Return to American School

Français, SVP!

The first big Return From France activity around here was the return to school -- a return to her old haunt for Molly, and, since French kindergarteners are the biggest little-school kids, the beginning of grown-up elementary school for Betsy.

In our school, children don't know until the week before school starts who their teachers and classmates will be. There are enough children for 3 classes in each grade so, they'll always know someone, but there may not be any close friends in class the first day. There almost always are by the end of the first week, though! Molly has a good mix of repeat classmates new ones. Overall, it's a really good group of children who work well together. Betsy knew just two children a very little bit before her first day, but was joined at the hip to 3 girls and felt great loyalty to a number of boys by the end of the first week. Both children have a number of classmates born in other countries in their classes. Some are in ESL and some not, but, alas, there is not a single child from a French-speaking family in the school this year. Thank goodness for multiple language-tracks on DVDs!

We lucked out and both children received letters from their teachers before the day on which the classes are posted on the school building, and both teachers were in their classrooms for the open house night. This reduced first-day anxiety considerably, without reducing excitement in the least.

Grammy and Grampy came just for one night on their way to a wedding celebration, and lucked into the open house afternoon, so they got to meet Mrs. Snavely and Mrs. Finley, too, which was great. Though Mrs. Snavely's name could have been artfully crafted for a character in a novel populated by people who dislike children, eat boiled cabbage, and are otherwise not to be trusted, her real-life character puts us to shame for even thinking such a thing -- she couldn't be more open, warm, and friendly. Mrs. Finley's name and character may be less contrastingly noteworthy, but it has everything to do with her more pedestrian name and nothing to do with any sort of novel-worthy character or lack thereof.

The girls were really conscious of the differences in the schools' physical settings between their school here and their schools in France. We took a lot of pictures of the inside of the building during the open house, but didn't get enough of the outside. This is the "yellow entrance" seen from the sidewalk on our side of the school. In France the elementary "schoolyard" is a strip of asphalt roughly the size of an American high school gym enclosed by a high wall, and accessorized by a single row of mutilated old sycamore-type trees and a shed-roofed 3-wall enclosure for rainy recesses. The public nursery school (maternelle) schoolyard has one unmutilated tree, a large swath of course sand, a fast merry-go-round (the name -- tourniquet -- in French doesn't immediately banish mental musings about the near-universal disappearance of all such instruments of fast and dizzy fun from American playgrounds) and a compact climber with a couple of plastic slides, freely used for behaviors that would not be permitted here, but which children there easily work out amongst themselves. The Easterly playground is notably large and green even for American schools. We'll have to add some pictures once the snow melts and it all looks inviting again, but there are climbers of various sorts, blacktop, open grass, swings, modern ("safe"!) see-saws and a sort of track that kids run or walk around every recess to earn miles for their classes in an up-the-activity anti-obesity effort.

The classrooms (even for 4th grade) are more like French maternelle classrooms than French elementary ones -- where 30 children sat in very tight rows in front of a chalkboard. American ones, as you French readers will see, have a rug, reading areas, cubbies for coats and bags, and small groups of desks to form student tables.

Here, like in France, we walk to school, but we only do it once a day, and we have a neighborhood "walking group" of a bunch of kids escorted by one parent in each direction. With Brian in middle school now and Noah in Germany, Molly is the oldest this year, followed by Devin and Morgan, Patrick, and Betsy (grades 4, 3, 3, 2, 1). Mr. Bellotti provides safe passage across the one busy street except when Molly has to be at school early for choir or, now, band. We really appreciate all the incidental greenery on our walk now -- the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, visible yards and gardens not hidden behind large gray stone or cement walls, and trees, trees, trees, all with a natural tree-like spread. Ahhhhhhhh.

Parting shots: Molly squeezes in a few more pages of Harry Potter, while Betsy delights in her minutes-from-true-First Grader-status.