Cheese and Updates

School is going well, and nothing terribly eventful to report, aside from your average daily chaos (missing colored pencils, forgotten notebooks, lots of kids out sick...). My youngest students, 2nd- & 3rd-graders, have pretty much mastered both asking and answering the questions, "What's your name?" "How old are you?" and "How are you?" They know their colors, can recite "1 2 Buckle My Shoe" with a fair amount of success, and are well on their way to knowing the days of the week inside and out. I've just added weather vocabulary to our daily regime, and I'm also making sure they know their numbers 13-20 as well as they know the first dozen.

My 4th-graders have several other questions they can respond to ("Where do you live?" "When is your birthday?" "What's your favorite color?"), and I'll shortly be double checking they can ask the questions as well. They know their weather vocabulary, seasons, and we're reviewing and working on classroom vocabulary and instructions ("cut" "glue" "write"...) In addition, I'm having them learn a short, fun poem every couple of weeks, and for the Thanksgiving poem, we had a contest to see which row could learn/read the poem the best. Great idea, on my part, if I do say so myself. Nothing like a bit of friendly competition to incite some learning!

And finally, my (knock-on-wood) recently-better-behaved 5th-graders have also been reviewing their vocabulary for weather words, classroom instructions and objects, and seasons. Right now they're working hard on telling time (and after the first day of those lessons, their teacher returned to the classroom and said to them, "See! You have to know this in English too!" - he said they had just been working on it in French!) which is going pretty well. They, too, had a poem to learn for Thanksgiving and it was originally for this "energetic" class that I came up with the idea for the poetry contest. They took to it whole-heartedly and had a good time being enthusiastic, if not a bit loud, while reciting last Thursday. And stickers make fabulous prizes!

On to the cheese.

Selected at the market this weekend, I picked it because it had the word "Lorraine" in the name. I figured I pretty much couldn't go wrong. And it's true, it was a good choice. However, I wasn't even half way home Saturday morning, juggling my bag of veggies, carton of eggs and umbrella, when I could smell the cheese already! Now, the covered market is full of smells; fresh fish, meats and cheeses, plus pastries and fruity scents. They all combine, and it's hard to pick out any one distinguishing smell other than "Wow, I must be standing next to the cheese counter, because it smells like cheese!"

Now, I have utterly no problem with smelly cheeses (but might not go so far as to say, "the smellier the better"), which is a good thing, because my entire refrigerator now smells like le gros lorrain, despite it being wrapped in wax paper, inside a plastic bag and then sealed in a plastic container. It's a very good thing I don't mind smelly cheeses.

But what really caught me by surprise (after I got over the fact that I could smell my cheese already on my very short walk home) was how mild the "big Lorrainer" tastes! It's mild, mostly firm, on the drier side but leaves my hands smelling like... stinky cheese. I'm still not entirely sure how all that is possible, but I think I'm thankful, since I don't know that I'd really want to eat a whole lot of something that tastes like how my refrigerator now smells... But all in all, another successful cheese choice!

Le Gros Lorrain