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4KookieKids

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  1. I agree with this. I think the age you do it matters less than having a conceptual idea of what a fraction is (which would come from the manipulatives) and having really strong multiplication skils. With those two tools, I've seen children successfully learn fractions as young as first grade, but more commonly not until late elementary school in the US. I'm no expert either, but I am in math education (I teach math teachers).
  2. For what age group? When my little guy was 2 (though it would work for older, just depending on your Danish language skills), we bought the BrainQuest for 2&3 year olds and went through it (we did it in German). It's not nearly as "trivia" as the older BrainQuests are and gives a lot of stuff to talk about! You just have to know how to say everything in Danish, of course. :) Edit: I just saw your little footer thing that says your youngest is 12, so maybe this isn't the best. Sorry! My guy just thought it was the funnest game!
  3. My son (3.5) has some motivation issues as well. What I've found to work well for him was just to explain to him in very simple terms why learning a language is important, and then to just consistently remind him throughout the day to say things in the other language (which gets extremely tiring for me, but works). Progress is slow, at times, but still happening. I would encourage the nanny just to keep at it, but I would also see if you can find a Spanish child his age anywhere to have even occasional play dates. My son has a Spanish friend his age, and he really took notice when she spoke Spanish with her mother. Even though I'm teaching him German, his interest in his friends' Spanish led to a really good conversation about other languages, and helped motivate him to speak more German with me, and also led him to express interest in learning Spanish too.
  4. On a related note, I'm looking for recommendations on favorite German children's books (primarily in the 3-5 year category). So far, most of my son's German books were only translated into German (with the exception of his Wieso? Weshalb? Warum? and Was ist Was books). What are your favorites?
  5. Yeah! It's interesting to read old threads! Though I'm generally hesitant to respond to them because I'm afraid it's already been covered and I just missed it in all the other threads. :)
  6. We have also made good use of bookdepository.com, as well. It's not based in Germany, but it has quite a few German books. The caveats are that they are often older books (not used, just books that came out a while ago) and that shipping takes a long time (up to 2 weeks). The up-side is that prices are usually cheaper than amazon.de (once you factor in an exchange rate), and there's no minimum purchase for the free shipping, so you can just get a book here and a book there without having to break the bank in one order. :D It's also a good site for non-german books, because it has books in a variety of languages, and they ship free worldwide. I hope it's ok to bring back up such an old thread.
  7. If he still understands it, or at least some of it, can you make it interesting by trying to get him into some Dutch movies or childrens books / audio books? Maybe that sort of "immersion" (I know it's not really immersion, of course, but it's so different from an actual course that I don't know what it's called!) will give help his brain "remember" what it knows. I know that I learned German as a very young child, but then all but lost it by not speaking it for close to 20 years. What helps my brain remember its German best is actually not to do any formal programs, but just to dive into movies and books. As I read and hear, I understand and it reminds my brain of all that really is hidden down in there somewhere, and I think it would take far longer for me to get the same amount of German brought to the fore-front if I was doing a more traditional learning situation. Also, when I started teaching my son German, I found that there was no way he'd sit through those "learn German" CD's from the library, but if I rip the audio from movies he likes, and play them through an mp3 player or CD in the car, he's more than happy to sit and listen to them for half an hour or more even. (Every time we get in the car, he now asks to listen to them, and he's only 3! :D)
  8. So I don't know that I have "experience" in middle school study abroad, but here are a few thoughts. First, if you google "study abroad" & "middle school", you get quite a lot of hits, and lots of stories from people who've done it. So I certainly believe it's possible. Second, and this might offend the school in question (so they'd have to consider that beforehand), I think the middle school shouldn't have any say whatsover, legally or not. I think that they should deal directly with the Spanish school, get her placed and ready to go. Deal with the "return" part later -- the school will *have* to deal with it. We moved around a ton in middle school: I attended 6 different schools in 3 years, and also spent two months in 7 grade not in school at all. Long story short, is that school deal with this all the time. It may be a bit of a hassle for them, which is why they're discouraging her now, but there's just not a thing they can do about it, once it's done, honestly. We usually didin't even get things figured out before hand; I'd just walk into a school with hardly anything on me (I started just taking care of it myself in 7th grade), giving them my info, getting placed and then taking home paperwork for my parents/guardians at the time. Just saw that regentrude got a post out before I finished this :D -- and I totally agree that the worst they could do (other than empty threats and lots of bullying) is not let her back in (which they *can't* if they're a public school).
  9. That's certainly the rule when I'm home, too! Even so, I find it hard to find the right balancing part. On the one hand, I'd love to have my kids have that "outside" exposure (e.g., anything other than me!) on a daily basis -- for several hours, even! But there's no way I'm going to let them sit there for that long, unless we're sick. :) Your spanish comment (or maybe just mention of 2 other languages) brings up another question for me (somewhat unrelated, so feel free to point me towards another thread if it might be more appropriate): We have friends who speak Spanish at home and my 3 yo has honed in on that. So he's starting to ask me how to say various things in Spanish when we discuss new German words. If I spoke Spanish even semi-fluently, I would say that maybe this just means we could start with a third language, but I only took 3 years of Spanish in high school and couldn't even tell him the word for carrot without looking it up. Any ideas on whether I should do anything? I feel like I've got my hands full with German right now, but don't want to miss this sort of great potential window. And I'm also concerned about confusing him more.
  10. Thanks for the tips on videos to look into. The videos are a hard one for me (though we have been using them to some degree) because we generally don't do a lot of screen time. So we watch them very occasionally, and then once my 3 yo gets the story down some, I rip the audio onto a CD and we listen to it in the car and around the house all the time. I think he likes it more than most other audio books we use, because he gets more of the story (since he's seen the video). I've been reading what I can, though it really comes in spurts depending on busy my kids are keeping me. :D In the last six months or so, I read a bunch of English books that had been translated into German, because I wasn't sure where I was and I thought it would help to know the story. So I read the Harry Potter series, the Eragon series, and am halfway through the Narnian chronicles (though I've been halfway through them for about a month or two now...) It's been encouraging, because I do understand almost all of what I read -- but then again, I do know the stories, already. I think that once I finish them, I'll actually switch over to German YA books, like you suggest. Thanks! I'll look into those! I had a hard time finding a good book for the finger plays, because I just couldn't figure out the directions very well. Do you know of any video's that would be good for this? Maybe I'll check out YouTube! (Don't know why I didn't think of that sooner... :p)
  11. Thanks! I'll spend some time browsing through all that information! I've been in contact with the GAS in Omaha, and we're hoping something can come of that soon! Most of their events are for kids a little older, unfortunately, and the ones that start around age 4 aim more towards children who don't speak German at home, I'm told. So I'm undecided on that (at least while I still have a 1 year old to pacify for an hour each way in the car!) But I think we may try it soon, and just see what it's like before making any decisions (they said he could come and see, even though he's not yet 4). What sounds most promising right now is that they're going to contact a few German families they know and see if anyone else has young kids and would like to plan play-dates. I'll check out some of those other groups too. Thanks! It all just feels so overwhelming sometimes. I don't feel like my German is coming along as quickly as I'd like it to because I'm always stumbling over words that I can't recall and I have to run to my dictionary (not particularly easy in the middle of story time while I'm trying to translate a new library book -- it's hard enough to get the 1 year old to sit still for 5 minutes!) and/or alter my sentences several times a day as a result. I have to remind myself that I didn't speak it for over 15 years, and I've only been speaking it again for a little over 1 year, so running to my dictionary and mixing up my cases some (even if it's 15 or 20 times a day) is a vast improvement over where I was a year ago! :D So from your website, it looks like you use a mix of German and English books. Do you still speak German when covering the English material? How did you decide which language to use for which topics/material? Or do you do most in both (I noticed that you had some in both languages)? Do you find it challenging to keep your children speaking German while living here, or has that not been an issue for you?
  12. Wow! Thanks for all the great resources! I've tried contacting people I found on an AATG list of German schools in the US, I was hoping they would share curriculum with me, and also wondered if how often they get new books (here in NE, accredited schools have to buy complete new sets every 5 years, so you can often find great bargains on books when schools are getting rid of their old ones!) But so far, I've had very little response, which is a little disheartening. I'll give it a few more weeks, and then maybe try again. But you think contacting AATG directly would be good? What should I ask about? I feel like what I could ask is so vast, I'm not sure where to start (other than curriculum and books, like I mentioned above!)
  13. I totally think that's ok, so long as you're actively working to get 'em memorized (like you said you were doing :D). I'd just want to get stuff memorized quickly enough that habits like using tables, calculators, etc. don't become too ingrained. It's a sad state of affairs that I've seen far too many high school students who whip out their calculators to calculate 21+13. True story! Edited to add: Not at all intending to imply he will be like this! Just commenting on having seen students grow reliant on other tools.
  14. So I've no experience with this from a home ed perspective, but I do have the perspective of a math teacher who has taught all levels of math, and who also teaches other math teachers at the graduate level. So I don't know if my perspective is at all helpful to you, but here it is! :) Let me just say that I'm a mathematician who hates arithmetic and I hate memorizing anything. I'd rather use my reasoning skills to derive a formula over memorizing a formula any day. *However*, the single biggest obstacle I see when teaching math (especially remedial tutoring) is a lack of arithmetic skills. While it won't hamper their ability to understand complex or abstract topics and ideas, their inability to do simple problems in new areas (without the use of a calculator) has a significant affect on their morale and their feelings of math competency, which quickly turns people away from math. I think it's absolutely imperative that students know what they're doing when they're adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. But I also think it is crucial that students have the basic arithmetic facts (multiplication tables, etc.) memorized cold as early as possible. So I would recommend using any and all motivation possible to get these memorized -- games, rewards. etc. I don't say this because it's fun or easy -- trust me: I really do hate memorizing things, and as a general rule, I almost always discourage teachers from forcing kids to memorize stuff. But if you think about the way you do math in your hard: if someone asks you 8*7, chances are (maybe not, just chances are) that you just have memorized the answer is 56. If they're going to excel at math, they'll end up with all of this memorized anyway, so my feeling is that memorizing it asap gives them a much better starting point for everything else.
  15. Yeah, we have always read a lot, and I've seen lots of other benefits. I just never realized that was one of them!
  16. I'll work on it! Thanks for the idea. :) That's great! I had this experience learning Spanish in high school as well -- it was just easy peasy for me. :) It's a good point that reading alot gives them exposure to much more complicated sentences. Thanks. :)
  17. Thanks for the encouragement!! I don't *feel* like a native speaker, which I think makes this seem more daunting. But it's encouraging to hear of your friend who was in a similar situation! We do already have a DVD player that can play all regions, and we have bought some movies from amazon.de. I just wish there was a more ready selection of used/cheaper stuff, because we can't keep breaking the bank to be buying new all the time! But used tends to have much higher shipping charges. :p I wish we had family over there, but all of our family in Germany has passed away since we left. I believe that my son's German could become active very quickly, because I've really been pushing him to speak it with me this week while my husband is out of town, and I feel like his German output has gone from maybe 30% before to somewhere around 60% without prompting, and 90% with me responding to English with a "Wie bitte?" or "Auf Deutsch?" So I feel like we're making really amazing progress this week, and it's exciting!
  18. Where do you get your audiobooks? I've been looking at audible.de, but wondered if there are other/better alternatives. This made me think of this website I saw: http://www.grundschulmaterial.de/content/elternmaterial I was wondering if anyone had experience with these materials, either the parent version or the teacher version? It looks like it could be promising, but could also get pretty costly, if you go through a lot of worksheets.
  19. Has anyone tried this with their kids in the four months since this came up? I'm interested in hearing how it went, if so. My son *loves* his "computer games", and thought it could be fun. But I'd like to hear if people thought it was worth the money first, maybe.
  20. I just really want to thank regentrude for all her posts on this thread! My parents put me in an English speaking (DoD) school after 4th grade (we'd moved out of the state where I was signed up for Gymnasium three days before school started, and they hadn't planned ahead very well!), and we moved to the USA when I was in 7th grade, so you've really helped me understand a lot more about the eduction system (and paradigm behind some of it) in Germany that was very unclear to me as a child! :)
  21. My kids are currently 3 and 1 and I'm planning on homeschooling them, but am undecided how to do it (lingually). DS3 is passively fluent in German, but defaults to English (his stronger language) when speaking. DS1 defaults to German, though I'm not sure how long that'll last. I was raised bilingually in Germany (with German my stronger language until age 10), but got pretty rusty not using it for 15 years until I had kids. I started speaking German with DS3 just after his sister was born a year ago, and I'm pretty pleased with his progress this past year. I'd really like to school (at least partially) in German, like I know some people on here do with their second languages, but reading some of the threads on here has me doubting myself. A good deal many threads have posts that seem to suggest that you shouldn't even try it if you don't have native fluency, which I'm not thinking I do, at this point. It doesn't help that there's *very* little German anywhere near us. As for our German input, I'm reading all I can, we listen to audio (books, recorded audio from movies, music, etc.) daily, and we read almost exclusively in German (which is sometimes a stretch on my translating skills when he hands me an English book from the library I've not had a chance to look at!!), and the occasional movie time is also German. DH doesn't speak a lick of German, though, so we usually switch to English when he's around. I've been in contact with German schools to obtain curricula and used textbooks, to at least start exploring the topic further, but am wondering if it's worth the effort, if people generally don't have success with this sort of thing. Any ideas/input/encouragement is welcome!
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