ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

The Cycle 2, fundamental learning cycle (Grade 1, 2 and Grade 3)

French

Teaching French consolidates students’ skills to communicate and live in society, structures each person’s relationship to the world and contributes to self-construction; it facilitates entry into all teachings and their languages. The integration of Grade 3 into cycle 2 must ensure solid basic reading and writing skills for all students.

Skills practiced:

• Understand and express yourself orally
• Read
• Write
• Understanding how language works

Fine arts

The teaching of fine arts particularly develops students’ potential for invention, within open situations promoting autonomy, initiative and critical perspective. It is constructed from the elements of artistic language: shape, space, light, color, material, gesture, support, tool, time. He explores various fields, both in practice and in references: drawing, painting, collage, modeling, sculpture, assemblage, photography, video, digital creation… The encounter with works of art finds a privileged space there, which allows students to engage in a sensitive and curious approach, enriching their potential for singular expression and judgment. The latter thus learn to accept what is other and otherwise in art and through the arts.

In cycle 2, this teaching consolidates the artistic awareness initiated in preschool and provides students with knowledge and means which will allow them, from cycle 3, to explore personal expression, to recognize the singularity of others and to access a shared artistic culture.

Skills practiced:

• Experiment, produce, create
• Implement an artistic project
• Express yourself, analyze your practice and that of your peers; establish a relationship with that of the artists, open up to otherness
• Find your way in areas related to the visual arts, be sensitive to questions of art

Musical education

Musical education develops two major areas of skills structuring the student’s entire training course until the end of cycle 4: perception and production. Taking into account the sensitivity and pleasure of making music as well as listening to it, musical education provides the cultural and technical knowledge necessary for the development of listening and expression skills.

The voice plays a central role in musical practices in the classroom. The most immediate vector for making music, it is particularly appropriate for production and performance work in a collective setting in a school environment. Likewise, the mobilization of the body in musical gesture contributes to physical and psychological balance.

At the end of cycle 2, students have a set of experiences, know-how and cultural benchmarks which will be the basis of the musical and artistic training continued in cycle 3.

Skills practiced:

• Sing
• Listen, compare
• Explore and imagine
• Exchange, share

Physical education and sport

Physical and sports education develops access to a rich field of practices, with strong cultural and social involvement, important in the development of the personal and collective life of the individual. Throughout schooling, physical and sports education aims to form a lucid, autonomous, physically and socially educated citizen, with a concern for living together. It encourages children and adolescents to seek well-being and care about their health. It ensures the inclusion, in the class, of students with special educational needs or disabilities. Physical and sports education introduces you to the pleasure of practicing sports.

Skills practiced:

Physical and sports education responds to the training challenges of the common core by allowing all students, girls and boys together and equally, especially those furthest from physical and sporting practice, to build five skills worked on continuously during the different cycles:

• Develop your motor skills and learn to express yourself using your body
• Appropriate, through physical and sporting practice, methods and tools
• Share rules, assume roles and responsibilities
• Learn to maintain your health through regular physical activity
• Appropriate a sporting and artistic physical culture

Moral and civic education

Moral and civic education aims at the acquisition of a moral and civic culture and a critical spirit which aims to develop the dispositions enabling students to gradually become aware of their responsibilities in their personal and social lives. This teaching articulates values, knowledge and practices.

Moral and civic education also aims for a free and enlightened appropriation by students of the values ​​which found the Republic and democracy: the base of common values ​​includes dignity, freedom, equality – particularly between girls and boys – , solidarity, secularism, the spirit of justice, respect and the absence of any form of discrimination, that is to say the constitutional values ​​of the French Republic, enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights and of the citizen of 1789 and in the preamble of the Constitution of 1946.

Question the world

From kindergarten school onwards, pupils explore and observe the world around them; in cycle 2, they will learn to question it more precisely, through an initial scientific and thoughtful approach. The general objectives of “Questioning the world” are therefore: on the one hand to enable students to acquire the knowledge necessary to describe and understand the world around them and develop their ability to reason; on the other hand to contribute to their training as citizens. The learning, repeated and deepened during successive cycles, will then continue throughout schooling by calling on increasingly elaborate, abstract and complex ideas.

Skills practiced:

• Practicing scientific approaches
• Imagine, realise
• Appropriate tools and methods
• Practicing languages
• Mobilize digital tools
• Adopt ethical and responsible behavior
• Position yourself in space and time

Maths

In cycle 2, problem solving is at the center of students’ mathematical activity, developing their abilities to research, reason and communicate. The problems make it possible to approach new concepts, to consolidate acquisitions, to provoke questions.

Skills practiced:

• research
• modelise
• represent
• raison
• calculate

Cycle 3 – consolidation cycle (Grade 4, 5 and Grade 6)

Cycle 3 now links the last two years of primary school and the first year of middle school, with greater concern for educational continuity and coherence of learning in the service of acquiring a common base of knowledge, skills and culture.

French

Cycle 2 allowed the acquisition of reading and writing. Cycle 3 must consolidate these acquisitions in order to put them at the service of other learning in a broad and diversified use of reading and writing. Oral language, which also conditions all learning and also constitutes a means of entering into the culture of writing, continues to be the subject of constant attention and specific work. Generally speaking, mastery of the language remains a central objective of cycle 3 and the integration of the 6th grade class into the cycle must ensure that all students have sufficient autonomy in reading and writing to tackle cycle 4 with the acquired necessary for continued education.

Skills practiced:

• Understand and express yourself orally
• Read
• Write
• Understand how French language works

Fine arts

During cycle 3, the teaching of visual arts draws on the experience, knowledge and skills worked on in cycle 2 to gradually engage students in a more autonomous sensitive practice, which they learn to analyze further. Pursuing the development of the potential for invention and creation. Learning is nourished by the introduction of more precise knowledge and by more sustained attention to the explanation of the students’ plastic production, the artistic processes observed, and the reception of the works encountered.

Skills practiced:

• Experiment, produce, create
• Implement an artistic project
• Express yourself, analyze your practice and that of your peers; establish a relationship with that of the artists, open up to otherness
• Find your way in areas related to the visual arts, be sensitive to questions of art

Musical education

Continuing from cycle 2 and to prepare for cycle 4, musical education in cycle 3 continues the discovery and development of the two major areas of skills which structure the entire training course: perception and production.

Skills practiced:

• Sing and perform
• Listen, compare and comment
• Explore, imagine and create
• Exchange, share and argue

As in cycle 2, each student who wishes must be able to commit each year to carrying out an ambitious choral project combining as many other forms of artistic expression as possible. This possibility allows him, in addition to finding pleasure in singing in a collective setting, to discover the requirements of a show organized at the end of the school year. Bringing together students from different levels of the cycle, the choir benefits from bringing together schoolchildren and college students, the latter even beyond cycle 3.

History of art

Multidisciplinary and transversal teaching of the history of the arts structures the student’s artistic culture by acquiring benchmarks from various and major works and artistic trends of the past and present and by providing methods to situate them in space and time, interpret them and relate them. It contributes to the development of a sensitive, educated and thoughtful view of the works. Throughout cycle 3, the history of the arts helps to create links between other courses and highlights their cultural dimension. From the sixth grade onwards, it brings together teachers from several disciplines.

Skills practiced:

• Identify: give a reasoned opinion on what a work of art represents or expresses
• Analyze: identify from a work of art, through observation or listening, its main technical and formal characteristics
• Situate: link the characteristics of a work of art to uses as well as to the historical and cultural context of its creation
• Finding your way around a museum, an art venue, a heritage site

Physical education and sport

Physical and sports education develops access to a rich field of practices, with strong cultural and social involvement, important in the development of the personal and collective life of the individual. Throughout schooling, physical and sports education aims to form a lucid, autonomous, physically and socially educated citizen, with a concern for living together. It encourages children and adolescents to seek well-being and care about their health. It ensures the inclusion, in the class, of students with special educational needs or disabilities. Physical and sports education introduces you to the pleasure of practicing sports.

Skills practiced:

Physical and sports education responds to the training challenges of the common core by allowing all students, girls and boys together and equally, especially those furthest from physical and sporting practice, to build five skills worked on continuously during the different cycles:

• Develop your motor skills and learn to express yourself using your body
• Appropriate, through physical and sporting practice, methods and tools
• Share rules, assume roles and responsibilities
• Learn to maintain your health through regular physical activity
• Appropriate a sporting and artistic physical culture

Moral and civic education

Moral and civic education aims at the acquisition of a moral and civic culture and a critical spirit which aims to develop the dispositions enabling students to gradually become aware of their responsibilities in their personal and social lives. This teaching articulates values, knowledge and practices.

Moral and civic education also aims for a free and enlightened appropriation by students of the values ​​which found the Republic and democracy: the base of common values ​​includes dignity, freedom, equality – particularly between girls and boys – , solidarity, secularism, the spirit of justice, respect and the absence of any form of discrimination, that is to say the constitutional values ​​of the French Republic, enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights and of the citizen of 1789 and in the preamble of the Constitution of 1946.

History and Geography

In cycle 3, students continue the progressive and increasingly explicit construction of their relationship to time and space, based on the contributions of two linked disciplinary courses, history and geography, including the civic and cultural purposes of the end of the cycle. These two courses deal with common themes and concepts and share tools and methods. Their specificities lie in their objects of study, time and space, and the methods they use to understand them.

Skills practiced:

• Finding your way in time: building historical benchmarks
• Finding your way in space: building geographical markers
• Reason, justify an approach and the choices made
• Ask questions, wonder.
• Be informed in the digital world
• Understanding a document
• Practice different languages ​​in history and geography
• Cooperate and pool

Science and technology

During cycle 2, the student explored, observed, experimented, and questioned the world around him. In cycle 3, the concepts already covered are revisited to progress towards more generalization and abstraction, always taking care to start from the concrete and the student’s representations.

The construction of knowledge and skills, through the implementation of various scientific and technological approaches and the discovery of the history of science and technology, introduces the distinction between what concerns science and technology and what concerns of an opinion or belief. The diversity of procedures and approaches (observation, manipulation, experimentation, simulation, documentation, etc.) simultaneously develops curiosity, creativity, rigor, critical thinking, manual and experimental skill, memorization, collaboration for living better together and a taste for learning.

Skills practiced:

• Practice scientific and technological approaches
• Design, create, realize
• Appropriate tools and methods
• Practicing languages
• Mobilize digital tools
• Adopt ethical and responsible behavior
• Position yourself in space and time

Maths

Continuing with previous cycles, cycle 3 ensures the continued development of the six major mathematics skills: research, model, represent, calculate, reason and communicate. Problem solving constitutes the main criterion for mastering knowledge in all areas of mathematics, but it is also the means of ensuring appropriation which guarantees its meaning. If algebraic modeling primarily concerns cycle 4 and high school, problem solving already makes it possible to show how mathematical notions can be relevant tools for resolving certain situations.

Skills practiced:

• research
• modelise
• represent
• raison
• calculate
• communicate

Learn more

Websites to consult

Eduscol

• Primary school timetables and programs
• Science at school
• The artistic and cultural education course

Education at a Glance 2023 – OECD Indicators
https://www.oecd.org/education/education-at-a-glance/

Reference texts

• Elementary School Program
  Special official bulletin n°11 of November 26, 2015
• Teaching cycles: primary school and middle school
  Decree No. 2013-682 of July 24, 2013
• Teaching French sign language from kindergarten
  Official Bulletin n°33 dated 4 Sept. 2008
  • Objectives and program
  • Conditions for implementing the program

Projet d’école 2022-2025

Teaching objectives:

• Meet the demands of families and the requirements of our multilingual environment,
• Follow the recommendations of the AEFE (French Teaching Agency Abroad),
• Offer a curriculum corresponding to the needs of our students and thus ensure a personalized success path,
• Propose a coherent course ensuring continuity with the French high school,
• Develop language learning skills, knowledge and intercultural skills.

At Boule et Billes school, children learn 3 languages:

1. French, mastery of which is the priority, and is ensured by the teaching of the French program in French in classes, but also by support in the French language (FLE) or French language of schooling (FLSco) if necessary,
2. Vietnamese,
3. English.

The school has a complete system offering the possibility of setting up a language course respecting the child’s learning pace and the AEFE directives.

Enrollments range from 14 to 16 students per class, allowing personalized daily teaching and exchange.

The policy for teaching modern foreign languages, built on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), aims to place the school’s educational offering in a context of mobility and international openness.

Students, depending on their level of mastery of the foreign language taught, are grouped into small groups for appropriate progression and teaching. Thus 3 languages ​​will be taught within our establishment: French, Vietnamese and English.

From Grade 1 to Grade 3:

Vietnamese : 2 hours per week with more writing.
English: 2 hours of study of the English language and 2 EMILE sessions of 45 minutes (twice 1 hour in Grade 3) in arts and questioning the world.
Support in French: Intensive FLE can reach 10 hours per week at the start of the year for beginner non-French speaking students with additional help in FL Tuition in class.

In Grade 4-5 :

Vietnamese: 2 hours per week with more writing + EMILE Vietnamese in CM2
English: 2 hours of English language study and 3 1-hour EMILE sessions in arts and sciences for a total of 3 hours.
Support in French: Support in FL Schooling of 2 hours per week is offered to students who still need it during cycle 3.

*What is “EMILE”?

EMILE designates a bilingual learning situation in which a language other than the school first language (French) serves as a vector for the teaching/learning of a subject. Language is therefore no longer simply an object of learning, but becomes a tool allowing access to disciplinary knowledge and know-how.

What is FLE?

French as a Foreign Language, abbreviated by the acronym FLE. C’est la langue française lorsqu’elle est enseignée à des apprenants non francophones en France ou à l’étranger. It is a discipline for which there are specific methods.

French Language of Schooling: FLSco?

National Education defines French as a second language as the language which, in France, allows the student to access a qualification. The acronym FLS can in this case be translated as “French language of schooling”.

It is a complex language articulating oral and written simultaneously, learned in a school environment and therefore always at a later stage. It participates in the cognitive development of the learner, is developed around an object of knowledge which is gradually constructed in the class. It requires the construction of a meta-discursive and meta-cognitive skill involving complex language material.

The FLSco is offered to students whose mother tongue is not French, but for whom French should enable them not only to communicate with others, but also to take courses. The difference between these two practices is that in France, the newly arrived student most often stays in the country and becomes French, which gives a different purpose to FSL: that of being a transitional language.

Language certification:

• French: DELF level
• Vietnamese : none

What is the DELF?

The DELF (Diplôme d’Etudes en Langue Française) and the DALF (Diplôme Approfondi de Langue Française) are the only French as a foreign language diplomas issued by the French Ministry of National Education. They have a lifetime validity and benefit from international recognition. They allow you to officially validate your learning of the French language. These diplomas constitute recognition of your educational, university and/or professional career in French. In addition, the DELF and DALF can allow you to study, work and immigrate to a French-speaking country.

Levels A1 and A2

According to the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), level A1 (introductory or discovery) is the most basic level of personal language use. At level A1, the learner is capable of simple interactions. He can answer and ask simple questions about himself, where he lives, the people he knows and the things he has. The A1 level learner can intervene with simple statements in areas which concern him or which are familiar to him and also respond to them, by not simply repeating ready-made and pre-organized expressions.

At level A2 (intermediate), we will find most of the descriptors which indicate social relationships such as: uses everyday forms of politeness and address; greets someone, asks them about them and reacts to the response; carries out a very short exchange; answers and asks similar questions about what he does professionally and for leisure; invites and responds to an invitation; discusses what he wants to do, where, and makes the necessary arrangements; makes a proposal and accepts one.

At level A2, we will also find descriptors relating to outings and travel, a simplified version of all the transactional specifications of the threshold level for adults living abroad such as: carrying out a simple exchange in a store, an office post office or bank; find out about a trip; use public transport: buses, trains and taxis; request basic information; ask for directions and indicate them; to buy tickets ; provide and demand the products and services needed on a daily basis.

• What is the program?

The programs are the official programs of French National Education, you will find them in detail on this site:

https://www.education.gouv.fr/programmes-et-horaires-l-ecole-elementaire-9011

• Are we entitled to the scholarship?

Only children of French nationality can apply for the school grant.

• Are you part of the AEFE?

Yes, we are an AEFE partner establishment from cycle 1 to cycle 3. From Kindergarten to CM2 (Grade 5).

• Can my child join the French School after “Boule & Billes”?

Yes because Boule et Billes is a school whose 3 cycles approved by the AEFE follow the same programs as all French schools approved in France and abroad.

• Is the teacher French? What diploma does he have?

Yes, FLE (French as a Foreign Language) or PE (school teacher) graduate, with at least 3 years of teaching experience.

• What time can we drop off our child?

The establishment is open Monday to Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Reception is from 7:30 a.m. to 8:05 a.m. for preschool and elementary classes.

• Can the child have breakfast at school?

No, breakfast must be taken before arriving at school.

• What kind of meal is served at lunch?

Varied dishes, European and Vietnamese. We favor fruits and vegetables. One vegetarian menu per week.

• Is the meal included in school fees?

No, lunch is charged additionally. See fees.

• Do they have snacks at school?

Yes if they are registered in an extra-curricular activity. (See Menu of the month).

At morning recess, fruit juice and fruit or cake are served to the children.

• What time can we pick up the children?

At 3:00 p.m. for children who do not do extracurricular activities.

At 4:20 p.m. for children doing an extracurricular activity.

Wednesday at 12:20 p.m. or after extracurricular activities at 3:00 p.m. or 4:20 p.m.

• Is there a shuttle bus?

Yes, morning and afternoon.