Le progrès

So it's been about five weeks since I started tutoring French, and it's going great.  At the end of this week, I will have taught twenty lessons.  Some of my students are already starting to read paragraphs and speak short sentences.  My latest student already has a vocabulary of over one hundred words.  My first student is learning both past tenses, having already conquered the present tense.  My one more advanced student is reading Les Trois Mousquetaires (abridged).  


I am going to include a list below of my must-have French books that I have in my personal collection.  

Bescherelle is the perfect book for conjugating verbs.  It has every single French verb conjugated, and it's only half an inch thick.  You won't find a

French person without it.

  Everyone needs a dictionary.  Larousse will do just fine

If you're at a level where you can start reading French (and I would say that would be when you know all the tenses, and a sizable vocabulary) then I would recommend reading a story that you already know.  It's not necessary to look up every single word you don't know.  You can underline the words you don't know and come back to them later.  If you look up a word every time you don't know it, you'll be too exasperated to read a French book.

This is a tiny little book that I like because it just has great topical vocabulary.  I use it when I'm coming up with my lesson plans so my students have vocab that is all related.  

This is the book I'm reading with my advanced student.  The vocab isn't too difficult and it's a fun story with exercises at the end of the chapters.  

This is the first genuinely French book I ever read.  It was difficult, but I learned a heck of a lot.

Now I'm going to give a list of recommended books.  

Two of my students have purchased this book.  After only a few lessons, they will know the majority of the vocab in this book, and learn a lot more from it.  I'm looking forward to starting lessons with this extra resource.  

      

These two books I am recommending to parents to buy for their children (who are my clients).  Either of these two books are great.  They are both illustrated for kids who have not yet learned to read and can be read to, or just learning to read.  

Any of these books can be clicked on to direct you to the page to Amazon, if you wish to purchase them.  

 So I now have four clients, with two potential clients.  Three of them are complete beginners and one of them has had high school French.  It's been really fun.  I make the lesson plans and give the lesson at Panera to my student.  I meet with them once a week, but there's one student who wants to meet more than once a week, which will be great.  There's also a mom who wants me to teach French to her home-schooled child.  The kid is six, which will be really fun.  I found a couple of books.  One is basically all pictures with the French word for it, and another has lots of French songs.  The other clients are on their fourth lesson now.


So if you're interested in French lessons in the Pensacola area, visit my website - www.annaclaire.org


Babysitting is going well.  I have interviews with moms who need more permanent nannies.  I was babysitting newborn twins - a boy and a girl - but the girl got sick and the mom is too scared to have non-family around them.  Now, I might be babysitting two newborn twins again - both boys.  


I'm going to a party tomorrow with my boyfriend.  Strictly business.  He might be doing some layout for a big magazine.  He's working on some big jobs right now that I'm really excited about.  This is good, because a recycling truck just hit his car - so it's good that he has work to keep his mind off that accident.  We're both fine.  

French lesson

So I had my first French lesson this week and it went well.  The client is nice and willing to learn.  I had a lesson plan and it took almost the whole hour until I improvised.  

I also got a hit on craigslist about my SAT tutoring.  

Check out my website!

French lessons and tutoring

I'm going to be in Pensacola for a few months, so I've decided to put my talents to use.  My boyfriend created a fantastic website for me to advertise my French lessons.  I currently have four clients, and I only started advertising a week ago.  I've created lesson plans and I have a lot of materials.  I'm excited to get started.  The website is:

French lessons/ Anna Claire the au pair 

I am going to include a section on the website about hiring me as a nanny as well.  I'll have testimonials and references available upon request.  

If any of this interests you, leave a comment here or email me at annaclairetutoring@gmail.com

Here are some more flowers (I know, boring) from my last walk in Normandy.  

Flying over Canada - 

Photo shoot

I did a photo shoot with Arielle Langhorne last month, and the pictures are up on her blog here - Photos


Please comment on that page.  If there are 25 comments, I get a free photo.

Une promenade

I went for another walk yesterday after dropping off all three kids at the school.  I'm really getting to like driving a manual transmission car.  It gives you something else to do, and I like multitasking.  Anyway, here are some attempts to take a couple of pictures of myself.  

Then I went to the lake near their house and there were some guys hanging out.  As I left, one guy stopped me and asked me something, but I didn't understand.  Eventually, I figured out that he was asking me out on a date the next night!  Instead of going through why I couldn't go with him, I gave him a fake name so he couldn't find me on facebook.  Then he asked for a kiss on the cheek.  That I just had to refuse.  

I heard that it's difficult to find poppies in Pensacola, but they are everywhere here.

They are very gangster here in France.  Especially in this well-to-do neighborhood.  Well, they do have a lot of graffiti at least.

I gathered a lot of flowers as I walked around the neighborhood for a petit bouquet des fleurs.  

One of many fields (champ)-  You can see the poppies at the bottom of the picture.  

There's a beautiful sunset outside my window almost every day.