La semaine du gout

As if France really needs to make more of an effort apropos of food and cultivating taste, this week was the Week of Taste - which included hundreds of events all over the country, notably in the public school system. Ella's week was full of spices - they tasted lots of different spices all week long, culminating in a big, really fun blind taste test today. And next week, they plan to continue the project by baking a spice cake in class for the October birthdays. Another highlight of the week for Ella came today when, during circle time, her teacher introduced an English nursery rhyme (one, two, buckle my shoe). She asked Ella and Olivia to come up and show/tell the class what the words to the rhyme meant. Ella could not have been more excited.

My big event of the week was that data collection got underway for my cross-cultural preschool study (about how children develop their ideas about food - appropriately enough). We have hired a student to collect the data, and I went this week to the first school to observe her. The school is almost an hour outside of Paris (in Picardy; we will also have two schools in Paris). The Picardy school is lower socioeconomic status, which will give us a good range of types of families in our data. Two things were notable to me. First, we got a very high response rate from parents - of the 30 parents asked to participate, 20 have already returned completed questionnaires. This is quite a bit higher than the participation we usually get in the US, and I think reflects better communication between schools and homes. The other thing that was really striking to me was how nice the school was given the low incomes of the families. Several of the families reported yearly incomes under 20,000 euros. Nevertheless, because schools are not funded through local property taxes here, the income of the families is not related to the quality of the school. The school was well stocked with excellent supplies, the teachers seemed very dedicated, and the kids very happy. Data collection was a great success.

On the way home from work today, I stopped in the Marais to pick up a challah (and, to continue our own personal "annee du gout" - year of tasting - the most delicious tartes: pear/ chocolate and raspberry) for Shabbat. The streets of the Marais were lined with people selling lulavs and etrogs for sukkot. I bought a set (a kit, really, since you have to put the lulav together yourself) and the kids loved smelling each plant and shaking the assembled lulav to hear the noise.