I have a confession. I feel incredibly guilty that Tomas and I haven’t taught our kids French or Danish. We have so many friends who have done an amazing job of raising multi-ligual kids, and we just have excuse after excuse. My latest theory is that we each spoke our mother tongues with our families, but neither of us ever lived in our home lands.
This summer we spent a whopping five weeks in Europe, most of it in Denmark, but we did have a side trip to my Mom in Brittany (north western region of France, we have our own flag and everything… but that’s another post). Before we left, we went mad posting the names for things all over the house to familiarize the kids with the languages, but Tor (who is soon to be four!) messed with our grand plans by moving our post-its around (fridge became table, chairs turned into walls… you get the picture).
The good news is that we had fun with the language experiment, but what really helped, with Danish at least, was all the friends the kids made while in Denmark. In the beginning their new friends would struggle to communicate in English, which they all learned in school, but as the weeks went on I would hear the new friends teaching Danish to my three. It was awesome.
Are you a multi-ligual family? Any advice on how to re-boot our efforts over here so we don’t lose the progress that was made over the summer? I’d love to hear your tips!
Patricia says:
oh, don’t get me started on the whole bilingual thing… i’ve also failed to bring my girls up bilingual with spanish, but i still have hope. my excuse is that my husband doesn’t speak spanish and i don’t want to leave him out! a few things i’ve tried and need to do more consistently: always watch dvds in spanish if it’s an option. have “spanish day” once or twice a week when we eat spanish food, read spanish books, speak spanish, you get the idea. also listen to lots of music in spanish. i try not to be pushy because both of my girls have a clear preference for english since they understand it so much better, and i don’t want to turn them off to spanish by insisting even when they start to get upset because they can’t understand. by the way, i love the new look for little elephants!
September 1, 2009 — 12:29 pm
Veronique Christensen says:
Love these ideas! We do cook Danish and French meals, but mostly it’s because that’s what we grew up with, not in a conscious effort to expose the kids to our cultures. What’s funny is that Tomas and I do speak French — to each other — when we don’t want the kids to know what we’re talking about :-)
September 1, 2009 — 4:27 pm
Heedan says:
I love your idea of putting Post-Its around the house! Will is only three and I think our efforts at aiming to be multilingual could be subtitled “The Little Engine That Could, TBD”. From the time he was a baby I flashcarded, talked, put the DVDs and telenovelas on. But we live in an English language dominant world (including our own household) and at some point he will likely stop speaking anything else without some external real world context, support and community. That process of engagement is definitely an ongoing project…
September 1, 2009 — 4:31 pm