Serina from France

Welcome, Serina! I enjoyed learning about you and your family--you're certainly having a rich multilingual and multicultural journey! I expect we'll all be "poaching" from your experiences and ideas, too!

I completely empathize with the "enormous challenge" part. But as you demonstrate, the more efforts we make to support the minority language(s), the more our children's language development will grow over time. It sounds like your persistence is paying off well!

Also, I had to laugh when you said this, because I can identify...


In fact, I mentioned my own penchant for loud (sometimes inappropriate) laughter in this blog post...

19 Things I Haven't Told You About Me and My Family (You can also see a picture of me kissing a giraffe! Really!)

Serina, I look forward to your posts! Have a guffaw-filled day in France!

Hi Joanna,

Thank you for saying that, you are very kind. We live in a town called Saint Germain en Laye, 25 km as the crow flies west of Paris, in the department les Yvelines. When we had to decide where to move next (son was 12), we wanted a place where he could be in a bilingual, bicultural setting...one of the reasons being that he had to be supported by the environment for his continued learning (and free up more of my time for Mandarin, which is not quite where I want it to be yet). Another reason - 12 years of being the only daily resource for 2, sometimes 3, languages in off-the-beaten-track places was really tiring. So, here we are, and enjoying it very much!

I love that you are thinking of setting something up in English. The younger generation French seem really more open to other languages. I am sure you will rock it! Let me know if you pass by Paris, we can meet up and swap ideas in person.

BTW, we LOVE Canada; we have family in Vancouver, my daughter loves Quebec (primarily because it produces so much of the world's maple syrup), and my son sees himself living in Toronto!

Best,
Serina

Welcome Serina!

I loved your intro post, and what a challenge!

I might be your closest forum neighbour, we're in the Hauts-de-Seine, literally at the Paris city limits.
I guess you chose St Germain among others for the school? I checked it out but it wasn't an option for us (logistically in particular). My daughter will start at a bilingual school in Paris this fall.

Cheers, Mayken

Hi Adam,

Thanks so much for your compliments.   I wish I had a secret, but no. Just this overwhelming desire to pass our cultural heritages and languages down to our kids + determination + breaking the process up into many stackable modules + mega research + extreme planning + "fill in the blanks."

In essence, like every keeper here.

I don't homeschool in the traditional sense because we deliberately put our kids in the French Educational System up to high school for Alex, when we were outside France, to help us in our trilingualism goal, so a chunk of their daily hours were and still are taken up with formal schooling in French. The rest of the time is mine (evil laugh).

Proviso: I have the luxury of organizing my work so that I am there for the kids outside of their school hours, a luxury many parents don't have.

How have I incorporated projects into our learning? First of all, they have to correspond with the phase I am focusing on for them to be viable in my book i.e. the right project at the right time in the children's learning.  

I break every project into many little parts. Each little part would not take more than 60 minutes, nor fewer than 30 minutes of the child's time on an almost daily basis (we have Mandarin too). This is on top of the 10 min worksheets that they do daily (sound familiar?).

During those 30 minutes, I sit with them, guiding them (they get more independent as they become more used to the methodology). It could be reading up on Mars and its moons, for example, and discussing the differences between Mar's surface and Earth's surface. Anything related to the project, no restrictions. Questions/Doubts/All other items are written down by them under supervision, and put into a box if they cannot be addressed on the spot. When my daughter started projects, I would sit with her and work with her while her brother would work more independently by us. By that time, Alex didn't have worksheets anymore; he had essays to plan/write, all around interest areas or themes that seem to resonate with pre-teens and teens (He has been totally independent in his learning since 12, when he entered 9th grade). Also, I could direct their Internet searches when the kids used the Internet, if we didn't have the required material for example, and guide them in research methodology. Because the projects were based around their interests, most of the time they wanted to spend more than 30 minutes on them. Alex would use the entire hour by the time his sister started. 

Sunday is given to discussions about projects. We would take out all those questions/doubts/related topics and tackle them. The kids would decide if anything was worth an independent project, or would be better added to the current project, or would just be for general research and discussion. For every proposal they have, I might have a couple in the wings (or not).

Any heavy physical/time consuming work like sawing, sewing, hammering, construction etc are done on Sundays. If stuff is to be tested, it is done on Sunday. Otherwise it is done during school holidays if it requires more than a simple outing/whatever. If they have play dates or competitions to go to, or if we have family plans, we adapt accordingly. But I don't think we have ever spent more than 2 hours (except when we went on outings) on projects on Sunday - too many other fun things to do.  

What is critically important for me is that for the project to be effective and time efficient, the children themselves have to own it. If I thought the project thin or un-doable, I would throw out suggestions/alternatives. But that is it. I plan the logistics, but the children drive their own learning.

Paradox 1 - This uber planning has actually led to a lot of spontaneity in our family because the planning is mine, while the spontaneity belongs to the children. I plan for maximum efficiency and effectiveness in line with our family demands/activities/availability/constraints, so everyone is confident that what is to be done would be done within the timeframe accorded, and adjustments are easily made because I also plan for overruns. There is actually time freed up because interest + self driven tasks = much less time spent on procrastination and whinging. So projects tend to cover certain periods of time; Morgane's current project will probably take up to a year.

Paradox 2 - One would think that the more complicated the subject, the longer the time required. By the time the complicated subject comes along, the child would have already grown so much more mature in research methodology, themes and subthemes, reading/speed reading capabilities, comprehension etc that they actually work at a faster pace. And their French and other subjects benefit too.  Morgane's project is long only because she is learning how to read with more sophistication, for a massive creative writing project.

I had complaints and whinging with Mandarin, and much much less with English. I think it is because Mandarin is another beast altogether without any alphabet, and requires more rote learning and memorization.

I hope this answers your question...

Best, 
Serina

Serina, welcome to the zoo. You really inspired me with your description of how you "work" with the kids. It is really nice to have you on board with so many new ideas for older kids.

Adam, maybe it is a crazy idea but how about if you would replace the daily homework routine in, let's say the weekends, for such a projects?

Hi again Adam Beck, Reina,

I actually think Reina's idea an excellent one, and am convinced it can work for any child that has started to read independently. What is most important is probably to link the project theme to anything that impacts the children, eg from their Science/Sport/other subjects done that week in school. Or questions/things encountered from their week. I would ask, "what was interesting this week?/what did you learn that you wish you knew more about?" Heck, even what constitutes good citizenship and how it is incorporated into a country's pledge for example if there was bullying in school. Anything is fair game.

It can work because a) any work that needs to be done will actually be incremental because the children are already pre-exposed to it, that is, the process has already begun and you don't have to "re-invent the wheel" so to speak. b) any questions emanating from it mainly come from the children, so it follows their logic strains which go outward like stars from a nucleus, and makes sense to them c) the projects will tend to be self-driven, needing only some input on your part in supervising information collection and research, and eventually to writing.  

What the child probably needs to do, however, is to follow a loose framework that you will probably have set in place that will serve as a guide for all projects for example : preamble and scope - hypotheses (max 3) - why this happens - how this happens - observations/conclusion. He may or may not need all the bits of the framework, but having one that can loosely apply to all projects saves time because the child will be more focused and the project better contained. What else does he need to do? Come with questions for that day's research. There are sites (some on subscription) like Grolier Online / Webpath Express / National Geographic Kids / Usbourne / Cobblestone if one lacks physical material.

When my son did his volcano project, it was logical to find out why lava flows varied from one to the other, which led us to an appendix on Hawaii, and a second project on the Ngorongoro crater because it is isolated from the rest of the savanna and self-sustaining (safaris!), and even to a proposed third one on what one could see around/at Sipadan just because it was an underwater volcano which is weird (which eventually transformed to the Great Barrier Reef via corals and because we were going to Australia for hols); it was all logical to him. Sometimes he had 2 projects going on. Sometimes he dropped those on the planning board because something else seemed more important. It didn't matter because a) everything boosted his general knowledge (and mine) and b) he was thinking in and actively using his English. Just wish Mandarin was this easy...

So in essence starting a project on a weekend utilizing something that the child has already seen/learnt in school during the week actually can be a huge time saver because his interest level is still very high and his mind is all over the place triggered by x or y in his head. It may still sound ambitious, but it works with less effort on our part for greater impact on them - more on our end when the child is younger, but perhaps at this stage in your children's progress they are fluent enough to tackle basic research and old enough to own the process. They can sustain this interest by talking about it during the week, looking forward to the next installment.

I specialized in process optimization in another life, and as part of my work studied many processes with a view to minimizing waste and effort, aiming for that sweet 20-80 zone. (Japan is actually excellent in this: most of its industrial growth stemmed from the simple fact that they would take a fabulous idea, distill it down into its components, then aim for a just-in-time production line, eliminating waste and increasing efficiency). I am not saying I am looking at my kids as inventory parts, just saying that I want to get the maximum bang for my buck.  And if it works in the industry, it might work with our kids...

Happy Work-in-Progress! Serina