Bonjour tout le monde !

Despite the fact that it is only the beginning of August, we’re already planning for la rentrée over here! Gotta do our back-to-school supply shopping, and it’s a whole undertaking.

Each school provides families with a list of fournitures scolaires (school supplies) the kids must have. Here are ours:

Every summer we have a ritual where first my kids go through all their old supplies, compare to the new lists, and cross off all the things they have left over from last year that are still in working order, so we know what we really need to buy.

As school is a serious matter, school supplies are likewise a very serious topic. The lists are extremely specific and cause me some stress every year, but I usually go in person with the lists to the local independent bookshop, Librairie Grangier, which has a great papeterie section, or to the chain bookstore store Cultura, and find a nice shopkeeper to help us decipher the difference between different types of notebooks, folders, paper, and pencils that the schools require.

At school, the teachers are strict about how the kids write (en attaché, in cursive, usually), what color ink they use, and how they write their headings (underlined with a règle, a ruler). And French cursive is slightly different from the cursive I learned, it’s curlier, loopier, and yet straighter. Voici :

But you can’t find everything on the list at the stationary store. The schools always require that kids have a separate set of sneakers for gym, for example. This is very common, even adults have a separate set of sneakers for indoor sports, in order to protect the floors of the gyms, voyez ?

And then there’s the almost standard issue Eastpack backpacks. Each of my kids insisted on getting one at the beginning of collège (middle school), and I couldn’t refuse since I remember myself how important my first day of junior high was and how I planned out my outfit as well (Banana Republic graphic T-shirt and Bass moccasins, trop stylée). Luckily the backpacks are rugged and the kids usually keep them throughout middle and high school.

We usually wind up spending several hundred euros on la rentrée, despite reusing as much as we possibly can from prior years. For low income families, there’s even a special government subsidy to help cover the costs. It’s called the allocation de rentrée scolaire, three million eligible families receive it, and it grants up to 466€ per kid for kids aged 6 to 18.

I do love French office supplies, and I will often stock up for myself on a few new supplies for my own rentrée, I love buying a few snazzy-colored pens and highlighters for my correcting purposes for my upcoming school year. I used to just let my pens float around willy-nilly in my bag and only recently embraced the trousse (pencil case) myself. All French school kids have a trousse, and now I do, too, and it is true that it keeps things so much more organized in my bag.

Shopping and preparing for la rentrée is an annual ritual here in France. Our lives are so rythmées by these traditions, by these annual events. As the end of the summer approaches (noooooooooo), the other big event we have to look forward to here in Burgundy is les vendanges, the grape harvest, but that is a topic for another day.

À la prochaine,

Suzi

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