School's Out For Summer!

No Alice Cooper

Well it's Memorial Day weekend and Language Stars has ended it's academic year, so we're on a break.  Fortunately it's only a week.  The Smith family will also be taking a break, heading to Mackinaw Island for vacation, although Leilani has one more class before that trip.  I don't suspect that Michigan will be the greatest place to practice her Spanish, but you never know.  We will have her grandparents there for a weekend and that should help.

In the meantime we can look forward to the new summer curriculum.  Leilani is still too young for the Week-Long camps (which start with 4 year olds) but she will be attending weekly classes as usual.  We're also still way overdue for some make-up classes so I'll probably take her for a couple back-to-backs on Saturday.  So what does she have to look forward to?

Well hopefully she gets to go outdoors.  Looking at the schedule it looks like the 3-5 year old close can go outside at numerous times, but not her normal day.  I think I'll go ahead and change my schedule a bit to match that schedule.  My little girl spends too much time inside, and a little outdoors with Spanish seems like just the solution.

Parent's Day and Myths

I've written about Parent's Day here before, but to refresh the memory, Language Stars periodically invites parents to attend the Kid's only classes.  While there we pretend to be 3 year olds and participate in the exercises, while our children try really hard to impress us.  It's rather adorable, even though Leilani wasn't doing a good job of paying attention.

About two thirds of the way through the class Reena Nair (the director of this location) pulled the parent's out and gave us progress reports on our children.  Leilani is doing great, of course, and then she talked to us about myths of language development.  One myth that seemed to be believed amongst some of the parents was that learning a second language would stunt growth in the first or primary language.  The belief in this myth, even amongst parents who are teaching their children a new language, is unfortunate and had consequences for our family.

Our oldest boy, Anthony, has a high-frequency hearing loss.  It sounds like a disability, but it really just means he shouldn't sit in the back of a classroom.  As a small child the doctor told his mother to speak to him in only one language, claiming that the two languages would stunt his development, so they should really only speak English.  This was a crock, and to this day I wonder if the doctor just didn't want another Spanish speaker in the world.  Unfortunately now 21 Anthony speaks very little Spanish, an obviously useful skill, despite occasionally having an accent in his English reflecting his parent's.

The point, which I have likely belabored, is that it's never a bad thing to learn something.  Would you refrain from teaching a child addition and subtraction because one might stunt the other?  Or avoid Science and Literature at the same time?  The notion is silly.  A child's brain is built for absorbing language, take advantage and get them learning as much as possible.

Summer Is Coming

And that means playing outside!  Thank goodness, my litte girl has been watching a little too much TV lately and I'm extremely happy to have her outside on her tricycle.  Until she tires me out of course.

Summer in my family also means parties.  I'm sure it does in yours too: a fourth of July BBQ, memorial day cookout and maybe if you're ambitious perhaps a last trip to the beach on Labor Day.  Well good job, but you've got nothing on me.

You see my wife's side of the family has, statistically, 3424014756 members and all of them have a birthday party this weekend.  The good news is that the parties are always a good time* but the bad news is this keeps us extremely busy over the summer months.  Fortunately this gives a few ways to practice, that I think I'll get started with today.

For instance today my parents are coming over with my nephews and niece for a cookout.   This means there is a non-zero chance my in-laws will come too, and if they come over I'll probably end up with a brother-in-law or two as well.  Since I'm cooking today I'll have Leili (and me) practice a few words that we may not know:

soleado: sunny
tener color: to be hot
hamburguesa: hamburger
hacer color afuera: to be hot outside
el verano: summer
el helado: ice cream

Okay she probably knows that one.  I've got comments on the blog, what words would you want your children to learn for the summer party season?

* "Hey we've got some beer left over from Quinn's 1st birthday party." - an actual thing I've said.

Hola T-Rex!

I'm a little behind writing lately and I apologize for that.  I'd like to blame a busy work schedule or Leili's potty training but the truth is last weekend I just plain forgot to do some writing.  I like to think my audience forgot to read as well, so we're even.  

I suppose that means I should make this blog extra looooooooong, to better to bore you with, but I don't think I'm gonna do that either.  Instead I'm gonna talk about the largest animals ever to walk the earth.  

Dinosaurs!  Spanish speaking Dinosaurs!

Como Estas Brontosaurus

Okay to my knowledge Dinosaurs do not speak Spanish, but they do seem to be a source of amusement for my little girl.  I'm pretty sure every child goes through a phase where they decide that  dinosaurs are the greatest thing ever,probably because they are big enough to eat Mom and Dad.  It seems both her day care (Montessori) and Language Stars have figured this out as both institutions have taken some time to use the large reptiles in their teaching.  That's not to say that Leili is learning the vocabulary, although she is, but that they are using a child's natural interests to help drive the teaching of more useful speaking.  After all saying "Tyrannosaurus" in Spanish may not be useful, but saying "The Brontosaurus is taller than the Tyrannosaurus" is. 

What this demonstrates to me is that all of Leili's teachers take reaching students very seriously.  I'm currently a Masters student, and many a professor could care less if you learn or not.  This is their prerogative and I'm an adult, but children aren't the same way.  Every Saturday Leilani needs to want to go to class, and she needs to feel like she's playing when she's learning.  If she's "playing" then she's paying attention, and the message will stick.  If she's associating words like bigger or shorter with one of her favorite things she's far more likely to remember.  This is far more effective than wrote memorization or repeating phrases that don't really interest her, such as "please" and "thank you."

Now hopefully this means they'll have the next classes about being an astronaut, or better yet a combination astronaut-princess.  That would really help.

Break's Happen, so does reading

I know I've written about this before, but it's worth emphasizing again, when Language Stars takes a break there are many ways to keep your child practicing during the break.  We just completed Spring Break and in Leilani's case she got an extra long one.   You see Leili's father is occasionally absent minded, and may have mixed up the day she didn't have class.  So she missed a day they did have class, and I took her on a day they didn't.

No I did not leave my daughter in an empty Language Stars.  How could I do such a thing?  The door was locked!

Okay I screwed up, so we've had to up our home practice a bit.  Fortunately my daughter has suddenly decided it's okay for me to read to her in Spanish again.  What have I been reading her?

Not this one.  It's worth a lot of money.

She tracked down some extremely old pop-up picture books with Spider-Man, the Hulk, Popeye and others, all in Spanish.  Why is this important?  Well with the combination of some Spanish, pictures, and of course nerd power I'm able to translate.  I don't of course, but occasionally my daughter will ask what's going on.  These books sometimes have phrases she wouldn't know in English.  Meanwhile I've learned some new Spanish:

Espinacas - Spinach
El Hombre Increible - The Incredible Hulk
Brutus - Bluto

So if I'm ever lost in a Spanish speaking country and have to fight The Incredible Hulk and Bluto, I'll just call out for "espanicas" and everything should be fine.

Judging Progress

Leilani speaks fantastic English for a three year old, which occasionally makes judging her progress in Spanish difficult.  Is she behind all 3 year olds, or is her advanced English making her Spanish look bad?  We really can't tell.

Informally we can't help but compare her to her cousins, even though this is utter foolishness.  We look and see that Ellie speaks better Spanish and wonder, "Gosh are we doing enough?  Will she end up forgetting her Spanish the like the older kids did?  Are we failures as parents?  When will family services take the children away?"

The moral?  Parents are idiots.

Fortunately Language Stars has this thing they call the "Learning Ladder" which they use to gauge your child's progress against learning steps, rather than other children.  There doesn't seem to be a copy of the specifics on the internet, but you can read about it here.  There's no grades fortunately, but your child is compared to various levels on the ladder so that the teachers can respond to them appropriately.  Even amongst a classroom I've seen the teachers treat students slightly differently, in a way that doesn't call the differences out, so that nobody is taught at too slow or too fast a pace.  More importantly it helps me gauge my little angel's progress.

In the last week I've noticed two things about Leilani.  The first is that more and more she is responding to her mother and grandparents in Spanish when they speak to her.  This is hopefully a sign that her mini-rebellion against Spanish is over.  In addition she's using more phrases spontaneously, occasionally even speaking complex sentences.  Looking at the Learning Ladder notes I see:

• Repeating Sentences / Using Single Words Spontaneously within the second season.

In their first and second year, children will develop their verbal mastery to include an increasing number of language structures, within the Spontaneous Speaking Stage:

• Using Single Words Spontaneously / Using Key Phrases Spontaneously within the first year.

So it looks like "Princesa" is right on schedule.  Perfect.

Maintaining Interest

If you have children you are probably familiar with a certain pattern that goes something like this:

• Your child is exposed to a [sport/musical instrument/game] via a [friend/tv/school] and decides [he/she] really wants to do that activity.
• You sign up the child for expensive lessons, and they attend with great enthusiasm initially.  They practice their [sport/musical instrument/game] constantly.  After a while it becomes part of the routine.
• One day the kid has a fit when they have to miss [friends birthday/baseball game/movie] because of the activity, and announces they don't want to do it anymore.  
• After a few weeks or months of fighting it you withdraw the kid from the [sport/musical instrument/activity].
• Your child announces that they desperately want to do a different [sport/musical instrument/activity] and it will BE DIFFERENT THIS TIME!

I think every parent has gone through this a few times, and it's a constant battle with any child.  Our older boys, Niko and Sebatian, have been in Boy Scouts, soccer, piano lessons, karate and I'm sure a few others.  Soccer is new so they are still in the enthusiasm stage.  Boy Scouts and karate are both in the "done" phase.  Boy Scouts in particular makes me sad because they had a lot of friends they don't see anymore, but the constant battle with the children made it impossible to enjoy the experience.  The exception to the rule is piano lessons, which the boys still attend with the same enthusiasm they had when we signed them up years ago.  What makes it different?

In the book "A Theory of Fun for Game Design" Ralph Koster posits that we stop having fun when playing a game when we stop learning, or when the learning becomes to hard.  As an example most people lose intrest in a game like Space Invaders fairly quickly, because it's gameplay doesn't really change.  Once you figure out a few patterns, you're done.  On the other hand many people, myself included, don't play more elaborate role playing or strategy games that require 500 page manuals to understand.  It's simply too hard to get started.  A game like Angry Birds hits the sweet spot for almost all gamers precisely because it's easy to get started and it's gradually increasing challenge ensures everybody keeps learning through playing.

Kostner's idea is relevant to parents because he applied the idea of learning to something we don't normally associate with learning, video games.  In video games the skill you are learning is the game itself, but what we take that idea and apply it to actual learning.

Looking back on the past for Niko and Sebastian they lost interest in karate because they didn't go enough for it to provide a consistent challenge.  Eventually they were doing the same thing over and over again, so they got bored, and once some of their friends started saying soccer was cool and karate was lame they didn't want to do it anymore.

Boy Scouts, for all its virtues, had a similar problem.  Boy Scouts go camping, then go camping again, and again and again and again...taking up many a Friday night and weekend with activities that grew repetitive.  The children are supposed to learn skills during this time, but as parents we found that the kids were probably relying on the parents too much to do the hard work to learn anything.  For instance they still can't put up a tent.

With piano lessons the boys have an incredible and patient teacher who does a fantastic job of giving them music that challenges without discouraging.  As such even though lessons are on Friday afternoons after school, when many of their friends are getting ready to attend dances or whatever it is eight graders do these days*, they rarely if ever complain.  If they do say anything they ask if we could make it a different day, but quitting never enters their head.

If you've made it this far you probably are wondering what this has to do with Leilani and her Spanish lessons.  Well every once in a while Leili says she doesn't want to go to Clase de Español, but in the end she always wants to go and always has a great time, because her teachers intuitively understand the Theory of Fun.  She learns a little bit more each week, without being overwhelmed, and tells me all about it when she's done.  Hopefully we can keep it that way.

* The use of this phrase proves I am old.