French Dictation Teas in Anjou (France) Game by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

French Dictation Teas Game by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

I learned abut French Dictation Teas in the Anjou region of the Loire Valley when my family visited one of our relatives’ homes in the town of Saumur (France).

Saumur is a town located on one of the tributaries of the Loire River.  The town is home to the Cadre Noir Equestrian School, Quarts de Chaume and Bonnezeaux wine vineyards, and Crémant de Loire sparkling wine outlets.

Saumur is most famous as the setting for the de Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet.  (This novel has also been made into a film.)  There are “troglodyte” cave homes along the river decorated with window boxes of red geraniums dangling against the white rock of the hills.

I learned from our family member that senior ladies gathered for a cup of tea and cookies every week to this day to do their weekly tea dictation party, which is run as follows:

The leader chooses a paragraph from 3 different literary works by authors usually poets.  The rhythm of poetry preserves the French language best.

Before guests come to the leader’s home for the tea, the leader makes sure that she can correctly pronounce all the words in the three passages.

The leader also uses punctuation as an aid for listeners’ to better understand the passage.

On the day of the Dictation Tea, the group leader reads the first paragraph as guests listen.

Then, the guests ready their pens to write their weekly exercise to preserve the French language.  Each time the Germans have invaded and occupied France, French school children were made to learn German at school.  These Dictation Teas helped preserve the language in these circumstances.

The leader reads one sentence in the passage slowly as participants write the passage.  When the participants are done writing, the leader repeats the sentence allowing the participants to grammatically correct their sentences.

When that sentence is done, the leader goes on to the next sentence and repeats the process for the next sentence.

The leader continues this process until the paragraph is finished.

As a final step, the leader reads the paragraph again slowly, so participants can do their final edits to the paragraph.

The next step is for the participants to compare the edits they made and have a recorder (secretary) make a final copy of the paragraph that is the group or team project.

Then, the leader hands out a copy of the paragraph with a note about the source (title of the book where the paragraph came from, author, and the date of the publication) to correct against the team’s paragraph.

The group goes over the original text versus the copy the participants produced to correct the group paragraph.  This little game helps participants keep French grammar, pronunciation, and literature in the Anjou and Touraine regions standard.

The group leader and participants then repeat this process for the next two paragraphs chosen by the leader.

At the very end, the leader reads the Dictation of Mérimée for fun.  (See my blog on this dictation on the Savvy Mom Ruth Paget website for information about this dictation.)

The group attendees see how many errors they made on this dictation once the leader finishes reading it.  The participant with the fewest mistakes gets to be Prince Richard Klemen von Metternich, the Austrian diplomat, who beat Napoleon by making fewer mistakes than Napoleon did on this dictation.

I am not sure if this is traditional, but I would make the dictation winner, the player who leads off a card game of euchre, which is also called Napoleon.

The French Dictation Tea can be used with children and teens to teach French pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and the rhythm of the French language.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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La Perouse the Explorer Game with 6 Expansions Created by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

La Pérouse the Explorer Game with 6 Game Expansions Created by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

This game has a local twist for Monterey County (CA) residents, since the French trade explorer Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Toulouse (1741 – 1788) set shore in Monterey as one stop of his exploration of the Pacific before disappearing in Vanikoro (the Solomon Islands).

This French trade explorer know as La Pérouse was on a “scientific” mission given to him by King Louis XVI of France to find markets for the French fashion industry’s fur trade from suppliers in Canada and the US and to find fertile whaling grounds.  No doubt his sailors ate like the ones described in Hermann Melville’s Moby Dick.

This is a detective game that requires some reading and analysis to answer task questions whose answers still affect international politics today.

Moby Dick Questions:

-Which countries had whaling industries?

-How were different parts of the whale used?

-How were sailors on the boats fed versus the officers?

The Journals of La Pérouse

Basically, La Pérouse had to do the following tasks:

-locate fur markets in Asia for the French fashion industry

-find a Northwest Passage through Canada to transport goods from the Pacific to the Atlantic

-find good “whaling” grounds for the French whaling industry

The tasks for this La Pérouse the Explorer Game are to:

-find all the stops La Pérouse made in the Pacific Ocean before he vanished

-for the places La Pérouse explored see if there are signs of French culture left in them today.

-the above task requires some research into French culture.  To make that an easier task think of signs that you can see easily like French baguette in a bakery window

-decide which of La Pérouse’s stops were for the French fashion fur trade or for the whaling trade

-look up different species of whales and the areas in the ocean latitudes they are located at. 

-think about why whales at different latitudes might be different from each other.

The French Huguenot historian Jules Michelet (1798 – 1874) wrote whales at different latitudes in his book La Mer (1861).

-where do the French still have colonies today in the Pacific?

-are these French colonies on trading routes, by historical whaling grounds, or by both

Working on these questions before, during, and after you go on your whale watching trip and other historical whale industry sites in Monterey County will make your sightseeing trip seem more like an adventure story for you and your family, too:

Suggested Monterey County La Pérouse the Explorer Field Trips

-visit the La Pérouse Memorial at the Carmel Mission in Carmel, California and the Mission’s Museum

-vist the Whaling Museum at Point Lobos State Park outside Carmel, California

-go on a whale sightseeing trip out of Monterey or Moss Landing across from Elkhorn Slough

As a final note, I would add that my family cleaned the brass plaque memorial to La Pérouse at the Carmel Mission about 6 years ago as a project for the Alliance Française of the Monterey Peninsula.

Maybe exhibits about the historical whaling industry in Monterey would be good to have in the Carmel Mission, Point Lobos, and Portola Plaza downtown. 

This La Pérouse the Explorer Game for a whale watching outing to the Monterey Peninsula would be fun for a San Jose State librarian to run as a workshop on gigmaster.com. 

A San Jose State librarian could also add a workshop on how to do reference online and with reference books to answer the task questions.

La Pérouse the Explorer Game: 6 Expansions by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget – suggested by Ruth Pennington Paget

Today French scientists want to save ocean animals and coral reefs, especially after the documentaries of Jacques Cousteau captured the beauty and fragility of the oceans of the world.

In these La Pérouse the Explorer Game expansions, you have 6 tasks to do for each animal you can find in Monterey County (California):

La Pérouse the Explorer Expansion 1:

-Look up what kind of habitat (home) each animal needs to live, have children, and raise children to adulthood.

-Once you know the information above, look at the environment in Monterey County and see how you could improve and/or maintain the habitat (home) for the following Monterey County animals:

-sea otters

-egrets

-brown pelicans

-hares (rabbits with long ears)

-harbor seals

-hawks

-condors (Watch a video about their habitat, home.  They hide.)

-monarch butterflies

-starfish (Have these been reintroduced yet?)
-bats

-deer

Answer each of those questions above for each animal.

Use an encyclopedia like World Book to do your research.  Most libraries have this encyclopedia.

La Pérouse the Explorer: Expansion 2

When you visit Monterey County, buy a postcard of the animals listed above.  (You can find postcards of many of these animals all over Monterey County.)

Note on the postcard what you think of the animal’s habitat. 

Sample Questions:

Are the animal’s young safe? 

How is their food supply being affected? 

Is the color of the animal’s skin different from that on the postcard?

La Pérouse the Explorer Game Expansion 3:

Make a La Pérouse the Explorer Journal

-Paste a photo you have taken or a postcard on the front of your personalized journal and use calligraphy to call it “La Pérouse the Explorer Journal: Monterey County.”

In other parts of the world or California, the region you list will be different, but this is a model for other regions to follow.

Inside the journal, you can write notes abut what you learned about animals with photos or postcards and what you did with your parents on your field trip.

You can practice drawing animals in your journal and writing poetry as well.

La Pérouse the Explorer Game Expansion 4:

La Pérouse collected plants on his voyage around the Pacific Ocean to send back to France.

You have 2 tasks to do here at Level 4:

-Identify the kinds of plants and trees that grow in the places that La Pérouse visited.

-Find out how to get a plant from the South Pacific back to France for each plant you identify above.

La Pérouse the Explorer Game Level 5

-Read the following books about sailing and the oceans

-After you read a book, make a 2-page summary of the book to discuss why the information is still important today with family and friends

Go chapter-by-chapter and do at least 2 paragraphs per chapter

-Book of Sailing Knots: How to Tie and Correctly Use over 50 Essential Knots by Peter Owen

-How to Draw Cool Ships and Boats:  From Sailboats to Ocean Liners by Fiona Gowen

-Learn to Sail: A Beginner’s Guide to the Art, Equipment, and Language of Sailing on a Lake or Ocean by Dennis Connor and Michael Levitt

Make a word list of the equipment and define it in terms you understand: 

Give yourself spelling tests on the equipment words. 

Then, write the words out and write the definitions next to them. 

Check the definitions you wrote against your definition list.

-Draw 50 Boats, Ships, Trucks, and Trains:  The Step-by-Step Way to Draw Submarines, Sailboats, Dump Trucks, Locomotives, and Much More by Lee J. Ames

-Sails: The Way they Work and How to Make Them by Derek Harvy

-How to Design Small Sailboats by Edward Clever Seibert

La Pérouse the Explorer Game Expansion 6

Plan a sailing or boating vacation on Lake Naciamento in South Monterey County where the temperatures can reach 110 degrees in the summer.

-learn the directional buoy system

-learn how to sail with your parents

-learn how to drive a motor boat with your parents

By Ruth Paget, Author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Introducing Korean Food to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Introducing Korean Food to Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Once my family had been to Orient Express in Seaside (California) and liked the barbecued beef called bulgogi and the array of little dishes called pan ch’an of sour vegetables flavored with sesame oil, I wanted to take my daughter Florence out for some more Korean food as an early dinner meal after picking her up from school.

My husband worked late hours at the time, so I treated early dinners with Florence as a cultural field trip when we went to ethnic restaurants.

I did some more background reading on Korean cuisine and called my editor at The Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000).

I asked my editor, if I could review the Hidden Korea Restaurant in Marina to introduce Monterey County residents to some other restaurants that serve Korean foods in the County.

The editor agreed to let me review the restaurant for that reason.  My review follows:

Hidden Korea: Marina’s New Korea Restaurant is off the Beaten Path, but Worth a Few Wrong Turns

The New Korea Restaurant in Marina is tough to find.  But, its elusive location has not kept customers away for the past thirty years.  Word-of-mouth brings in most diners.

My husband’s Korean colleagues recommended it.  I immediately liked the place when I walked in and saw the wood tables and Korean script poetry on the walls.

We started our meal with what I dubbed a Korean pizza: the haemul pajon pancake, containing scallions and seafood.  The rice flour used to make haemul pajon gives it a chewy texture.

Sesame oil and soy sauce give the pancake a savory taste that accents the seafood flavors.

Golden crust covered in the haemul pajon , which was cut into squares for easy dipping in soy sauce.  I thought the Korean pancake was delicious.  Like pizza, this dish can easily serve as a main meal for two.

My husband Laurent alternated eating between the two main dishes he ordered:

-maemal soondubu and bulgogi

-the spicy, dark red soup that no doubt gets its kick from the addition of gochu jang : Korean hot chili paste made from melted glutinous rice, soybean cake, red hot chili, and salt among other items.

Laurent stifled a few snuffles as he ate.  He said the soup was delicious as his cheeks turned pink.

He especially liked the pieces of tobu (Korean tofu).  Fresh mussels, octopus, and shrimp made up of the seafood contingent in his soup, but they were more like condiments than the main ingredient.

The thin filets of beef were very tender and some of the best that I have tasted on the Peninsula.  Every cook has his or her own secret for this dish, but the meat typically marinated in a mixture of soy sauce, rice wine, sesame oil, and sugar before getting broiled.

The meat comes steaming to the table on top of brown onions.

Korea is unique in East Asia for its beef consumption; the Chinese favor pork and the Japanese favor fish.  In the 13^th century, Ghenghis Khan’s Mongol hordes overran the Korean peninsula and brought their taste for beef with them.

Koreans are picky about their meat looking for all cuts to liven up to the reputation of the beef on Korea’s southern island of Cheju.

With their country surrounded by water on three sides, Koreans have always featured fish and seafood in their cuisine.  My main entrée, nakji bokum, octopus stir-fry, was one such dish.

This dish is a spicy mixture with lots of hot, green peppers, so the faint of spicy foods should beware.

Spicy gochu jang paste goes into the stir-fry along with chili powder, sesame oil, strips of red peppers, carrot ovals, and onions.

I loved the hot spicy taste with the chewy octopus.  Some of the thinner tentacles were a little tough, but that happens when you cook thin and thick pieces together.

My favorite part of a Korean meal is the mixture of side dishes called pan ch’an.  Usually they consist of pickled vegetables seasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil called haemul.

I liked the kimchi, which left a nice tingle in my mouth as did the cucumber kimchi.  The cucumber kimchi had a slight fish flavor to it.  Several Korean cookbooks note that the oysters used to season kimchi dissolve, leaving only their briny tang.

The chilis and chili powder that seem so typically Korean have not always been part of Korean cooking.  Pickled cabbage has been around for 4,000 years.

Chilies, an American agricultural product, entered Korea beginning in 1592 according to food historian and cookbook author Copeland Marks in his book The Korean Kitchen: Classic Recipes from the Land of the Morning Sun.

It was during a seven-year war between Japan and Korea that Portuguese Catholic priests, who were accompanying the Japanese troops, took the chili seeds and/or plants to Korea.

The Portuguese got the plants from the Spanish, who had brought them from Central America to Europe.  Koreans adopted the chilies just like the Italians adopted the American tomato.

We drank Korean barley-corn tea with our meal, which is different from black and green teas.  The Koreans prefer decaffeinated brew made by boiling barley and corn and, then, straining the liquid.

The tea soothed our tongues from the spicy foods.  I felt like picking some up in a Korean grocery store after we left this restaurant that definitely deserves a detour.

End of Article

Since I wrote that article, a very good cookbook on Korean food has been published called Growing up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Shin.

Before going to a Korean restaurant now, I would recommend reading that book, so you would know what is on the menu.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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