Betsy (et ta soeur) parlent français (postscripts added)

One day Betsy announced she would like to give a "concert". She then recited the poem just as in the video, from memory. Obviously this is something she learned at school, but we suspect that the desire to memorize and then perform it is related to the fact that her big sister has to do this from time to time in her class.

We have been told by some of the parents here that Betsy's accent is absolutely indistinguishable from that of a native speaker. One interesting bit of news that Cricket learned recently from Julie, Betsy's beloved mâitresse (kindergarten teacher), is that in a recent placement test over French phonemes given to all the children her age, Betsy had the highest score in the entire school. We have no idea what this means (and we haven't told either child about it), but we think it's really interesting. Maybe it has something to do with having to listen so carefully all the time.

For her part, Molly appears to be functioning completely normally in her work in French now. We are told that she has a slightly detectable accent, and it's clear that her conversation is not quite fluent, but she can read at grade level. She does all of the same homework as her classmates, and she recently achieved one of the few 100% scores on a verb-conjugation test. Again, we think much of this is due to the fact that Molly has had to work a lot harder on this stuff than her friends. A side benefit of this is that her study skills have made a quantum leap since we came to France. In that she now has some.




If only their parents could absorb language this naturally! (NB: Not "easily," as it has certainly been a lot of work for both girls.)

Postscript: On Feb. 2, Betsy's kindergarten class had its parents' day and she was able to show Cricket and Dave a lot of the work she's done this year. Among the items was the page shown here, which is the poem -- annotated by Betsy, of course -- she is reciting in the video. The title means "What happens on the ice." We are especially fond of the penguin Betsy drew freehand at the bottom of the page.

As for Molly's verb-conjugation test, here is a picture of that. Pretty much speaks for itself, even if you don't read (much) French.