2 Spaniards raising Eng-Spa bilingual children in Spain

Parents here don't correct as much as I do. I think that having 2 languages makes you pay more attention to them, especially when the one you're speaking isn't your first language. My daughter makes lots of these irregularities mistakes, but I know all kids make them, so I'm okay with them.

Today, I was very happy when she finally said "here it is" correctly -finally!!- instead of her usual "here is it". I pointed it out and told her I was very happy she said it right. She was very proud.

They take turns being the teacher's helper, and yesterday was my daughter's turn, so she brought home a list with her classmates' names. There were some she didn't know, so I suggested we read them. We used what we learned from our English reading lesson, that is, blending sounds, and the sounds she already knows in Spanish, and she did well at guessing the names she didn't remember. I was so excited! I had mentioned to her teacher that we would start taking this English reading lesson and she disregarded it, like what we did in English had nothing to do with school, but I told her it would also help her in Spanish, and it is!!

She's a wonderful teacher, don't get me wrong, but she isn't used to dealing with this kind of bilingualism, just children coming from other countries who have never heard a word of Spanish before. When my daughter started school at age 3, she suggested we switch to OPOL; she was concerned my daughter would need extra help when primary school started if we didn't. She was looking out for my daughter, and I love this about her. I told her we wouldn't at the moment, but that I valued her opinion and would keep it in mind. As I expected, my daughter's Spanish improved very quickly from that moment on, so we didn't need to make any changes.

My guess, with the reading bit, is she didn't know that this kind of knowledge, like blending sounds, is transferred from one language to another (you learn it in one, but can do it in both), so what we do in English affects Spanish, which is what they're working on at school.

Anyway, I'm very happy with my daughter's progress, even though we just started, and I told her she would get something special for her hard work when we finished each lesson. For the first one, it'll be all the books I ordered.

My son keeps learning new words, it's so much fun! His newest one is turtle, from "A taste of the moon". In the book it says "tortoise", but we say "turtle" at home and my daughter hates it if I fail to change it to "turtle" and corrects me.

The Reading Lesson: Teach Your Child to Read in 20 Easy Lessons, by Michael Levin and Charan Langton.

I recommend reading the introduction to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons first plus lesson one. It's boring for children but it explains how to do it much better to parents.

Let us know how it goes!

Oh, and muchas de nada, haha (= you're very welcome)

I wouldn't know how to do it either, as I learned how to spell every single word when learning the word itself. I've heard that when a word is consonant+vowel+consonant+e, the vowel in between the consonants is a long vowel. My guess is "give" is an exception to this rule. But I don't really know.

I think what this book does is use a different symbol for each sound, so that, for instance, there's a (alligator), å (ball) and â (acorn).From these funny looking words, they move to regular letters and words, when the child already recognizes the words and is used to these letters having different sounds. I got this book because the reviews were very good. They were for the 100 lessons too, but people said it was boring for the child, although it explains what the parent needs to do at the beginning very well. I got both, but you only need the introduction to the 100 lessons plus the first lesson, IMO.

You can download the introduction and first two lessons to The Reading Lesson from this webpage.

A few things about this week:

- 49 hours in English this week, so I'm very happy with our English exposure. It makes all the difference when our weekends aren't full of birthday parties and stuff.
- My son keeps learning new words: truck, turtle, elephant... Some in Spanish too.
- We finished the first lesson in our reading book. I gave my daughter the books I had bought for her and we wrote the date on a progress chart. We'll start lesson 2 tonight!
- Both my children were waking up a while before the time they need to, so bedtime has been postponed by about a half hour, which gives us the extra time we needed for English homework with my daughter and it also means more playtime in the ml for my son. But I think sleep time is paramount, and if I need to wake them up every day, they'll start going to bed earlier until we find the right bedtime.

Adam, that's a good point. I tend to agree, but I'd rather have both. I like knowing the rules too, so that, when in doubt, I know what's right and what's wrong. But this can come with time; I don't expect little children to learn rules either.

Raquel, I agree, explanation has its place. In my experience as a teacher, this is generally with older children and adults.

Whenever language questions arise, I flash on an older Chinese teen that I once taught in a TOEFL class, many years ago, in San Francisco. Every day she posed a difficult question about grammar that I had to painstakingly research that night. It was quite a challenge, but also a good learning experience for me, too.

Thanks Raquel!

Raquel, Adam, 
Thank you so much for your comments, they comforted me. I feel a bit overwhelmed by the task. I had planned to wait for ML school to take the lead in teaching reading, but seeing my daughter's interest, I feel that I should seize the opportunity and start with teaching in ml2.

Maybe I shouldn't feel so overwhelmed, and take it at a more basic level, not getting into the detail of rules. I worry too much about details.

My eldest daughter's reading interest has been prompted with some captive reading I've been putting up on our loo's wall. So much so she has started trying to read a couple of beginner reader books we have.  So I just ordered an Oxford Tree beginner readers' collection (similar to what Adam was suggesting) which includes a booklet for the parents.

Let's see how it goes!

This is a very good point. I think the most important task we need to do is spark the child's interest in the language and the books. It's just like a hobby or a job you really like, you know you don't have the skills yet but you become an expert sooner or later because you love it and spend a lot of time on it?!

Raquel, in our case, I think early captive reading also had a positive influence on their reading development because my "policy" was not to add illustrations to any of the words/sentences/texts/stories I would post in the bathroom (and put into notes for their lunches at preschool). This means they could only look at the words.

Whenever you like (and this offer stands for all keepers of this community), feel free to email me for a "secret code" to download my set of 30 captive reading stories for early readers of English at no cost. My email address can be found on this page of my blog.