“Dancer Dorbie” gets a lesson in the lowercase letters.

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Sam and I are both missing our French class friends. So we made a little video carte postale (post card) pour nos amis. These are some of the songs we’d been doing in class, and you’ll see that I couldn’t resist using the iMovie editor to add a little lesson. Bonne année, les enfants!

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All three of us got our craft on last month. The first rainy Saturday we spent making rubber stamps for our Letterboxing obsession. AC did the actual carving. Here Sam makes us a model for the butterfly stamp she wanted: My tulle tutus for Sam’s little “magical dress-up” birthday party. Try saying “tulle tutus” twenty …

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Salt dough letters and shapes: They looked like cookies until Sam painted them. Egg carton spiders: We made these when we were reading Charlotte’s Web. We also use them in French class when we sing “L’araignée gypsie” (The Itsy Bitsy Spider). Using the hole punch on painted egg carton was difficult and so the second …

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After a three-year hiatus I am once again teaching French. You know the old teacherly saying, “It seems like the students are getting younger every year?” Well, in my case, it’s true. These are the youngest students I have ever taught. They don’t remember 9/11. They don’t know who Michael Jackson was. They definitely …

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On Tuesday we counted 130 instances of the letter S during morning shopping errands. I’m trying the old “letter of the week” theme with Sam and we are starting this week with S. She’s keenly interested in that letter. She may believe on some level that it belongs to her. But it also belongs to Stop Signs and Sale Signs …

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Lobsters always makes me think of Annie Hall. Sam and I didn’t try to drop any live ones in a pot of boiling water but in our creation of the crusty crustaceans we did manage to get paint EVERYwhere, resulting in much giggling and hopping and contorting of bodies on our way to the tub. First we painted Sam’s hands and …

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While trying to organize some of the clutter in our little house before 14 people come over on Thursday for the first session of Allons-y les petits (my preschooler French class — !!!) I came across this story Sam wrote last month. She dictated it to me and after I’d written it down she illustrated it. The narrative …

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A week or so before we left CA for PA, Sam found a book on dinosaurs and became interested, especially in some of the long and torturous names. So we’ve been reading a variety of dinosaur books, some serious and some silly. And we did one dinosaur craft shortly before our trip: a sponge-painted stegosaurus with …

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One of Sam’s regular questions is: “When do I get to have my OWN laptop?” I finally broke down. Here it is: (Thanks again to No Time for Flash Cards for the idea.) This is a special design. Sam rejected both the QWERTY and DVORAK keyboard layout in favor of ZYKHJT raised to the Q. Also, notice the space bar on the left …

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