CE2 présente ... water!

What are these children doing? Why, the French equivalent of the elementary school play, of course! Molly's CE2 class (3rd grade) had been going to dance class once a week and this performance for the parents was the culmination of all of their effort. French schools (at least those we've seen) don't tend to have a large multipurpose room -- the combination gym/cafeteria -- like American ones do, so there is not a good place to stage this type of performance. One of the best rooms for the purpose turned out to be the "salle de jeu" (play room) at Betsy's school, so this is where we attended this performance, sitting on tiny Betsy-sized chairs that were set up for all of us parents along one side of the room.

The theme of the performance was water, so as you can see the children are all dressed for the part. They performed variously as ocean waves, clouds, ice that later melts, and probably other things related to water we were too dense to understand (Dave was sure that the ocean waves crashing on the shore, then sinking into the sand, were actually snowflakes falling to earth and accumulating on the ground. Molly rolled her eyes at her father's utter cluelessness for what we imagine will not be the last time.)

This picture is of Madame Boulan, Molly's teacher, who was understandably very proud of her students. She is not the person who directed this performance -- that was the woman who ran the dance class -- but she clearly had a lot to do with setting all of this up (including keeping the kids in line when necessary, which she does very effectively!)

It is difficult to describe adequately what this performance was like, nor why Cricket and Dave agreed that this type of thing would simply never happen in the US, so we end instead with some video footage of the event: