End of 2013-1014 School Year

end of year party

Well, another school year in Luxembourg has come to a close.  The public school session runs from mid-September to mid-July.  This past week, James finished Cycle 1.2 (kindergarten) and Daphne finished Cycle 2.2 (2nd grade).  This means they've completed 2 full years of school here, plus the month and a half at the very end of the 2011-2012 school year when we first arrived.  

As such, this was our third year for the end-of-school talent show and party in the courtyard.  The first year it was all quite a mystery, the second year we knew the drill, and now it just feels normal.  Well, almost.  I'm not sure we'll ever fully adjust to kids-singing-and-dancing-to-pop-music-in-English-with-questionable-lyrics-at-a-school-function-but-they-probably-have-no-idea-what-they're-saying-so-oh-well-I-guess-who-cares (?)

I try to lend a hand at these parties if I can (they have a smaller version around Christmas time as well), since it's a good opportunity to interact with the other parents and be generally useful.  This year I actually joined the parent planning committee.  I felt like a bit of a burden because I'm still pretty darn crappy at French, and I didn't want the parents to feel obligated to switch to English for the meetings on my behalf.  But on the encouragement of my Luxembourgish friend/president of the committee, I tentatively joined.  We had a couple of planning meetings, which were a mind-boggling mixture of probably 4-5 languages, including English.  Like in many of my interactions in Luxembourg, I walked away from these meetings feeling like an idiot, but I figure it's better to be a somewhat-useful-sort-of-idiot than a just-plain-idoit.

So I volunteered to help with face painting.   This was a safe bet because 1) I can understand kids pointing at pictures 2) I can copy a simple design and 3) I can recognize the names of the basic colors in French, Luxembourgish, and German.  If you're mildly impressed by that last one, don't be. It still puts you solidly in the idiot camp in this country.  

But for a point in my favor, I printed off a World Cup logo to bring along at the last minute, which was quite popular.  Yeah, the World Cup is kind of a big deal for the kids here in Europe (so, all they've talked about for weeks).

must have done at least 20 of these

By the end of the night, all princess and super-hero designs were abandoned in favor of the logo and special requests for native country flags (thank you, Google-images-on-smartphone).

And according to what is now The-Ts-blog-tradition, below are a couple clips of the class dances.  Not surprisingly, both Daphne and James' class performed songs related to the World Cup.  Americans, you'll have to tell me if these songs were heard anywhere back in the homeland during the World Cup.

The two kindergarten classes and the précoce performed together to "Magic in the Air" by Magic System from the Ivory Coast.  James is in the back at the left of the screen in a red shirt and grey pants, and holding a large Brazilian flag.  You'll need to click through to youtube and make it full screen to have any shot of seeing him.  And you might be able to hear that except for the title lyric, the rest is in French.

Daphne's class danced to Shakira's "Dare (La la la)."  The class found a youtube Zumba video and copied the moves.  Daphne's on the right/back of the screen, in a light purple shirt. 

As you can see, her hips don't lie.