Thursday, October 31, 2013

Halloween, Italian Style

Happy Halloween everyone! Many ask if this holiday is celebrated here in Italy and the answer is, "kind of." Each year this holiday becomes more and more popular. There is still no traditional door-to-door trick or treating in Italy, but there are fun readings in school with pumpkins and bats and ghosts. This year, Isabel's school actually had a Halloween party at a local community center. The kids got dressed up and had snacks and there was even a dj spinning some dance tunes. The kids were mostly dressed as scary things like monsters and witches. That is how Italians see dressing up at Halloween. It brings one back to the more scary and spooky part of the tradition. There are no strawberry shortcakes or other cute characters. I did see a couple monster high girls, just tell you that is popular with young girls across the globe, or at least here in Europe.

Josh and Isabel ready for the party.

Isabel and a couple friends at the school Halloween party. The girl in the center dressed as Rainbow Brite is Isabel's American friend. She is the only other American at their school.


Italian kids here in Vicenza have a special treat in that they can go traditional trick-or-treating at the Army Base Housing area. They have started opening it up to Italians. Tonight, we are bringing a couple of Isabel's best Italian friends. It should be kinda crazy as this is a small housing area and all American families, and now Italians too, will be descending on these poor people who live there.

The true holiday for children to dress up in Italy is actually Carnevale. This is the time just before lent, better known to Americans in the form of Mardi Gras. During Carnevale, kids are off from school. There are parades in various towns and sometimes a costume parade at the mall. Kids throw streamers and there are special sweet cakes that are baked only around Carnevale time. The biggest carnevale celebration is in Venice where people come from all over to participate in or just observe the elaborate costumes and masked that are worn.
Carnevale in Venice

La Scuola (School)


We have completed our first two months of the new scholastic year. This will be our second year in the Italian school system. I had great hopes of writing more about the school experience last year, but, like many resolutions, it just didn’t happen. I’ll try to make it up this year. So, here we go….

 
Isabel and Josh in front of Isabel's school.

Isabel has started second grade (seconda). Yea! She is really excited about it. She completed first grade last June.  We threw her into Italian elementary school with the sink or swim attitude. We figured, if she sank, she was still young and all would be fine. If she swam, it would be wonderful. Well, we think she did great, and she remained happy which was one of the most important things for us.

 

Of course, the question everyone keeps asking is, “So, does she speak Italian?” That is actually a hard question to answer for a few reasons. First, kids don’t learn language like we do. She is not studying verb conjugations and proper Italian grammar (yet). She doesn’t know what the subject or indirect subject is in a sentence. She picks up things that she hears. She learns some simple vocabulary from her homework. She pieces them together and out comes some speaking, however grammatically incorrect.

 

The language skill is also difficult to judge since she definitely does not want to speak it, at all, in front of us. If I am around when she is playing with an Italian friend, I catch a few words muttered here and there as I am hiding behind a wall being very quiet. It’s coming along. Her Italian is not grammatically correct and sometimes it’s just totally crazy wrong, but I’m glad she is trying. Today was the first time I heard her mutter, “Ma dai!” and that told me she will be picking up extraordinarily more of the language this year since she is going into second grade with a year of Italian school already under her belt. “Ma dai” is the equivalent in English of saying, “come on!” in an exasperated way as if the person in front of you on line is asking one to many questions to the cashier and taking way too much time. “Ma dai!” is often used with an exasperated hand gesture.

 

Josh has also started school with one year completed. He is in what they call “Grande”. It’s the third year of the preschool. The preschool is basically divided into Piccoli (3 year olds), Medi (4 year olds), and Grandi (the 5’s). In the American school system, Josh would have started his first day of Kindergarten this year. He would have been starting elementary school. It was a little hard for me to see him continue back to preschool, but I remind myself that his experience is so different than most other American 5 year olds. I have to appreciate that, and I hope he will too someday.

 

In Grande, Josh will learn to write all the capital letters and do some very simple writing and calculating of numbers. That, and the continuation of fine motor skill development, is pretty much all the curriculum that is covered at this level of school. I’ve heard people say it’s what American kindergarten was 40 yrs ago when mostly you did the alphabet and some finger painting.

 

When Josh moves on to Scuola Elementare and the first grade, he will start with A, capital letters, and 2+2. They start very basic. Preschool is not mandatory, so some kids are coming to first grade with only 6 years of being home with grandma. When starting first grade, they basically only assume the kids know how to write their name and know how to write all the letters in capital. That’s it. They start slowly, but give them loads of homework every week so they progress quickly.

 

Isabel’s homework last year proved quite challenging for both of us. She attends school from 8a-4p Mondays and Wednesdays. The other days of the week, she attends from 8a-12:30. She would come home, eat lunch, and then start homework. It was basically like homeschooling your child, with the added challenge of everything being in a foreign language. I would sit there with her, surrounded by Italian dictionaries and Google Translate on the laptop. She was exhausted. One day she simply fell asleep with her head lying on her notebook. As the year progressed, she began to understand more and more Italian, and her exhaustion lessened. Oddly enough, I hadn’t even noticed this phenomenon until the teachers pointed it out at a parent-teacher meeting sometime around March.
 
One example of homework from first grade. Each week was a new letter of the alphabet and its assorted combination with the vowels. It cracks me up how sigaretta (cigarette) was one of her S words (the picture colored orange). Would you ever see that in an American school??
 
 

Another homework example from later in the year.
 

 

I can certainly say this year is easier already. Having a much greater understanding of the language is the biggest help. Also, the teachers you start with in First grade are the same ones you have all through elementary school (unless they quit or retire), so her teachers know her well and she is very familiar with them. I think she got lucky, because we really like them both and they call her their little amore (love). All in all, school is going well for both kids this year. It’s definitely an adventure, but a great one.