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One of the activities my children and I have discovered in our 8 years of living in a Paris suburb is the people’s fascination with urban culture. Every spring our “commune” of Magny-les-Hameaux, just 20 kilometers southwest of Paris, offers sports workshops for children featuring French urban culture. (Scholarized children enjoy 2 weeks of school vacation every 6 weeks throughout the school year. Their school vacation in April has become synonymous with these urban culture workshops.)
So what’s French urban culture? Come find out! *For obvious reasons, I blurred the faces of the children not my own participating in these workshops.
Echasses urbaines (jumping stilts) are very popular. They are a metal set of stilts with a strong spring action. They look more like braces than stilts and are out of this world!
Every single year, I’m so tempted to try them out, but I haven’t been brave enough yet. They look like so much fun!
Roller & trotinette (roller blades & scooters) are also very popular, but these seem more commonplace to us than the jumping stilts for example! We’ve got a skate park (with banked ramps, pools, bowls and stairsets) about a kilometer away and a flat skate area just a few hundred meters from our home.
Beat box “(also…b-box) is a form of vocal percussion primarily involving the art of producing drum beats, rhythm, and musical sounds using one’s mouth, lips, tongue, and voice. It may also involve singing, vocal imitation of turntablism, and the simulation of horns, strings, and other musical instruments. Beatboxing today is connected with hip-hop culture…” (Wikipedia).
Not my cup of tea, but fascinating all the same to listen to all the incredible noises they make with their mouths!
Breack & hip hop (break dancing & hip hop) takes me back to my youth! All four of my Peruvian-Mexican brothers were break dancers growing up in southern California! This “style of street dance…originated among Black and Puerto Rican youths in New York City during the early 1970s” (Wikipedia). Pretty fun to find my Latin roots resurface in the urban culture here in France! (Ironically, it’s not at all my style!)
Graph (graffiti). This workshop activity, to be quite honest, is major culture shock for me! In my days, graffiti was illegal activity and today it’s glorified as urban art that we teach children?! Go figure!
It is, by the way, still illegal. However, Paris has an astonishing number of 66 legal graffiti walls!
Golf urbain (street golf). Pretty self-explanatory, but did you know? Street golf doesn’t exist just in Paris; it can also be found in the slums of India, for example.
Like I said, every spring, the commune we live in offers these workshops for children 8-18. They are offered the first week of school vacation and children attend Monday through Friday from 10am to noon. My children have participated on and off for the past 8 years. They are not big fans of urban culture other than the roller blades, scooters and maybe the jumping stilts. (I guess the apples didn’t fall far from the tree!) They have fun all the same and it’s a great way to keep them busy and active during the school break.
By the way, the workshops are usually concluded with a type of celebration with demonstrations of what the children have learned. At this time all activities are also open to the public! Next year, I’ll be sure to wear my tennis shoes! Those échasses urbaines are calling to me!
Where do you live and what kind of urban culture is popular there?
Maria, born and raised in the United States to a Peruvian father and a Mexican mother, is today the proud mama of four trilingual kiddos. She loves their multilingual, multicultural lifestyle, living in a suburb of Paris, France, taking family vacations to the United States and eating Mexican tacos. She graduated from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah in 2000 with a Bachelor’s degree in French, completed undergraduate coursework in early childhood second language acquisition as well as graduate coursework in French literature. She taught beginning French at BYU before beginning her own in-home multilingual experiment. She blogs at Trilingual Mama in a quest to explore and exploit the secrets that lead to a family’s multilingual successes, including research, practical tips, resources and real life.
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They have so many days off, how wonderful for them! Those jumping stilts look amazing (fun and a bit difficult, but amazing!).
Yes! Next year when I try the jumping sticks, I will let you know! Thanks Marta!
Those jumping contraptions for the feet look amazing!! I hope they come stateside soon! My kids would love them!! They like Pogo sticks so this would be perfect!
Thanks! Yes, most kids love the jumping sticks and if you look on the Internet you can find some pretty amazing acrobatics with them!
I hope I’m not the last person on the planet to find out about those stilts?
We could use a break dancing class around here – son has a sudden interest. Good to know someone out there is doing it!
By the looks of the other comments, I think you’re not the only one, Joy! And this is all just firing me up to really try them next year!
I just had a look at your wonderful blog! I love it! Looking forward to reading you!
I love the idea of urban culture workshops, and how great it is to get kids outdoors and think outside the box.Unlike everyone else’s enthusiasm, those stilt contraptions would make me nervous 🙂
Absolutely Marie-Claude! Getting kids outdoors is one of my main concerns these days!! And you are right, it does help them to think outside the box, even me! 😉