So we’re finally getting into the Monday groove around here, more than halfway through January. Romain came for lunch and his usual Monday English lesson. This has really evolved into a conversational English session. Today’s involved Melinda, Romain and me, per usual. But Chloe doesn’t start back up at school until next week so she sat in, and then Ella was home for lunch, per usual, and we had her sit in, too. Today’s topic was more of me trying to explain to Romain why many Americans are so fond of guns. He wanted to talk about this in light of the shootings in Arizona, something that he explained is very confusing to him and his friends. By the time I was through, we not only discussed the Bill of Rights, we were considering the American political spectrum, including the Tea Party movement, and 20th century history. It was quite the conversation.

Melinda had her first French lesson with Nathalie, mother of Guillaume who is getting English lessons from us on Friday afternoons. Nathalie offered to trade some French practice for our English lessons and Melinda took her up on it. They chatted for two hours.

Manon is in Spain on a short student exchange so we didn’t see her today. But we did have our first lesson with Alice, the 13 year-old daughter of good friends of the Boudeaus. Chloe joined in on this lesson, too, which evolved into a game of Pictionary and identifying vocabulary words. Ella got to play a little once she got home from school.

The final lesson of the day is today’s featured photo, Ella’s math homework. As you may be able to tell, she’s learning how to reduce fractions with exponents. She needed some help with this one, the last of her problems for the day.