In our last days we tried to capture some of our going-to-school routines, including:
Reading "20 Minutes," a free daily newspaper. We'd pick up our copy at the metro station and read it as we walked to school. The value of seeing our boys reading a French newspaper? Priceless. They usually just caught up on the latest football (soccer) scores, but still.
Each morning on the way to school we also said hello to Monsieur Vinet, a famous Swiss literary critic and author.
On many days we stopped to marvel at a big tree. We called it the "hugging tree" because when we first saw it we tried (unsuccessfully) to join hands around it. The circumference of this trunk is 241.5 inches (we measured!).
If we were running a little ahead of schedule, we took a detour to walk through a park near the school. The guys would jump off the retaining wall -- with Mark's help!
We are very thankful to have found the Ecole Bilingue de la Suisee Romand. It provided a great combination of small class sizes and an environment where the boys could learn French without being fully immersed (meaning mainly that their math classes were in English!).
While in some ways the school was very different than a US elementary school (kids travel from teacher to teacher, they work at their own pace, there is no homework or tests), in other ways it was similar.
One similarity was the end-of-the calendar year celebration. Like many schools, ours had the children put on a little Holiday performance. The children, from pre-K to 5th primary, sang holiday songs in English, French, German, Spanish and Latin.
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Here are the guys with some of their pals from school.
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| Christopher and Matthew with Ethan and Paige |
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| Matthew with Milan and Arnaud |
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