Can you complete all the tasks correctly to achieve your Maison Claire Fontaine certificate ?!
— 1 Sept 2021, 07:56 by Mark Elliott
Children are heading back to school here in Avallon. It's time to strip the shelves bare in the local shops that sell all those essential items a child will need to have in their pencil case.
The start of the academic year has a unique feel for everybody involved in education. Just like the New Year bank holiday acts as a springboard for a new calendar year in the business world, so too does the August bank holiday in the UK for the academic year.
France has the same feel at the start of September, sadly without the bank holiday.
What does the rentrée mean for us, given the ongoing mayhem in school travel caused by the pandemic?
Well, it certainly means we are not getting back to normal with our hoped-for return of UK schools. We will put this into the category of us hoping for the best at the start of the summer.
The resumption of travel is disrupted by the mismatch of vaccination and travel rules between France and the UK. Having any influence over all of this, of course, is well beyond our pay grade.
We can, however, focus on where we do have some control. This all falls into the category of planning for the worst part of our pandemic life.
We will be busy in two areas.
The first of these is in our continued English teaching in the local schools.
We have always provided English experiences and lessons for local children through full class engagement and privately organised sessions for small groups or individuals. From the start of our life here, we have regarded this as a crucial part of our integration into the local community, something we both believe in very deeply.
We have had time to do more of this due to our regular work with English children being so profoundly impacted by the pandemic. In previous years we would perhaps have contact with between four and five hundred French children.
This number is going to increase this year. This teaching will be through residential visits to our centre by groups and our going into schools to support language learning there. It turns out that just as language trips are difficult to make from the UK to France, the same is true in reverse.
For the town of Avallon, we will continue to provide language lessons and fun activities during periscolaire hours at three local primaires each week.
We have decided to continue to host UK student language learners during their gap or year abroad time. The pandemic has significantly impacted them in both the quality and the depth of their experiences. We are passionate that we should be doing all we can to try and fight the disruption and lasting damage the pandemic is having on language learning at this level.
They will be helping us with our work with French children. I have found that there is nothing quite like a linguistic workout courtesy of a young child who doesn't understand that you don't speak their language.
The second area of our work is in supporting UK schools whose usual trips continue to be disrupted.
The children in these covid disrupted times are missing out on so much. Although we obviously cannot replace the experience of travelling to France, we have found that schools have valued and appreciated the resources that we have produced. In particular, it has been gratifying when we have had schools take part and share feedback on our virtual trip experience.
These resources are freely available to all schools, not just our clients. We would encourage anybody interested in these to explore our website further.
We all know that virtual work isn't the same as a trip to visit us, but it is something to keep the flame of travel and discovery alive.
If you have other ideas about how we could help your language learning from afar, please get in touch. We would welcome the chance to stay relevant and engaged in what we love doing.
We will keep on hoping for the best and planning for the worst - it is what we have all had to learn to do in these difficult days. More than anything else, we look forward to once again giving children the freedom and space to discover more about the world they live in and crucially about themselves.
No one promised running a french school trip company would be easy, but we didn't imagine it would get quite this complicated. We know the same continues to be true for all teachers.
We hope to see you all in person soon, but until then, please use our resources if they are helpful to you.
Can you complete all the tasks correctly to achieve your Maison Claire Fontaine certificate ?!
Please follow this link to the resources page on our website. We value your feedback and ideas for future videos, worksheets and virtual activities.
We very much enjoy working with the children in Avallon and were very proud of their presentation in English at the end of the summer term.
