La semaine du gout

La semaine du gout is a week in France where there is a strong focus on food, taste, flavors, etc.  At our school we had a menu contest, a vegetable sculpture contest, drawing contest, a "blind test" and the last day before the vacation of Toussant, we had a touch and smell activity in English class.  I spent two weeks teaching my students about the food pyramid and the food groups in the US.  We all learned a few things and added a few more lines to the "wall of differences" that I have in the classroom.  For example...

• Nuts are considered fruits in France.
• The "feculants" group (our grain/pasta group) also includes all starches in France, like corn, potatoes, etc.
• While I consider the tomato to be the only fruit/vegetable, the kids informed me of several other chameleon foods, like the avocado.
• Some vegetables have never made it big in the US, like leeks, and I doubt they ever will...

 I printed off about 10 different worksheets from the national pyramid guidelines.  Each food group page, designed for kids, had the foods listed in the center and the object was to match the word to a happy little dancing food around the edge of the paper.  The French kids dutifully got out their rulers and fountain pens to match the two, but were quite thrown off by the drawings.  I'll admit, it was hard to distinguish a smiling pear from a dancing apple :)  The most "entertaining" moment of the past two weeks of food?  A student asked me when we were going to go back to learning English.

I asked Dan to come to school at the end of the second week to help me carve pumpkins after the "concours" to see who could have the best pumpkin design in each of my four youngest classes.  The kids had a great time pulling the "guts" out of the pumpkins.  For many of them, it was a first.  Halloween is sort of celebrated in France.  A few of my students had carved pumpkins before, sometimes annually, but they were all impressed by my pumpkin carving skill.  I do have more experience than they do!  I toasted the seeds (okay, Dan toasted them!) and brought them in for the students who insisted on peeling them to eat them, even though I repeatedly showed them that you can pop the seeds straight into your mouth.  (I also took some seeds to my art class, which provided great entertainment as the women there gingerly tasted seed after seed.)

So, even though I supposedly didn't "teach any English" over the past two weeks, I'm pretty sure the kids learned a thing or two!!