A little story about Josiah’s recent field trip was published in the local paper and Josiah appears in the picture.  Pretty neat:

Josiah’s school published a story on their website about the field trip.  You can read more here (in French).  Josiah appears in one of the pictures (same one as the newspaper it looks like).

Brian had the pleasure of being able to go with Josiah to a school field trip last Friday.  Josiah’s class of 4th and 5th graders (CM1 and CM2 here in France) visited a steel mill and a dairy farm to learn about the processing and manufacturing of raw materials here in our region.  It was very informative and I was able to translate much of it for Josiah.  We had a sack lunch (un pique-nique) along the way.  Here are a few pictures:

Very exciting being inside the cow shed. Many of the children didn’t think it smelled very good.

Josiah had to wear safety gear to go into the steel mill.

I also noticed a couple interesting things which probably wouldn’t have happened on an American elementary field trip:

First, the adult chaperones split a bottle of wine with their sack lunch (yes, one of them brought a bottle in their sack lunch).  I was offered some, but declined.

Secondly, one of the children fell (slightly, enough to get his pants dirty) into the area where the cows poop.  The reaction from everyone was mostly a “too bad for you/tant pis pour toi — guess you shouldn’t have done that”.  I would’ve guessed a slightly stronger reaction would’ve happened in the States.

At the end of February, we had a family field trip with the Centre d’Enseignement du Français. It was a beautiful day to visit this nearby town, which is much bigger than Albertville.  We also visited a medieval village, Alby-sur-Chéran, where we learned about candle- and shoemaking, the main industries there for many, many years.

We went to Crest-Voland (about 25km from Albertville) for a day of skiing.  It was the first time for Eila and Thaddeus to ever try downhill skiing.   After a rough start, everyone had a great time and enjoyed it so much, we decided it would be good to try another day as well.