Lana Privitera is the proud Mom of a fun-loving, bilingual "chatterboy" that likes to spice his speeches in English with long-winded Spanish words. Her goal for 2008 is to pack also some French and Italian in his very expandable 3.5 year old brain.
Lana still qualifies as a SAHM but uses her "spare" time working as a watercolor artist and Spanish/art teacher.
One apple a day keeps the doctor away…and one word a day in a non-local language will
help to make your child multilingual.
I just started exposing my son, Nickey, to his third language. I was lucky to find the
adorable “Trotro, l’ane” on YouTube and that jumpstarted our French adventure.
Originally I had planned to introduce French after he had mastered Spanish but then I
realized that there was no need to wait.
One word a day is all it takes.
When I started teaching him Spanish he was already 21 months old and speaking in
sentences in English. I introduced a new Spanish word every morning and I would use it
repeatedly throughout the day. (ie: “Nickey, please, sientate. Sit down, Nickey.
Sientate.“) In a couple days that word was etched in his brain and it had equal meaning
to the English equivalent. I could then add more Spanish words to the sentence. (ie:
“Please, sientate. Nickey, sientate, por favor”)
I had heard of children rejecting the new language when parents switched suddenly so I
went quite slowly at first.
It really worked for us. For my son “red” and “rojo” mean the same thing today. No
translating in his head. He’s 3.5 now and his Spanish vocabulary is almost par with his
English.
Tip of the day:
Check out these websites on Multilingualism. You’ll learn about all the wonderful pros and
the very few and lame cons in this matter.
http://www.multilingualchildren.org/index.html
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/multilingualmunchkin/?yguid=228980480