A house as a classroom...

Obviously, I have a bit of free time while the kids are at school...I will be occupying that free time with some more exciting things very soon. But, it is fun that Léo comes home from school in the middle of the day. Today, after a lunch that contained crazily delicious French cheese, Léo trekked me through the mud to meet the donkey next door, Peggy. I like her bangs (that's fringe for any English people reading this!). They are cut around her eyes. She seems a bit lonely (she can probably see the two ponies and feels sad that she is all alone) and makes lots of donkey noises for much of the day.

For anyone who has ever seen my science classroom in Colorado, you know that I have words covering everything by the end of the year...as did/do the rest of Tigers- in fact we got made fun of for it regularly. So, I am slowly turning La Crochardière into a classroom. One of the tricks I learned about teaching a language from a variety of brilliant language teachers, is to label things. We started last night...I modeled one and had the boys do the rest.





Then, we decided to hang all the prepositions on the fireplace. We are referring to it as "La Cheminée des Prepositions" and we have been practicing them at mealtimes since this fireplace is in the dining room. We are naming the food at the table and learning to say please and thank you in English as well. I feel that after two months, they should have learned some English!

The kids are just so incredibly sweet and excited to have me here and so far it has been really fun. I have full-on black out shutters in my room and am definitely going to have to leave them open as it seems to be the middle of the night when I wake up when in fact, it is morning and it makes me feel like a giant slacker loser.

Tomorrow we will go to a medieval village called Vitré and then Sunday, if it is sunny, the family will take me to Saint Malo, a larger town on the coast. It is also a series of fortified medieval villages. It is totally normal for Europeans to live in such historical places (like when I went to a 900 year old pub for lunch in England!) but for me, it is nuts to think that Dol has been continuously inhabited for a few thousand years, at least. There are pagan monolithic stones that have been uncovered here as well as some Roman ruins and various remnants of several Viking invasions. Really cool. In Fort Collins, I can go to the Avery House, it was built in like 1880. :) Not that I don't LOVE LOVE LOVE Colorado, but old buildings just have a different meaning in Europe. It is difficult to wrap my head around that!