Swimming and coding

There is no doubt about it, Caden is a fully, fledged swimmer now! I am so chuffed for him. He wants to go swimming all the time to practise his new skill. At La Rochelle, we visited the water park. It was very good. Miles had loads of fun on the water slides (the fast one haha) sat on Mum's knee and Caden was brave enough to try the slow one all by himself (the minimum age is 6) and he loved it too, even the splash at the end, because he can swim now. So he was able to do the slides on his own. This is the first time I have been able to take them properly on water slides together, all these little milestones are making our lives that little bit easier, one step at a time. 

Miles was the amazing Shark Boy, half boy, half shark!! Caden didn't need any floats, he swam all over the place. He seems to have developed a little butterfly stroke all of his own, he swims under water, comes up for air, then swims under again... he can even do it completely out of his depth, deeper than I can stand up in. It's awesome! Now I have to get Miles swimming properly and I will be feeling a lot more confident with them around the canal. I still plan to take them swimming a lot so they practise and get stronger at it. 

We went for a nice walk one afternoon on a beautiful sunny day, they found two socks again who they are now calling Deux Chausettes..... Their spoken French is coming on, bit by bit... 

Caden is now doing one French lesson on Duolingo every day with me. He also got back onto his coding again today. Here are the boys having a play with 'Scratch Jr'. Even Miles can do this very basic programme, Caden got to grips with it immediately and has produced several 'films' already. I have bought him a game called Robot School. This is slightly more advanced programming than Scratch and it looks pretty accessibly in that the operator has to get the robot to a certain point by using the directions each time. These are like games to the kids but they are teaching really important introductory coding skills that I hope the boys will continue to build on.  We also played about on the 'Barefoot Atlas', I bought them some 'puzzle packs' which are quizzes about things like 'animals of the world', cities of the world' and 'famous worldwide art'. We have been having fun with that. The barefoot atlas is a very high quality app. I highly recommend it for anyone with an interest in geography and global natural history, we have learned about Edmund Hillary, what a Buddhist Monk is, that Japan has 1000 earthquakes a year and loads, loads more. 

One more nice thing that continues to happen throughout everything that Caden is doing is that his spelling, typing and English improve in the meaningful context of his daily life rather than some abstract textbook. 

We are continuing to have a nice time in France and we are looking forward to visiting Paris in two weeks. We already know we will be visiting the River Seine and seeing the Eiffel tower. The boys don't want to eat snails or frog's legs though.