The Importance of Practice

Leili gave me a little inspiration for tonights blogpost. Before bed she pointed to the book on the right and said, "Read!" Occasionally my lovely daughter can be a tad demanding. Now in the interest of total honesty I should tell you that I absolutely dread reading this book. See that word on the top, "Diccionario"? It's a children's dictionary, and it's only 70 or so pages, so we get to read it for an hour or so. Today Leili said, "Read it in English," apparently looking to give me an extra challenge.

My griping aside this inspired me to write a little bit about practicing with your children. Now in our home we have an advantage, my wife is Peruvian and speaks almost exclusively in Spanish to our littlest children. In your home that's probably not the case, and even we still practice. In addition to the obvious reasons it's also important to us to make it "okay" for Leilani to speak Spanish to me.

She's well aware of the fact that I speak English and mommy speaks both languages and often insists I speak English to her, or read her Spanish books in English. The more Spanish I speak, the more she will speak and the more likely she is to keep her knowledge into adulthood.

So how do we practice? I'm not going to pretend like we're some kind of super, or is it tiger, parents who spend hours with Leili running flash cards then quizzing her. We're both very busy people with four other children who also demand our attention, and what kind of two year old would sit still for that anyway. So what are the ways you can practice at home? The most important thing is to speak as much of your desired foreign language as you can with your child. I speak small Spanish sentences to Leilani all the time, which is one of the reasons it's so important that you speak all the words during class too. You can listen to music in the language of your child. Those annoying kiddie songs are ...well they are just as annoying but they are in a different language! And of course you can read books in the language your child.

Just avoid the dictionary. It's a bit dry.

Welcome

This is a chronicle of my daughter Leilani's experiences with the Language Stars program, so some backstory is probably in order. My wife Crystina is Peruvian, a first generation* immigrant and now an American citizen. When we met she had three children, and none of them is fluent in Spanish despite being surrounded by an entirely Spanish speaking family. With Leilani, and eventually her little brother Quinn, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that I speak only rudimentary Spanish with a terrible accent. Yet we would both love for our children to be bilingual. When a friend of ours told Crystina about Language Stars we were ecstatic.

We immediately signed Leilani up for the program at the Arlington Heights location, and she loves it. Every Saturday morning she wakes up and says she wants to go to her "clase de Español with dada." At home we speak to her in Spanish as much as possible, with Crystina only speaking to her in it, which has helped with her dramatic progress in the language. At this point we're looking into moving her into the 3-5 year old class, Leilani is two and a half, even though that is bittersweet for me since I won't be attending class with her anymore when we do that. Later this week I'm gonna talk a little bit about the curriculum so far, but I think that suffices for a "Hello."

* Her parents moved here too, after she did. Does that make them second generation? And if so, is my wife now her parents mother? Somebody needs to look into this.