Cleo, a question -

[cathmom]

Can you give me a rough idea of how you started bilingual homeschooling with your dc? When did you start introducing English? If you have posted this before, please feel free to link it, but I don't remember seeing your story before.

 

Merci beaucoup!

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

I posted this in bits and pieces all over the place. I don't mind trying to come up with an 'official' story here :)

 

First of all, here's my family situation. We're French speakers, in a French city, in a French province, in a mostly English country. *But* we happen to live in the English part of town, and we use to spend winters in Florida.

 

We debated going OPOL with the kids, but decided against it. My husband's French is very very local, and his English isn't that great. So we stayed with French. At age 5, we sent our son to Cubs in English, because it was available to us. We have it in French or in English - which is great. Ds had been exposed to English before in Florida, and had a very small vocabulary. He cried all the first year, but managed much better the second year. That was an hour a week. At the same time, he was in Singapore Math. I would read each word problem in English, then translate it to French pointing out recurring words. I don't remember reading in English with him, but I know I did with my daughter. If the book was in English, I would read in English, if the book was in French, I would read in French. First time through an English book was a word by word translation, then a sentence by sentence, then just the general idea. With my daughter we used Five in a Row, and the repetitive nature of it really helped.

 

When my son was 8 we joined the local pool, which was almost entirely English, but with most kids who could understand French. The kids were having bilingual conversations, each speaking his or her own language, and the lifeguards acting as translators when needed :lol:

 

We also added more activities in English. Well, technically those are bilingual, but since we're in the English part of town, that was the dominant language.

 

So did *I* teach my kids English? Not really. I facilitated the learning, I was there to help out when needed, but mostly, I just threw them in the water. Both became fluent at about 10 yo, not before.

 

Had we not lived in a mostly English neighbourhood, we would still have worked hard at bilingualism. It's that important to us. I would have tried something else, I'm sure.

 

Oh, and when in Florida, there was a lot of TV watching. Since the kids couldn't choose French TV, they had to go with English, or bypass TV altogether. So they watched up to 2 hours of English tv every evening, after a day at the beach.

Edited December 2, 2010 by CleoQc

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

I forgot to mention. We had a lot of reading in English. A LOT.

 

My kids have been doing Sonlight for 3 years now. For my son it was relatively easy, he was already almost fluent. For my daughter, I kept on translating everything. In fact, I only got the read-aloud books for her from core 1+2. She was incapable of reading on her own, at least in English. That had to wait for an extra year.

[cathmom]

Thank you for writing it out for me! :001_smile: