Tales From the Minivan

Once again, life has gotten in the way of me updating my blog. Here’s a few paragraphs (well maybe more than a few) to keep everyone up to date of what’s been going on since we got back from our trip. (I know I still haven’t added Part 2 of our trip yet!)

So as some of you are aware, we were having some issues with Mackenzie and school. She was having a hard time, and this was one of the reasons we decided to take the trip. When we got home, these issues did not get any better, if anything things were escalating and hit the boiling point of her getting suspended from school. I’m not going to get into the details of the suspension, but when I actually got the call from the Principal last week a sense of relief came over me. We met with the school district later in the week and I’m happy that our concerns were listened to and they will hopefully be resolved so no other child will have to suffer like she did this year. I just wish I had listened to my own instincts and took her out of school after we returned from Florida, but as they say..”hind sight is 20-20″.

The second issue that’s been looming over our family has been EarlyFrench Immersion, you may have read a previous post called A Sad Day in NB for Education. If not, to sum it up- Early French Immersion was eliminated as an option in NB. IN our province it starts at the grade 1 level, and Liam was registered to start this coming fall. On Feb 29, a report was released regarding French Second Language (FSL) (the Friday before March Break) and parents were told to send comments and concerns regarding the report to the GNB website. There was no mention of when the Minister would make his final decision. Two weeks later on March 14th, Education Minister Kelly Lamrock made the announcement that Early French Immersion would no longer be an option for FSL. Instead all French instruction would be eliminated from Grades 1-4 and in Grade 5, ALL children would then take an Intensive French course, where half the year would be taught in French, and the entire Grade 5 curriculum would be crammed into the other half the year.

After the decision was made, many FSL experts came out against this decision even the designers of the Intensive French Course said it was never meant to be used this way, it was never meant to replace Early French Immersion. You can hear a CBC Radio Documentary on this here: http://www.cbc.ca/nb/features/ scroll down to Sunday Edition: Scrapping the Cadillac. I soon joined a group of concerned parents upset that the choice was no longer an option for our children, and we decided to sue the Province, and we felt that the whole process leading up to this decision was flawed. A 2 week period one of which being the March Break, was unacceptable, after the Minister stated this past summer, that there would be “a full debate on this issue”. Is 2 weeks and an online submission form, really a full debate?

On June 11th, Justice Hugh McLellan of the Court of Queen’s Bench, deemed that “the decision of the
Minister was unfair and unreasonable” and that “the Minister’s decision to phase-out Early French Immersion is removed into the Court and quashed.” This meant that Early French Immersion was back on! I took the four kids with me to the Court room to hear the verdict, and managed to get myself on TV again, I guess I was a good photo-op.

Later that day, our hopes that this would be over and our children who were enrolled in EFI for the fall of 2008 would be allowed to resume, were dashed when Minister Lamrock stated, that he would now follow the Judges ruling and allow for a full debate and have a 6 week consultation. Comments and ideas could be submitted once again to the GNB website up to July 25, and the Minister would make his final decision on August 5th, 4 weeks before the start of the school year.

Could this cause anymore turmoil for families, teachers and school administrators, who now have to come up with staffing plans for 3 possible scenarios? Once again the Minister of Education is showing his “unfairness and unreasonableness”, it’s time to admit you’ve made a mistake rushing this through and put a one year hold on this plan. Furthermore I believe that Minister Lamrock as a parent of a child enrolled in Kindergarten this year (and an older one in EFI) needs to take a step back from this decision, it is clear that this has gotten too personal for him. Designate an independent panel that can weigh the pros and cons of this. Not have someone that has a predetermined outcome already conceived.

Many parents have been deceived into believing that EFI is the root of all of the problems in NB ) Education System, and if you’ve only heard Lamrock’s side of things or read their Glossy inserts in our newspapers http://www.gnb.ca/0000/publications/ProgressReportEnglish.pdf he makes a great argument, but there is another side to this, last month this article was published in the Telegraph Journal with outlines a lot of the misconceptions and myths the Government had been feeding the public, The Other Side on Education.

So if I’ve been a little preoccupied it’s because I have a lot on my mind. I want all of my children to have the opportunity to become fluently bilingual, and under this new plan, that is questionable, unless they opt for the Late French Immersion program in 6th grade. We won’t know how successful that will be either, as anyone currently who is in LFI, has had previous French instruction prior to entry and there are plans to offer less courses in French in the future. It’s a big gamble that the Government is taking on, I don’t want my children to become lab rats in the “educational experiment” that has not been proven.

I hope my children will get the opportunity to wear this symbol in the future. If the government’s plan goes through, it will truly be a rarity to see it in the future.

This entry may come off as a bit of a vent. No photos not much fun, so I will apologize in advance. In about 6 hours an announcement is going to be made that will impact my 3 youngest children for the rest of their lives.

As most of you are aware, I live in New Brunswick, Canada’s only bilingual province. That said, bilingualism is in jeopardy here. You see, my 3 boys will never have the benefit of Early French Immersion as the NB Government is planning on eliminating it from the school system. They say their intentions are good, they are planning a new “Intensive French Program” that will start in 5th grade and will give every student the opportunity to become bilingual by the time they graduate from high school. Their goal is to have 70% of students graduate bilingual, the Late French Immersion program will be kept and students will still have the option to start in 6th Grade if they so wish. Core French will not be taught at all until 5th grade, which now starts in 1st Grade, so they can bring back programs like Art and Music (programs that were slashed years ago). These are the recommendation after a report was done of the Early French Immersion program.

The report “said” that EFI is not producing bilingual students, too many drop out of the program before they graduate from highschool. The other problem is”Streaming” as the report calls it. This is when children are having difficulty then their parents are pulling them out of EFI throwing them into the English program causing these teachers to be overwhelmed, and many children are not getting the resources they need.

I was enrolled in the Late French Immersion Program. At the time it started in 7th Grade. This was a difficult decision for me to make at this time. It meant changing schools, leaving all of my friends and a much longer school day because of the location of this school. I remember many tearful nights wanting to quit and go back to my old school. The preteen years can be very tumultuous and this is a very difficult decision to have to make at this age, many will opt out even when they would have excelled in the program. I was fortunate and did excel in the program, stuck it out made many new friends and appreciated the sacrifices I made from grades 7-9.

Skip forward to highschool, I continued in the FI program for my grade 10 year (highschool back then started in 10th grade). What I did not realize was that the Late French Immersion and Early French Immersion students would be integrated together. This is where I saw the advantage of EFI over LFI. The Early Immersion students were so much more advanced, and the majority of them continued with the program through graduation. I dropped out of the program in 11th grade, something I regret all the time. At this age teens just can’t grasp that these decisions will impact them, perhaps if I had of taken the EFI program, I would have rethought this decision. I was very fortunate though as I retained the majority of the conversational French I had acquired and went on to work in bilingual positions with some of my future jobs, I even had an offer to work in France at EuroDisney in the early 90’s.

After seeing the advantage the EFI students had I knew that when my daughter started school, I would have her enrolled in the EFI Program. She’s done very well in the program thus far and I know that when the time comes in highschool, I will encourage her to stick out her commitment with the program. It was a no brainer that we would also enroll our son who started Kindergarten this past fall. Now I have to explain to him he will not get to learn French like his big sister until 5th grade! He will also most likely have to change schools now too, as our neighbourhood school did not have the EFI program so he was enrolled at the school that did.

This comes down to dollars and cents plain and simple. EFI enrollments are down, and the NB Government does not want to subsidize these smaller classes. They are having trouble recruiting teachers to fill the positions. If New Brunswick is to retain it’s status as the only “bilingual province in Canada” they need to rethink this decision or there isn’t much sense keeping this status. What will students do that are coming in from other provinces that have been in the program? We have a huge Military community what will this mean for them?

I know the fight is not over, but we have a long road ahead of us. I just hope that my 3 boys will get this same opportunity as their sister.

For anyone interested reading this confusing 100 page report it can be found here:

http://www.gnb.ca/0000/publications/comm/FSL%20Report.pdf

If you are against this decision, make your voice known, now is the time to make the Government listen to those who elected them.

A photo really does say a 1000 words, and if you are a Blogger a photo can really help to get your story across. Statistics say that Blogs with photos have higher readership!

Here’s a few pointers on how to get photos easily onto your CPO Blogs!

First and foremost is resizing! If a photo is too large it will look distorted. We recommend a width of 400 pixels as the maximum width.

Here’s an example of a photo that has not been resized:

Here is the same photo resized to 400 pixels wide:

How do I resize my Photos?

Many online photo hosting sites allow you to resize you photos there, but with some of them you will be limited to their default sizes. (***Photobucket, now has custom resizing capabilities now!***) If you’d like to resize to a specific size I’d recommend using a Windows XP add-on called Image Resizer
Once installed it allows you to right click on any photo and choose “Resize Pictures” you can then customize to the size you want.

How do I add a photo to my Blog entries?

Now that you have your photos resized appropriately you’ll need to upload them to a photo hosting site. There are many of them online, Flickr, Image Shack and Photobucket are the most common and easy to use. Sign up for a free account and upload your resized photos from your computer to the site. Doing this will assign a URL (a www address) to your photos. I know many of you are familiar with adding photos to your signatures and posts on our Message Boards, adding a photo to your Blog entry is just as easy, but differs a little. Instead of using the [IMG] code you’ll just need the direct link code. A quick way to get this is to right click on the photo and select “Properties” and highlight and copy the URL for the Image Location.

Once you have your photo and your URL, to get the photo into your Blog entry you’ll see some tools just above your new post text box. Click on the “Insert Image” it’s the small icon that looks like a tree. Once it has been selected you can paste in the URL of your photo then select “insert”.

It’s as simple as that! If you have any questions feel free to comment below!

We’ve been trying to get Mackenzie involved in an activity of interest for quite some time.  She turned down; Girl Guides, swimming, soccer, yoga, & music lessons, but when I mentioned an art class, her response was, “Maybe?”  Maybe?!!!!..this was progress as it wasn’t a definite “NO!”  Two days before the class was to begin, she finally said she’d like to join and I quickly called to get her registered!  So on Saturday Mornings she’s been going to our city’s Art Centre where she’s been enjoying one-on-one instruction, focusing on both the fundamentals of drawing and painting, as well as techniques and styles.

Here’s a pic of her latest creation:

So have you been wondering where the minivan is? After a very exhausting trip we decided to stick close to home over the past month. Here’s a little of what we’ve been up to since our adventures in the minivan have slowed down…

We’ve been working on getting the house organized and decluttered and finishing some projects that we’ve wanted to complete for a while. Having a husband home for the summer has been hard work!

After arriving home we decided that the timing was right to have a new back deck built. This old one had seen better days and we spend a lot of time in our back yard so why not enjoy it? A friend of ours lent out has carpenter to us and a week later we went from this:

to this:

I’m loving it! I think he did a great job, and it was exactly how I envisioned it to look! We got lucky and got a great deal on patio furniture that was being cleared out too!

We’ve also been spending a lot of time at our local favorite beach, Mispec Beach. It’s a place where the kids can run around, play in the sand and have a great time. I don’t actually swim when we go to the beach as it’s located right on the Bay of Fundy. Believe it or not that water only changes 5 degrees in temperature from summer to winter. AS you can see by the looks on the boys faces, it’s shockingly cold!

My favorite time to go is definitely low tide, or while the tide is going out. I find that the cooler air from the cold water also goes out with the tide. The other plus is that the beach expands so much from high to low tide. For those of you not familiar, the Bay of Fundy actually has the highest tides in the world and can differ up to 40 feet from high to low!

Here’s a few of my favourite photos:

We’ve also been spending sometime out at my father’s pool. Both Liam and Ciaran have really taken an interest in being more independent in the pool this year. Ciaran has decided he doesn’t need us to hold him anymore! Check out this video of him swimming with his little tube swimsuit on!

Click here to see video of Ciaran!

The other thing we’ve wanted to accomplish is getting the house organized and decluttered before Andrew goes back to work. I’ve finally put together the shelving units that I bought months ago! I’m hoping by giving everyone one a designated colour that when I find things that belong to them, I’ll put them in each of their cubes. I’m hoping this will be a good solution for hats and mitts this winter.

We’ve also been moving out and donating clothing that we haven’t worn or the kids have outgrown. It’s a work in progress and is slowly coming together.

So that’s about all that’s been happening, we plan to load up the minivan again soon, for another adventure so stay tuned!