Sabbatical Adventures

 Welcome, and welcome back! A brief update since a lot of time has passed since I regularly updated this blog (a covid project, primarily): As of June 2024, M. is seven, soon going on eight, and L., our new arrival, is six months. In less than two months, we are moving to France for the year for my work. M. will attend CE2 (the French equivalent of third grade) while we are there. L. will likely stay home full-time, as she has proven to be a more reliable napper than M. was, at least in early infancy. In January we might reevaluate the situation, but, as romantic as the crèche sounds and how much hype it gets in anglophone circles, it is actually pretty tough to get a spot if both parents aren't working full-time in an office. We also just feel like she is very little to go to daycare, even if what is available is high quality, since we have the flexibility to keep her home for now.

As far as this big transition goes for M., I began speaking to him in French on and off from when he was born, but we really focused on getting 10 hours a week of French (or so, this is my unscientific estimate) the year he turned three. This is also the year he started attending our local FLAM. For those who don't know me personally, I am not a native French speaker, but spent a year there in graduate school and taught French at university for five years. The amount of French we speak at home has fluctuated over the years, but the FLAM education has given M. an anchor. He also only encounters Netflix in French (we changed the settings on his profile) and despite all the literature on TV not being as valuable as two-way language exchange, we do see his vocabulary and output increase when he watches TV a lot in a weekend. (Sometimes he goes weeks or months without TV, so it is easy to see the difference.) And, reading in French has always been important. We've subscribed to different Bayard/Milan magazines over the years in addition to reading tons of French books acquired during my travels (as well as used US sources and occasional trips to Albertine Books in the French consulate).

Given M.'s reading difficulties, I haven't pushed his reading in French; my guess is that he reads at a kindergarten entering first grade level in French (or, grande section entering CP), but I am sure he will catch up quickly. He'll be attending full-time bilingual school (50/50 English/French, privée hors contrat — that means the school doesn't receive government funding for the French part; only some of the 70/30 bilingual schools do) as we'll return home in time for fourth grade and I want to make sure he keeps up with his English. Later in the summer I will start him on a cahier de vacances (the French version of summer homework), but for now we are sticking with Dragon Masters (reading a chapter a day for four days of the week), math facts, and writing in a journal. Low frustration tolerance is one of the issues M. deals with as part of his ADHD, and so managing that means avoiding the summer slide so that frustration with schoolwork is relatively low.