to be really sad and upset by this

[lonelyandangry]

i can't stop crying about this as my dd has written in her french school book that she lives with the former OW and has called her 'mother' and said she lives with her father half brothers but she lives with me and always has done. i saw it when i checked her room for laundry and her school books were on her bed.

DS invents families and hobbies in language lessons as encouraged by the teacher to demonstrate knowledge and grammar, not facts.

It's probably just for the language practice. In my class in school we all said our father was an accountant and our mother was a nurse. So much easier than explaining "well, my dad works in an office doing such and such and my mum kind of does this but not really it's more like that". So, accountant and nurse all round.

I'm sure it's the same for your dd

Do you normally go through her school books?

It is strenuously encouraged to do so by my dd’s secondary school. They actually ask us to find out specifically what our children are studying and talk to them about it, maybe to centre a family outing to doing something that relates to it. You don’t need to defend looking in her books OP.

Kids do write all kinds of crap, fantasy, lies, dreams etc....

But it is odd that she referred to this OW as her mother,

@lonelyandangry

You need to ask her why she wrote this. I would be fucking livid.

In the school where I taught, they were encouraged to use the widest range of vocab from the topic list because they get more marks. We used to tell them it didn't have to be true-the examiner would never know and wouldn't be interested anyway. So if we were doing for example 'Where I live' we encoraged them to add a garden if they didn't have one, orpets, or additional rooms etc.

Also, perhaps your daughter is just imaginng what she would like -her mother and father in the same house. Children don't think through the intricacies of what they say sometimes.I can see why you feel hurt but am sure she did not do it to hurt you. Could it have been a day she'd had a fall-out with her brother? Or you?

I think "fucking livid" might be an over reaction somewhat...

Tbh, I can see why you're upset but she's been asked to write about her family as an exercise to practise her vocabularly; verb agreements; tenses and French syntax

It's far more likely that she's just taken some of the fact from her life and constructed a narrative that enables her to write a parapraph of sufficent length. These are all people in her life. She is 12, it won't have occured to her that you would be upset by it because it isn't true and you know that.

How do you know that the mother and father she refers to aren't just you and her dad in an idealised version of life in her head?

I used to make up all sorts of shit in my language lessons. My German teacher was friends with my mum so knew it was all lies but they don't care as long as it demonstrates good language skills. Try not to worry about it OP.

I invented a whole new life for myself when doing my French oral. It made it easier to tell a story rather than talk about me.

I would have thought she wrote about the life she has but just added her father in the picture too.

Please don't take it to heart . At that age I decided I'd been adopted

I’m not clear why you think she’s referring to the OW at all? It sounds to me that she’s editing her out and keeping all her siblings.

Awww Mulberry that made me smile and a bit sad, thinking of you having to have bread and cheese and an apple every day that you had french! Did you have a slightly perplexed parent wondering why it was so important to avoid other sandwiches on those days? Or was the whole family on board with providing "du pain, du fromage et une pomme" ?

OP glad that you are feeling better. I am sure that others are right, that your dd will have been encouraged to try out new vocabulary to get a better mark.

Honestly, I think you are reading too much into it. One of mine wrote that he had spent the weekend locked in the attic for being naughty.
Another time that his father was a trolley boy in Tesco (he is deputy head of a large nearby school).
She knows who her Mum is

I echo all the PPs saying don’t take it to heart. Kids write all sorts of provocative stuff at school.
I bought new furniture for DD’s bedroom and she wrote in her primary school diary: “My mum threw all my furniture out. I was very sad and I don’t know how the furniture felt”. (No mention of the new stuff!)
Also “My mum was in her dressing gown all day” - without mentioning that I was actually off work with flu!
I’m sure your own DD was either just trying to make her life sound more exotic, or using some extra French vocab.
You could have a quiet word with her and say it made you feel a bit rejected or sad, OP, but a teen is likely to just get defensive and angry in response. Probably best to just let it go.

You need to ask her why she wrote this. I would be fucking livid.

No way am I fucking livid, I'm not even going to mention it to her. It did upset me at the time but now, well whatever.

I remember DS struggling with this when he was a similar age. He asked me what to write for his homework as he was struggling with the right thing to write. I told him to explain it however he felt best, and I wouldn't be upset whatever he wrote. In the end he wrote about both sides as he was worried about missing anyone out. But it made me realise how hard these situations must be for them as they come across them, even in seemingly simple situations for others.
I'm glad you are feeling better about it, I can see how it is difficult to read that, but I expect it was far more difficult for her and the simplest way she could describe things without going into the tricky detail.

I’m not clear why you think she’s referring to the OW at all? It sounds to me that she’s editing her out and keeping all her siblings.

Completely agree.

I used to write whatever was easiest in language lessons, although we were encouraged to be creative so you learnt other translations. I don’t think it is personal.

I teach languages and I tell them they don't have to tell the truth, it's not the aim, and not so much at 12 but certainly older, it can feel intrusive and point out disparities. Like right now we are talking about new year's resolutions, and I have said I won't be calling home if they say their resolution is to work more in maths and then they don't. I bet the teacher said something like this and she was just using her vocabulary.

She used to ask us what we had in our packed lunches every day. I would only ever take food that I knew the vocabulary for.

ROFL I’ve been on holidays like that. Where no one speaks English and you can only order sausages or ham pizza until you manage to learn a few new words.

It just French school/homework. It doesn't have to be true. She'll be using vocabulary or practising expressions or grammar. I did a GCSE in a foreign language a couple of years ago and I made everything up - nonexistent holidays or cinema visits, the sports I took part in, etc, etc. I added nonexistent sons and half-brothers, random relatives I said I shared the house with.

I was just going to write much the same as daisypond.
In fact it’s now a family joke how much my dd adores the discotheque!

But that doesn't really answer my question- she could have still been referring to you and not even mentioning ow. She's probably pretending you all still live together either wishful thinking or because it's easier to write in French. It's much more likely she's missing out the ow rather than calling her mother, surely?

I agree with most of the posters, I wrote all sorts of rubbish in French. In my last exam I had to say what I did on my birthday - I said I went to the beach, played volleyball, had cake, etc etc... I wrote using as much vocabulary as I had to boost my marks. In reality I'd not done anything that year