By: Yasmine Martinet

Last time I wrote here, my home country, France was still social distancing and the United States had only started to see its number of Covid-19 cases increase. Since then, France has reopened its borders, while keeping Americans out, Americans took to the streets protesting, the United States started loosening its social distancing measures and saw its number of cases increase. A lot has happened in a short time.

All the while, most of my students remained at home, finishing their semester, trying to keep hopeful and energetic like all youth does. It is a very trying time for all of them, and their future is very uncertain: Will they get to go to college or high school in August? What would that be like? When will they get to see their friends and bond again with that chosen family? When will they get to do all the activities that make them feel good, fulfilled, happy, and help them grow into young adults? 

Online French Lessons for High School Credit

A couple of my students had plans to travel to France this summer, and were taking classes expressly for that purpose! Imagine the disappointment. Well, I did my best to give them a taste of that, crafting activities to get their imagination to do the traveling even if their bodies couldn’t. It’s very tricky, especially when you are still trying to get them to understand the nitty gritty mechanics  of the French language, which they need to get their High-School credits and be in a good position to get into their college of choice. 

Want to Take French Lessons Online? Download This Free Brochure to Learn More!

LanguageBird cares tremendously about our students and we also enjoy experimenting and innovating, so we came up with a brilliant solution: a Culture Camp! It is a series of lessons all in English, to show a bit what Francophone culture is made of, give students a taste of what traveling around those parts of the world would be like.  French is not the only language with a dedicated Culture Camp: we also have Spanish, Italian, and Russian! To top that off, LanguageBird prides itself on having wonderful professors teaching across all continents, so students will get to hear from far away places, through far away people, from the comfort of their own home … You can hear more on the benefits of that aspect of our programs here!

Explore French Culture with LanguageBird Culture Camp!

We have crafted our French Culture Camp so that it might feel like a real traveling experience: we want to awaken curiosity, arouse surprise and wonder, make your ears rejoice, your head bob, your taste buds tingle, your eyes marvel …! Our hope is that this will get young people to feel like the world out there is still waiting for them, full of adventures and promises, that it will get better and they will get to go anywhere they feel like eventually. It’s with this sense of openness, hopefulness and possibility that I would encourage anyone to enroll their children into our summer programs and into the Culture Camp. High-School gets rougher and rougher as the pressure builds up to  get into college. But taking courses with us, they would get to enhance their chances at college while getting the breathing room and refreshing taste of elsewhere they need most at the moment. 

Join us this summer in learning language and culture and travel around the world without leaving home. I hope to meet you in Culture Camp!