Post by Tatyana L on Sept 12, 2018 8:21:18 GMT 9
I’ve been meaning to start this thread for a few weeks now. I need accountability and I need to start having an obsessive focus on my kids’ ml again.
As background - we moved from a somewhat remote, homogeneous Midwest area into an urban, highly diverse environment 4 years ago. Some aspects have been good. My daughters attend a Spanish immersion program and are now trilingual. There are a lot of Russians around, so they see that this language has a purpose outside of just our little bubble. The younger child attended a Russian preschool for 3 years during which her Russian truly became her dominant language.
The older one grew up too. A language is a given to her, she treats its existence like air, instead of a time-consuming effort. She has other interests and other obsessions. She’s a swimmer. So we have done swim team for two years now. During spring and summer, it’s swim practice every weekday and races on weekends. Not much time left for meaningful input after that. And that’s just one sport. There is also gymnastics, dance and soccer. I don’t want them to forgo their passions and ML friends just for the sake of a language. On the other hand, nothing comes free and the cost of them having a normal American childhood is less time talking to their Russian mother.
Which brings us to this school year! The youngest did test Spanish proficient and did get into her sister’s school. I now have both of them at the same place and we get home almost an hour earlier on non-sports days. The youngest has decided that she wants to know how to read in Russian and the oldest said that she misses when we played “school”. And thus, the “Weekend School” was born. I’d love to do a homework routine every day like Adam, but my oldest has an hour of homework a day. The weekends will be our plan for now. I plan on reading stories and discussing them while providing related worksheet activities that are age appropriate for each of them. Youngest needs to learn how to read. Oldest needs more fluency in reading and increased vocabulary. I’ll work with both on writing, but honestly, I don’t know how much I care at this point. It’s been such a fight with writing that I might do just small elements of it, without too much focus on it. Plus we’ll do math. My plan is to expose them to whatever subject and topic fascinates them. Turns out they both love math. I figure if I can sneak in an occasional word problem between equations and number lines, that gives them a chance to read. 😀
That’s the plan. Wish me luck. My plans rarely work out as planned. First class is this weekend. I’ll report back how it went.
As background - we moved from a somewhat remote, homogeneous Midwest area into an urban, highly diverse environment 4 years ago. Some aspects have been good. My daughters attend a Spanish immersion program and are now trilingual. There are a lot of Russians around, so they see that this language has a purpose outside of just our little bubble. The younger child attended a Russian preschool for 3 years during which her Russian truly became her dominant language.
But there were bad aspects as well. The commute eats up a large portion of our day, leaving so little for ml exposure time. The Russian weekend school we tried for a year with the oldest was a disaster. They tried to teach the Russian Federation standard curriculum that focused more on rules and blind copying of text with little thought or explanation/expansion of vocabulary. For a school year we battled every single night over homework. She truly started to hate Russian. That’s when I pulled the plug. I’d rather her be a happy, grammatically incorrect bilingual than a monolingual who rejected her heritage language.
Then the problems started with the youngest nearing school age. The school the oldest goes to went back on its promise to allow siblings to attend. Because of the popularity of the program, the only reasonable way to ensure a fighting chance at admission was to apply as a Spanish/English bilingual which is a category that has less competition. Because of this, the youngest spent this past year at a Spanish immersion transitional kindergarten (it’s like a preschool for 4 year olds that is part of the public school system). Her Russian skills deteriorated to the point where she tries to speak as much English as I’ll let her get away with. Her afterschool was government run and therefore we were only allowed to pick the kids up during a 15-minute window that was much later than I would normally use. It limited the time we had together even more.
And then there is the second child problem that I didn’t realize would be so hard. I don’t have time for everything. Reading to one kid was easy. Reading to two is difficult when one wants their favorite repeated over and over and over again, and the other cries because she’s sick and tired of the same old story. But you don’t have time to do two sessions of reading because all there is time for in the evenings is dinner, cleanup and bedtime routine with one story.
Which brings us to this school year! The youngest did test Spanish proficient and did get into her sister’s school. I now have both of them at the same place and we get home almost an hour earlier on non-sports days. The youngest has decided that she wants to know how to read in Russian and the oldest said that she misses when we played “school”. And thus, the “Weekend School” was born. I’d love to do a homework routine every day like Adam, but my oldest has an hour of homework a day. The weekends will be our plan for now. I plan on reading stories and discussing them while providing related worksheet activities that are age appropriate for each of them. Youngest needs to learn how to read. Oldest needs more fluency in reading and increased vocabulary. I’ll work with both on writing, but honestly, I don’t know how much I care at this point. It’s been such a fight with writing that I might do just small elements of it, without too much focus on it. Plus we’ll do math. My plan is to expose them to whatever subject and topic fascinates them. Turns out they both love math. I figure if I can sneak in an occasional word problem between equations and number lines, that gives them a chance to read. 😀
That’s the plan. Wish me luck. My plans rarely work out as planned. First class is this weekend. I’ll report back how it went.
Keep going. Give time to your strategy. Rome wasn't built in a day... 
