Summer is so fun! We are always having picnics, being outside, playing in the pool or at the beach. But it makes Spanish harder for us! As we get together with friends, everything turns English. I am fine with this and love for my kids to make good friends, but that means I need to work harder at the Spanish.
This week we are trying speaking Spanish every day! We speak it mostly at home, because I forget when we are in public and out with friends is difficult. I thought this would be hard, but it hasn't been bad.
If you speak with your kids, do you demand that they speak back in Spanish. Lately I am mostly speaking in Spanish and they are mostly speaking in English. I try to remind my oldest, but it takes a lot more work for my middle daughter to come up with the words in Spanish.
Any suggestions? How do you keep up speaking Spanish in the summer?
Writing Classes on Skype
11 years ago
3 comments:
Ha! I am fortunate that my wife is from Spain, so during the summer I send her and our two children 'home to Spain' for two to three months in the summer. That is how our children have become bilingual, but that doesn't help me or the rest of us who are still stuck in an English speaking country. I find it helps if I attend Church services in Spanish or read books or the scriptures in Spanish (many times they make more sense in Spanish than English!). My daughter is now grown and is serving a mission for our Church in Argentina. I maintain a blog for her and I translate her letters from English to Spanish so that her family in Spain (or anyone else interested) can enjoy reading them in Spanish. I have also volunteered down at the Police Department and help them translate from Spanish to English when needed. That volunteer work has proved interesting at times.
We homeschool so in many ways summer is not that different for us...We just keep up the usual: If they respond in English I give a quick "español por favor" and that is usually enough. If not I'll remind them how important it is that we practice our Spanish lest we forget and remind them that we have so many chances to practice English and so few to practice Spanish that we have to take advantage of them all.
good luck
I haven't run into this problem yet, but I plan on insisting on Spanish so that they don't become passive bilinguals. It is easy to say that now though. Maybe things will change when I am actually faced with the situation.
Post a Comment