New here, would love advice (warning, long post!)

[enviromommy]

Hi, I'm Jennifer, and I'll be homsechooling starting next year. I have DD (10), DS (8), DS(5), and DS (2.5), and expecting another BOY in July.

 

French is not my native language, but I speak it without an accent. It is very comfortable for me, but not as comfortable as English. I majored in French, spent my Junior year in Paris, worked in Paris as a translator, did a double degree law school program between the U.S. and France, took the bar exam in France, and worked in a law firm in France for 3 years. My DD lived there from the age of 6 months to 3 1/2, and my first DS was born there and lived there till the age of 18 months. Unfortunately, although I made a new resolution with each kid, I never ended up speaking French to them, and now I deeply regret it. Although it's not quite as relaxing for me as speaking English, I could speak entirely in French with them and they would be hearing unaccented, almost completely error-free French. (I would be missing some of the "baby" word euphemisms I never learned, but that's probably not a big deal.) So why didn't I do this????

 

DH speaks some French and can read pretty fluently, but does NOT speak well, in terms of either accent or grammar.

 

So.. now I have my (I think) last baby coming, and I'm bringing everyone home to homeschool at the end of the year (only 9 more weeks, yay!) (I am not working as a lawyer now, but I teach one section of eighth grade French at the school my kids currently attend.) I'm really determined to speak French to the new baby, and to get the rest of the kids up to speed, but I'm not sure what the right way is to go about it. They know very little French at this point. I thought for the sake of simplicity and cost-savings that for my two oldest I should just use the curriculum the school uses for 8th grade French. I could xerox all the extra resources at school and have access to a complete program, free of charge, for my kids. (The school uses "Allez, viens!", which I don't adore but which will suffice.) How do I work in the two younger kids? Should I just switch to French and let everyone flounder for a while until they catch on? I don't want to make them hate it. We sing a lot of French children's songs, which they enjoy but don't understand at all! When I try to read French children's books to them, they want me to translate and then they end up demanding that I JUST translate, skipping the French altogether. I tried having a "French hour" between bath and bed, and that fell apart. So now the kids know some terms I use during bath, (sit down, stand up, give me your arm, give me your foot...) but that's it.

 

I would REALLY love to get them caught up in French enough to do CNED for French (I saw at least one person does this?) but that seems like a really distant possibility. We may be able to do a sabbatical year in France at some point, but not for a while.

 

Any suggestions? Thanks so much for reading if you got this far!!

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

French is not my native language, but I speak it without an accent. It is very comfortable for me, but not as comfortable as English.

DH speaks some French and can read pretty fluently, but does NOT speak well, in terms of either accent or grammar.

 

Hey, you're my mirror image! Although I do speak English with an accent. It's not terribly pronounced, but enough to out me, for sure.

DH also speaks English and reads it fluently, but does not speak it well

 

So welcome aboard!

 

I would REALLY love to get them caught up in French enough to do CNED for French (I saw at least one person does this?) but that seems like a really distant possibility. We may be able to do a sabbatical year in France at some point, but not for a while.

 

Any suggestions? Thanks so much for reading if you got this far!!

 

That would be me, for CNED. I saw the other day that CNED has a program to ease in children who don't speak French. Their website is so bad that I can't find it anymore.

 

Anyway, we did NOT speak English to the kids from the start. I introduced each child at age 5 by starting to read aloud English books to them. They whined, and hated it, but eventually they started to like it. Daddy was reading in French, but if they wanted Mommy to read, it had to be in English. Somehow, they accepted that more easily than when I attempted to address them in English. However, my situation differs from yours, since we had access to English immersion. I live in a part of town where almost everyone is bilingual. So scouts had two sections, English and French, and each section had about kids from each language. It was easy to provide immersion. Also, we used to spend our winters in Florida, where further partial immersion was possible.

 

Good luck to you! And welcome aboard!

[enviromommy]

Wow, CNED for children who don't speak French yet... that'd be amazing. I'll go dig around on their website...

[anabelneri]

Wow, CNED for children who don't speak French yet... that'd be amazing. I'll go dig around on their website...

 

Please post the link if you find it!

 

 

 

There are some great resources out there to help with language learning. Your 2.5yo will certainly catch on pretty quickly, and with the older kids it'll be a lot about getting them on board somehow. But there are a lot of fun things to do to learn French.

 

1) Muzzy. This is what jump-started our learning. It'll be really dull for your older kids, but it's really useful to watch it multiple times and listen to the CD in the car. We checked it out from the library. With the older kids it'll work best to use the subtitles, at first in English so they can read what's going on, and eventually in French so they can see the French text.

 

2) Other educational movies. There are a bunch of French-language-learning movies, like Bonjour Les Amis! and even the Standard Deviants DVDs for your older kids.

 

3) Other movies. Lots of kids movies have French dubbing. It'll be a while before they're ready for the whole of "Finding Nemo" in French, but it's fun to try and pick out as many words as possible in 10 minutes of film. I've also been know to let dd watch movies in French that I won't let her see in English (movies with any of the Disney Princesses, for example)

 

4) CDs. I have a bunch of CDs in French that we rotate through in the car. We basically only have French CDs in the car, both kids' music and adult music. The most useful for language learning have been Lyric Language and Baby's First Steps in French. Lyric Language is one of those CDs where you have to push through your gag reflex, but it's worth it. Everything is sung in both English and French, so as you learn the songs you learn what they mean. Very, very handy. Skip the video, though; it's useless. Baby's First Steps in French has been fabulous for improving accents in our house. It'll also help with some of the nursery rhymes and baby talk that you'll want to do with your baby.

 

5) Consciously learning lyrics. This was something we've done at random, but it's probably one of the best things we've done. We'll pick a song and "learn it", which means that we'll work on memorizing it as well as learn what things mean. At first we did fingerplays so that I could do them with my infant, but we've also learned nonsense style rhymes and traditional songs. Doing that really improved my older daughter's enjoyment of the music we were listening to in the car. Mama Lisa is useful for lyrics and describing hand motions, and sometimes it'll have clips of someone singing the songs. Our favorites have been "Frappe frappe petite main", "Une souris verte", and "Au clair de la lune"... the first was great for the baby, the second because it was silly, and the third because it's on just about every children's French CD we have.

 

6) Books books books. We happen to have an excellent used bookstore nearby, and I've scooped up just about every board book in French that has come through there. We have at least 20 board books in French, and for a long time those were the only board books out to read to the baby. We have read them over and over again, and it's been good for both of my girls. As my older daughter becomes more comfortable, we're slowly increasing the complexity of the books.

 

7) Cooking/eating in French. A friend who speaks French made crepes with a bunch of kids one day, and the kids had a blast and learned a lot of French! We'll also go through the grocery store and try to label everything we can in French. I used to use the Montessori "three period lesson" to teach the names of things (1. tell the name of the item; 2. ask child to point to item; 3. ask child what the item is called; never "stump" the child but help them be successful).

 

8) Games in French. I'm still working on this one, but now and then we'll do a math game in French.

 

9) Time. Give it time. When we started learning French 3 years ago, I didn't speak any French at all. But somehow, doing all the things I've listed above, we've gotten to a pretty good place where my older dd can carry on short conversations and my younger dd babbles in French. It just takes time. And you're a leg up on me, since you speak French already.

 

Hopefully something will help!

:)

[enviromommy]

Thank you so much, those are fabulous suggestions. I'm going to print it out and start gathering materials. Can I just say I can't WAIT for school to get out? I asked the kids if they wanted to "deschool' for a while, have a summer vacation and start homeschool in the fall, and my 8 yr old DS said, "Nah, let's get started right away, I'm excited to see what it will be like." Yay!

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

Wow, CNED for children who don't speak French yet... that'd be amazing. I'll go dig around on their website...

 

I found this link

http://www.campus-electronique.fr/TestFle/

but I"m not sure if it applies to children, or teens, or adults

 

Ah, based on this page

http://www.cned.fr/di/8FLESDIX09-N.pdf

it's for 16 and up. So maybe there's nothing for children. Just for high school

Edited April 9, 2010 by CleoQc

[anabelneri]

Oh, but that will be helpful for me! Maybe it'll be modifiable for use with children.

 

 

 

Oh, I didn't mention this in the above post, but for the OP, I've also used Tell Me More, Rosetta Stone, and the Learnables. Oh, and I have First Start French.

 

Tell Me More didn't work well with my daughter; it's geared to an older audience. I'd bet that your older kids would be Ok with it. I've had access to it from our library for free; check yours to see if you can try it/use it that way. But for me it was fun, with puzzles and stories (it just wasn't interesting to a kindergartener).

 

Rosetta Stone is an interesting way to get exposure, but it gets old after a while. I found the speaking section to be very useful, but for me, not my daughter. Again, your older kids might find it useful. But like Tell Me More, it's a fun way to start in on learning French just because it's on the computer with colorful pictures.

 

The Learnables has been my daughter's favorite program. Much of it is in story form, and it focuses on life rather than travel. Dd really liked that it had stories which kept her interest, as opposed to Rosetta Stone which had just random pictures. Some people don't like the Learnables because it's just black and white pictures in a book (only the very first section is on the computer). But when we get it out, we have a lovely time because both my 1st grader and toddler enjoy piling into my lap to look at the pictures.

 

First Start French is nice, but my 1st grader doesn't like it. It's written for children 3rd grade and up, so that's not really a critique of the program. It's very bookish but useful in terms of introducing vocabulary and some parts of French culture in an organized fashion. And the price is good.

 

Oh, and Alex and Zoe was good too. We only used that briefly, but dd enjoyed it (despite being written for an older age group). If I wanted a book-program to supplement an immersion experience, I'd probably go with Alex and Zoe. For us it's too much to add to the Learnables which supplies our immersion experience. Schoenhof has Alex and Zoe.

 

Schoenhof actually also has "Il etait une petite grenouille" which is by the same publisher as Alex and Zoe, but for younger kids. It's story based, and really really cute, but the Teacher's Guide is entirely in French which made it useless for me. Maybe it would be useful for you though. It's really quite lovely.

 

Ok, I think that actually exhausts my French language learning resources. Or not. I'll have to see if anything else comes to mind.

 

Oh, and if you don't have a good source of French children's books but don't want to buy a whole bunch, Les Petit Livres is like Netflicks for children's French books.

 

:)