher and the aide will supervise what he is working on.

I hope that he can handle working independently--while he can spend an hour reading by himself during "quiet time," no problem (and then sometimes turns off his timer so he can stay in his room and finish a book), he does not enjoy being forced to answer questions about what he read or being told what he needs to write about.  (Welcome to school, kid.)

But, ultimately, I'm not too concerned.  He loves books, he's learning in Spanish.  (What I am worried about is the possibility of the Spanish supplanting the French--but I'll save that for another post!)

Gwyneth was less excited than the rest of us.