It has been my dream for a while to take the kids to France and enroll them in school for a couple months to learn the language. It hasn't even been close to possible for more than a few years. We have been loosely planning to travel abroad next year and I started thinking today that perhaps I should research and see if enrolling the kids was actually possible since its practically the same cost to stay 1 week or 6 once we've left Alaska and flown half way around the world.
I am sort of excited to have found some preliminary information that makes it seem like a sorta maybe possibility. For one, the cost of tuition for the month+ may be reasonable, and it is actually allowable as far as I can tell as part of an ordinary vacation. The advice was to go toward the end of the school year. Not sure why exactly yet as some factors may not affect us as homeschoolers, but if it seems best, that would mean looking at spring 2018. The biggest concern I had when researching was the statement about bringing vaccine records. I am not sure what the French vaccine schedule looks like, but if it looks like the American one my kids will not meet it. France doesn't seem like the sort of country to have a religious exemption so I will have to research this further soon. I also want to brainstorm options outside of a traditional school that will accomplish the same goals but for now I can't think of anything better.
Even if French school isn't an option yet, we have stepped up our French during school time considerably. We are starting with a full hour of French immersion with a plan to move to 4 hours. Right now we have a mix of my verbal instruction/drawing cartoons with silly speech bubbles and having the kids modify and suggest new dialogues, instructional videos, and various levels of cartoons to fill the time. I want this to be as low stress as possible since in the past I have had struggles with one child or another deciding French was too hard and rolling and moaning on the floor during lessons. Trying to keep that to a minimum here 
2 days, 2 hours in and so far enthusiasm is high.
I also picked some new courses. The Easy French JR, which starts with English dialogues and adds more French each time. I have loved the look but passed on it for years because of quebequois accent on the audio. I decided to stop being a snob and realize my children are more likely to run into a French speaking Canadian than a European French speaker and they might as well be familiar with the accent. Still the samples were hard to listen to so I am not worried if this is only marginally useful or we have to go "off script" rather literally
I picked up Alex et Zoé level 2 and now that my son is writing better I hope we can go through the writing portion of levels one and two this year.
I picked up two other programs Ecoutez Parlez level one and the Learnables Level 1. The former is a book with audio cd. You look at pictures, listen to CD, repeat. It has a fairly small amount of content but people say it can last a small child quite a while. Probably because it's boring 
I don't know that for sure yet but I need something for each child to do independently so that is for my kindergartener. The Learnables is for my son. It only comes as a computer program now although I'd prefer the older book version. I am sure my son will like this better. It goes through pictures and builds each word into sentences and uses some secondary sentences to clarify unknown words and then starts again. Again it is pretty pricy for the amount of content I think ( comparable or more expensive than rosetta depending on how you buy) but at least you own it in the end and I think it has some other pluses as well. We will see when we get it.
Of course I also bought the quarterly flood of French picture books. They will arrive like a shower of happy surprises in my mailbox from now through September so that's always fun
I started a thread for the Course Completion Challenge. Anyone who is reading and might be interested should hop over and take a look.
Statistics: Posted by Ani — Sun Jul 10, 2016 6:19 am