We started this unit with a documentary about Vincent Van Gogh's paintings. It showed the real-life places in France of Van Gogh's paintings. It wasn't necessarily for the art history major, but a good introduction to both French scenery and Van Gogh's art for a third grader and her non-art-class-taking mama.
This led to us creating French themes everywhere.
Mazzy had her third birthday party. We served up French bread, cream cheese, turkey salad (featuring our very own Thanksgiving turkey), French fries (haha), and a big over-the-top chocolate cake with chocolate-dipped fraises.
Sassy learned how to find and use an online translation dictionary. We did our best on le menu, but my French is way rusty. I was a Spanish girl, but for a short two-year stint in French class. We did get to talk a little about e's with accent marks - backwards and forwards - a's with hats and c's with tails. What were they for? What did they mean?
We decorated the girls' room with a Madeline theme in mind. What little girl doesn't adore Madeline? They love the coziness the new decorations brought.
Sassy wanted to look up Madeline cartoons, so we struck a mutually beneficial deal. We brought back spelling and math worksheets in the morning, and if she finishes them by the time the babies take their naps, she gets to watch Madeline while they sleep.
Sassy read Happy Orpheline in less than a day (go Sassy! yay!) and loved it. Of course, orphans are a favorite reading topic for her, so that worked out.
We watched a few videos. The first was called May Festivals in France. I was more interested than the children in that one. One of the festivals was for real-life gypsies. What an interesting subject. I'd love to explore that one further one day. Another festival did medieval re-enactment, including torture re-enactment. How macabre and, um, strange.
We also watched a cooking video loosely based on the movie Rataouille, starring several famous chefs. They liked the Rachel Ray segment best, as she taught a little boy how to make "chicken toes" - smaller than chicken fingers, she said, so they would call them chicken toes. The girls loved this. Chicken toes, hehe.
During dinner a couple nights, we watched a documentary about castles in France. Turns out, some castles are owned by ordinary people, ordinary families. They pay very little for them, then spend all their money (and then some, I'm sure) fixing them up. One family paid only $60,000 (US dollar equivalent) for an enormous, ancient, beautiful castle. We're talking forty plus rooms here, complete with wood-burning kitchen and servant's quarters below. For ten years, they have been renovating the castle. It still isn't done, but it is amazing. They put their own modern apartment in one "little" section of it (one little section about as big as our whole house), and they live there while they renovate the rest true to period. It is also a bed and breakfast, as most of the castles we learned about seem to be.
On an unseasonably warm January day last week, I re-painted the trim on our barns and sheds, with the intention of finishing them off with little French signs starring sunflowers (our take on Van Gogh's sunflowers) and titles in French. We painted the sunflowers on the signs today while the babies were napping. I still have to paint the words, so pics on those later.
And what was our soundtrack to all this French focus? Why, the French Cafe Radio on Pandora, of course. It provided the perfect backdrop for both inward-focused January in general and all of our activities al francais.
(And on a side note, it made Mama want to find lots more music by Pink Martini.)
I can't speak for Sassy, but I have several take-aways from this study. The most significant came when we did our Van Gogh-inspired sunflowers; more on that in the next post. The other is how badly, badly, very very badly I want to go back to France. And Ireland. It hurts, it is an ache. I want to go, and I want to go now.
But I think the girls would also enjoy it so much, especially when they are a little older. So my pragmatic Europe-bound goal for this year is to get our passports. I'm sure if recent political history is any gauge, then it will only get harder to get a passport with each passing year, so procrastinating in this instance would surely be a fool's slack.
