Today is the first day of school. Here is a picture of the school. If you look carefully, you'll see it's vintage from a time when boys and girls were educated separately. It has a nice fenced-in courtyard with a couple of plane trees in the front. Oddly, you have to go outside to use the toilets (and the sinks are just open to the air) - it reminded me of some places in Hawai'i, actually.
Andrew's teacher was wearing orange shorts and a T-shirt that read "Dean and Joe's Garage". I guess dress code is a little less formal here, although to be fair, the colour of the shorts did perfectly match the colour of the writing on the T-shirt. The École Primaire schools have 5 grades, what we would call grades 1-5, or what are here called CP, CM-1, CM-2, CE-1, and CE-2. What we call the primary or kindergarten grade(s) are at a separate school called the Maternelle. Our school only has 4 classrooms, so there is an annex containing the 5th classroom and the administrative office. As I mentioned before, class sizes are ~25.
Today marks the first day of the new French school week, which is:
M, Tu, Th 8:30-11:30, 13:30-16:00
W 8:30-11:30
F 8:30-11:30, 1:30-3:00
Lunch is €3 at the school cantine, otherwise they come home for lunch. Since we need a medical certificate documenting David's allergy, we're foregoing lunch at school until we've got that.
As you can see, they have Wednesday morning class now (there was no school at all on Wed until this year), and a shortened Friday afternoon. Overall instruction time is increased by 2 hours (3 more hours on Wed, one fewer hour on Fri). So we'll still be able to travel on Wednesdays: in our August travels we rarely left before 10:30 anyways, and now that the tourists are gone, there will be fewer people to slow us down.
End of day update: They don't mess around here - Andrew had math and reading homework, and David had multiplication tables to work on.
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