Molly's Thanksgiving presentation

Remember the brave 8-year-old who started out a school year in French, knowing her numbers pretty well but not much else? Just a few weeks ago, she got pink-slipped by her twice-weekly language tutor; there are other children who need his help more now -- French-speaking children.

For Thanksgiving, she readily agreed to prepare a talk in French for her class about the holiday. She and Cricket researched Thanksgiving (they especially liked Plimoth Plantation's "be the historian" pages) and Molly learned quite a bit. Then she began thinking about her audience: what do children who have never heard of Thanksgiving need to know? With just a bit of help, she created an outline, then dictated a talk in English. The adults made an attempt at translating it into French, but left all the verbs in the infinitive. Molly hit the 501 Verbs book, and (with some help deciding on tenses) edited the talk. She all but memorized it on Wanksgiving, and on Thanksgiving itself presented to her class, standing up in front with only a page of notes.

Molly kindly invited her parents (and her visiting "Aunt" Christine) to come too, so we do have some video of the talk. The camera was in the back row, so unfortunately the microphone didn't pick up her quiet but steady voice very well.

This video clip, meticulously subtitled by Dave, is of the last two paragraphs of her talk, when she abandoned the notes in favor of reading. Molly's French grammar isn't quite right in the video, no thanks to her parents, but here is the text of her entire talk after Mme. Boulan corrected it.

Molly's class received the talk extraordinarily well. They were VERY quiet, VERY attentive, and VERY respectful, even in the one place where she got stuck for a few seconds (and picked up the printout, just as the video starts). When their English teacher then began his lesson by asking when Thanksgiving was, he got a big, almost-in-unison "Aujourd'hui!" in response.

The talk also marked another rite of passage for Molly. CE2 (third grade) is the grade for moving from regular pens and pencils to a stylo plume (fountain pen). At the beginning of the year, Molly's teacher asked her to stick with ballpoint pens while she learned cursive (French children learn cursive concurrently with printing). Following her talk, Molly went to the papeterie (her favorite store in our little downtown) and chose a stylo plume that she loves. She spent much of the next day writing with it, and now uses it in school, too, with Mme. Boulan's blessing.