Making language decisions towards Spanish

Everyday seems to present more reasons we should do Spanish as a homeschool family. I don't think a single receptionist at our doctor's office doesn't speak Spanish. Most of the doctors speak Spanish, too.

We can buy books in Spanish cheaply and get many at our library. We can listen to the radio in Spanish. We could theoretically watch TV and movies in Spanish. We can volunteer in Spanish.

It isn't a language with a high chic factor. No one says, "Wow, you learned Spanish? You must be a genius!" However, it is a language that makes sense.

We're back!

We're back from our trip to the snow!

We made maple-sugar-snow candy, like Laura and Mary in the Little House in the Big Woods. J made a snow man. A enjoyed cutting, cutting, and more cutting with her Kumon Workbooks. She's becoming very proficient! M enjoyed lots of Grandma laps and drawing.

Hubby and I went cross-country skiing three days in a row. I almost wish I had grown up in Minnesota so that I could have been on an XC ski team in high school. It is a lot more fun than XC running.

We're moving towards getting back into the swing of things. I made J a simple math worksheet today and of course he's reading aloud. One of his Christmas presents was his own simplified Bible that he gets to stay up later than the girls to read each night. Although that isn't "school work" it helps towards developing fluent reading skills.

We'll be moving back into RightStart B and Spell to Write and Read on Monday.

Yay for a relaxing trip!

That's all for 2010...

... we're taking a break until the relatives leave.

Merry Christmas!

German game ideas

A local mom told me about her approach to Spanish with her children. Every few weeks she chooses a game (Chutes and Ladders, checkers, Hungry Caterpillar Game, or such) and teaches her children the vocabulary which go with the game. She taught them to count for Chutes and Ladders (Mancala would be good for this, too - Chutes and Ladders makes me nuts!) or taught food words for Hungry Caterpillar foods. Then, they play the game for a few weeks.

We have a game library here, but someone without one could trade games with friends and neighbors. This localizes the use of the language well to help prevent language mixing ("We've opened up a game, now we speak Japanese!") while linking the language to positive attention from the parents. This might also encourage the children to use the language because they are less likely to be forced into situations their vocabulary can't handle. We'll definitely do this tomorrow! Stayed tuned for how it goes!

*UPDATE*

A and I had a good time playing the Brown Bear game. She volunteered all the colors but had to be coaxed through the animals (which was a surprise to me) and the fairly simple sentence structure. I think if we do it a few times she'll be pretty comfortable with it. I guess that post will come next week.

Multilingualism and bird calls

While in Boston, we were members of LEX/Hippo Family Club, which encourages multilingualism and taught us that it is actually easier to learn languages when one is learning more than one at a time. According to the research they sited, a different part of your brain turns on and your ears are better able to listen to foreign sounds when being bombarded by a large variety of them. Maybe hearing a bunch of crazy sounds at once tells you that you can't map each of them to a sound set you already know. I don't quite know. I experienced a similar thing with bird songs. After spending half an hour in the car listening to a bird sounds CD, I thought somehow I was still listening to it when I got out of the car. My ear was attuned to bird sounds and suddenly the neighborhood was full of them. When you listen a lot to multiple languages, the sounds you couldn't rightly hear at the beginning become clearer.

Learning more than one language at a time seems to be discouraged nowadays, often in chat rooms or in general conversation, but it has many precedents. Charlotte Mason's teachers taught children French and German from before age six, of course beginning with rhymes and songs, and Rudolf Steiner did the same, although I'm not sure what the two languages were! In the USA, Waldorf schools usually teach German and Spanish simultaneously. They also teach through song and rhymes.

Not to be outdone, but mainly because I think it makes a lot of sense scientifically, we'll be adding Spanish through songs and rhymes to our homeschool curriculum in spring of the coming year. I'm working on the curriculum now, but mom needs to do some work on her own (barely there) Spanish, first. I love languages! This is fun!

SWR - for our family

I'm trying to figure out how to use SWR in a way that accomplishes my goals: good spelling, exposure to Christian virtues, comfortable reading, logical thought, without having it take over my life. It seems to take a good 45 min to 1 hour to do the whole thing everyday, which would be fine if I didn't have any other goals for our homeschool time.

Here's what I'll be trying for the coming four weeks, though we'll take off a few days around Christmas. We'll be following a four day per week schedule, doing ten words per week, and having no "tests."

• Everyday: review all phonograms visually, read thirty flash cards, and focus writing one letter perfectly
• Day 1 - copy and write the week's focus phonograms
• Day 2 - write the week's ten words
• Day 3 - write the week's words on flash cards and make sentences by arranging them
• Day 4 - write a sentence from dictation and correct it

This won't lead to the sort of mastery that SWR promises, but that level of mastery seems to be coming through reading for J. Anyways, we'll do all the words over next year as is suggested.

J's consulting teacher has suggested we start the practice of ten minutes of daily journaling. We might implement that concurrently and see how things go.

This guy is a sponge!

He absorbs things but I never know what has been soaked up until he wrings himself out, however infrequently. I used to think that J couldn't count by fives. We used the abacus, but counting by fives to 100 took ten minutes as he slowly pushed the beads back and forth. A few days later, frustrated, I took it away and told him to do it without the abacus. No problem. It took less than a minute.

We had another such breakthrough today. While working on a sheet of two-digit addition and subtraction problems, I couldn't find the abacus so I told him just to go for it and "see the abacus in his mind" while I read to the girls. (Of course we were reading Petunia's Christmas - it has to be Petunia for my 2-year-old!)

He's gotten about three wrong out of twenty. Not too bad for the first time without manipulatives. If I'd found the abacus, however, he'd still be chugging away with it.