micheleandtom.com

Worldschool around here means studying the brain and art, mostly through the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Betty Edwards’ theory is that people don’t need to learn how to draw, they need to learn how to see. And in order to learn how to see, you must be able to freely access the visual/spatial right hemisphere of your brain while simultaneously managing to mute the verbal left side of your brain.

To help you accomplish this, she gives you tasks that the left side of the brain hates and will abandon to the right side. For instance, she has her readers sketch a line drawing by Picasso upside down, so the budding artist doesn’t begin naming objects and parts of the body (left side function) and instead, just draws lines.

We do these projects together as a family and they’re really quite entertaining. Below are the Zs’ first attempts at an upside down line drawing (this was the Picasso). Zoe’s is on the left and Zelda’s is on the right.

Whenever our land line rings in the house after 10:30 or 11:00 pm, I always shout, “It’s China calling” before answering the telephone.

Why would China be calling me? Because the girls are taking their Mandarin lessons from a school in Beijing!

The marvels of modern technology are spurring very interesting businesses. There is a school in Beijing called eChineseLearning. They offer one-on-one classes at a very affordable rate, the catch is, you use video over Skype to meet with your teacher.

So twice a week, the Zs park their pale butts in front of my MacBook Pro and answer a Skype call from Beijing for their Chinese lesson. The teacher has a whiteboard behind her for drawing characters, she interacts with Zoe and Zelda using props and games, and she also writes words in the Skype chat interface using both pinyin and characters.

I was skeptical at first, but it’s really almost exactly like one-on-one tutoring. A side benefit that we didn’t anticipate: because we are using Skype in our own home, there are no other time sinks associated with the lessons — no transportation to another location, no showering and getting dressed nicely, no straightening up for an in-house tutor…it’s great!

Lastly, I must wax enthusiastic about my FAVORITE online Chinese dictionary. They present clear, large characters (both simplified and traditional) that can be played over audio if you aren’t sure how to pronounce the word. There also are animated stroke-by-stroke videos for how to draw every character. Wow.

It has taken us about a month to transition the kids to our new worldschooling schedule:

06:15: Get up for school.
07:15: Leave for school.
12:15: Pick them up from school.
14:00: Worldschool begins.
17:00: Worldschool ends.
18:00: We eat dinner.
20:00: Bedtime for the Zs.

The basic idea of the schedule is to secure the girls enough rest so they can be happy little non-growly citizens of our home. “Hooray, we have achieved our goal.”

But this Friday night, Tom saw the downside of “hooray.” It seems that our daughters have acclimated to our weanie American schedule so completely that they can no longer make it through a regular Argentinian meal!

Poor Tom has been dying to go out to a genuine restaurant (which means it opens for dinner at 8:00 or 8:30 pm) for the last few weeks. Unfortunately, it is pretty much out of the question during the week, or we ruin the aforementioned worldschooling schedule. Tonight though, he managed to wrangle Zelda and I out the door (Zoe was at a sleepover) for the real deal. After wandering around our neighborhood, we ended up seated at a nicely decorated little joint staring across the table at a passed out little girl who had completely lost her appetite and her ability to form coherent sentences.

Tom is now in mourning over the loss of eating out at nice restaurants as a regular family option in our lives, probably even on the weekends. But, he is perking up over his new plan: attempt finer dining at lunch on the weekends instead!

Zoe’s 4th grade classmates have the most fabulous parents, who collectively save our ass on a regular basis as we muddle through the ins and outs of school: parties, musical instruments, school supplies, field day, hockey equipment, transportation problems, holidays, etc.

On the birthday party front, these amazing parents mobilize and collect $25 pesos per classmate per party, giving the total cash haul to the birthday parent to spend at their discretion for something big that the birthday child actually wants.

When the fabulous fourth-grade parents discovered that Zoe’s birthday occurred over the summer holiday in December 2008, they banded together and raised her gift money (and the kids made her a card too), which they handed off to us last week. It was such a lovely belated birthday surprise.

The result, she got a Star Wars Rogue Shadow Lego set, which she spent all weekend putting together! (The actual craft she assembled is pictured above with space background.) She adores it.

There is a chain of English-language bookstores that we frequent here in Buenos Aires called KEL. (We normally only buy the Z’s books there because it’s really expensive and Tom and I peruse most of our reading material on the Kindle, which we continue to love.)

Since Zoe recently ran out of books to read, it was clearly time for a run, so off to KEL we went. (Today, it was homeschool in the taxi.) Imagine our surprise when we showed up at this normally sleepy shop only to be greeted by a mob scene. All of the shelves and books were cordoned off, there was a huge line, and they had implemented a see-customer-by-number system.

It seems that in February and March, when school starts back up after summer break, the KEL locations have a higher volume of customers. In response, they have devised a novel system for dealing with this uptick — they make ALL of their clients take a number. When a customer’s number is called, they must tell an employee which tome they want, and said employee retrieves the book for the client. NO SHOPPERS CAN BROWSE ANY BOOKS ON THEIR OWN.

Needless to say, this is a ridiculous system — the store is a mess and people wait forever to buy their one English dictionary that they seem perfectly capable of choosing on their own.

I tried explaining to the store clerk, who spoke great English, that we wanted to look through chapter books for the girls and that I didn’t have any specific titles in mind. She got really shirty with me, and her “solution” was to stand behind a shelf barrier and hand us every chapter book they had in Zoe and Zelda’s age range. (Which really struck me as a great use of her time.)

Of course, she brightened up considerably when she realized that we were going to buy a boat load of books. And, even though we were a royal pain in the ass from her perspective, she did throw in this hot book bag, modeled here by Zelda.

This ranked as one of my most ridiculous shopping trips ever! If we hadn’t needed the books so badly, I would have just waited until April.

La vida Argentina isn’t always easy for my oldest daughter, who loves sports and hates short shorts. Examples of the challenges she faces include the following:

1. At school, when she befriended her only American classmate, who happened to be a boy, everyone relentlessly teased them about being in love (this is in 3rd grade last year). In Zoe’s class, at least, the girls and boys do not intermix AT ALL socially — even at recess.
2. Common recess games for girls include one girl pretending to be a boy and the rest trying to catch her and kiss her. Another is to practice their “model walk.” Not surprisingly, Zoe does not find these sorts of activities very engaging.
3. In computer lab, the girls all try to play an online game where you have to kiss your boyfriend as many times as possible while your father’s head is turned, without getting caught. (Again, 3rd grade last year…my God it starts early.)
4. We visited the pediatrician (male) last Friday for the girls to complete their physicals so they may participate in PE at school. Zoe did a typical kid slouch at one point during the exam, which led the pediatrician to explain that the only way to cure her poor posture was to enroll Zoe in some sort of modeling class because “when women are around other women, their competitive instincts will kick in and they will throw their shoulders back and stand up straight.” (Yes, I found this solution rather offensive.) I decided to translate this little gem of advice for Zoe after our visit so that she wouldn’t freak out on the spot. (Of course, now I love to tell her that if she doesn’t stand up straight, I will have to enroll her in modeling class, post haste!)
5. Girls DO NOT play soccer here. It’s a bummer, because Zoe loves soccer. This holds true even at recess, where she can’t play fútbol because a) girls don’t do that; and, b) she would be relentlessly teased about being in love with all of the boys
6. There is little time for after school sports due to the school schedule, nor are sporting programs horribly common for girls.
7. She has to wear a pleated skirt to school and for sports. She has adapted, but boy she hated them at first! (She does look adorable though.)

Yes, that’s right, school started this fine Monday for the Zs, a day that Tom and I like to call, Parent’s Day.

Last night was a late one. As you can see pictured here, we had to go through all of the school supplies, label, reconfirm we had the right stuff (they are very particular that you get exactly what is on the list), find uniform crap, iron said uniform crap, Tom had to fix the clip-on tie that Zelda had destroyed last year, pack backpacks…the list goes on and on.

Today, the Offermann/Reeves clan got a very bleary-eyed start to the morning, and, although we had to squeeze in an unplanned kiosk stop to grab some juice boxes, we were still early on the first day of school! “Hah and double hah,” as I like to say to the girls because it makes no sense and drives them crazy. Anyhow, enough about us, the Zs were excited to be back at school and we all felt it was lovely to be welcomed so warmly by parents and staff. They were in high spirits when we picked them up at noon.

The latter half of the afternoon marked the beginning of our great experiment. We made lunch and then I cracked the whip as the home schooling maestra. Zoe said, “Mommy, you’re hard!” Music to my ears. When the albino girls would get a little burned out from the home schooling death march, I allowed them a short timed break, or had them do some exercises (sit ups, good mornings, flutter kicks, jumping jacks, squats, push ups, etc.) I called the work out mats, “portable recess.”

Our main topics today were writing and lots of geography — their South America is really rocking (although they still need to work on spelling country names properly). I had them research a South American country of their choice. (Zelda was delighted that we were having “computer lab time,” as she called it.) I learned from Zoe that Brazil borders on every country in South America except Chile and Ecuador. From Zelda, I now know that the national language of Guyana is English. Who knew?

Now that our family unit is back in BA, I thought I would share some of the challenges we have been facing living la vida expat with kids, as well as some of our crazy plans to address those challenges!

CHALLENGES

1. School hours are long. We appreciate that the Zs don’t have as much homework as they had in the US. But, they attend school from 8 am to 5 pm, which we are finding is just too long. By the time we pick them up, get home, cook dinner, eat, and clean up, it’s time for bed. It leaves little time for them to have any extracurricular activities or hang out with their parents and still get to bed at a reasonable hour.
2. The English half of the school day is underutilized time. We thought that sending them to a Spanish/English bilingual school might be a good idea so they could have some time in English to balance out having to learn Spanish from scratch. In truth, the English level of their peers is well below a native-speaker’s level, so the class time is less than engaging.
3. The Zs are losing some of their Mandarin. We try to speak Chinese as much as possible (it’s our secret language when we’re out and about in the city), but there’s little we can do for their writing since I can only reproduce a few characters. And, with their current school schedule, it’s hard to find time for additional tutoring.
4. We are always working against the Argentine schedule. I call the kids here “Coca-Cola Powered” because it’s gotta be the caffeine that keeps ‘em going. Wee Argentinians are up about three hours later than my kids but seem very perky in the morning. Unfortunately, my stodgy American kids need a lot of sleep to feel decent and not be growley all day long. It’s tough to maintain a reasonable sleeping schedule when you are fighting an entire nation’s predilection to stay up late. (Yes, there is a theme here — getting our kids to bed at a decent hour is nigh on impossible.)
5. Healthy eating is a struggle. Argentina does wine, ice cream, and beef really really well, but fruits and vegetables…not so much. Of course, we are incredibly spoiled coming from the Pacific Northwest. It’s hard to adjust to having only two types of apples available (Granny Smith and Red Delicious), no heirloom tomatoes, no multiple varieties of locally-grown cherries, no amazing berries, no farmer’s markets… . But aside from lamenting the loss of PNW produce, the lack of produce variety as well as the poor quality makes it very hard to feed our children in a matter that we consider to be healthy, even when we are doing our own cooking. (Luckily, the girls are able to choke down less-than-tasty produce because they understand the importance of eating fruits and vegetables, even if they don’t taste as good as they did back home.) This was not a challenge we anticipated before moving here.

CRAZY (and mundane) SOLUTIONS

1. We are going to begin “Worldschooling” (a phrase coined by my friend Mel and also by some other traveling home schoolers). We approached the Z’s academic institution to ask them if they would allow us to enroll the girls in the school for only the morning portion of the day (which is Spanish) and one afternoon a week (which is field day). For four afternoons a week, we want to bring them home for some learnin’, Michele and Tom style. (Yes, I know…never say never!) To make a long story even longer, we met with the various functionaries at the primary and administrative levels yesterday (biting our nails) and they gave us the green light! (All the while stressing that this has never been done before and that they are only approving it on a provisional basis which will not be extended to any other families.) So the great experiment begins.

   We want to use the afternoons for private Chinese tutoring (the girls and I will take classes together); English, math, and geography homeschooling; and, extracurricular sporting activities (we may take up some family horseback riding lessons and family time at a tennis center). Crap, writing this makes me realize how much freaking work we have to do!

2. Try alternative produce options. Please see my thread on BA Expats about possible produce procurement options. A lot of contributors had great ideas and we will be trying some of these. Also, we are going to attempt to integrate food shopping into school pick up time in Belgrano, since it will be in the middle of the day, and incorporate meal planning and prep into the home school curricula.

One of the things that I found the most frustrating prior to my move was trying to obtain information on schools while still in the United States. So, here’s a breakdown, with links, on what I know, to help those planning an international move to Buenos Aires with kids:

• I posted a list of school tips based on our search at the BaExpats forum, which can be found here. I would recommend starting with my observations on the BaExpats forum before diving into the schools.

• A good place to begin your school search is to go to the International Baccalaureate site for schools in Argentina, which can be found here. Many of the bilingual schools in Buenos Aires are combined primary through secondary programs, and although they don’t all offer IB at the primary level, it is a good indicator of their commitment to academics if the school offers it at the high school level.

• Schools mentioned to us by friends/family are: (there may be some overlap with the IB schools) Belgrano Day School , Nuevos Rumbos, Belgrano Uno, Colegio Buenos Aires, Felix Bernasconi, Palermo Chico, Escuela del Renacimiento, Uriarte School, Sworn Junior College, St. Patrick’s School, St. Brendan’s School, Escuela Septiembre.

• For a rough idea of tuition and fees, the schools we toured in Belgrano ran about $US 400 to $US 700 per student in initiation fees per year and about $US 300 to $US 500 per month for 10 months in tuition. There is usually a discount for 2nd and 3rd children. The 2nd child discount is 15-25%. I can’t recall the third child discount because, well, I don’t have a third child!

• Remember, by mid-December, you won’t be able to get in contact with any school as they will be GONE for summer break. Schools recommence activities sometime in mid-February.

DISCLAIMER:I am not personally recommending any of these schools, nor have I checked out every one of these schools. I am merely sharing the information from which I began my search. Good Luck!

Considering the fact that both of their sweat pants ripped in the crotch while stretching during field day, the first day of school went rather well indeed!

At pick up, Zelda didn’t even mention the fact that her sweat pants had torn. Zoe was a little peeved, but mildly so. Zelda declared the first day to be fabulous. She said that she had made new friends, learned new playground games (color witch–a version of tag) and worked on her Spanish numbers.

Zoe had taught somebody the singing/hand game “say say oh playmate,” and ended up having to play it for an hour! She also did some writing in Spanish and received a nice card from a girl named Vicky in English class saying she wanted to be Zoe’s friend.

After school today, we dragged them to a shoe store to pick up the brown shoes they need for the uniform day tomorrow. We also picked up something for them to use as lunch boxes and got the paper and colored pencils the girls needed. Next, we will have to see if we can have the sweatpants repaired–sigh. Not something we factored into our schedule this week.

So far so good! What a relief.