Carro grande, carro pequeño :)

So how are we doing with our three languages?



This summer we spent 10 days in the UK. I was hoping the children would find opportunities to practice their English while we were there but as they always had their sibling to rely on there wasn’t much need for it. I’m not fussed about that because I know that they do have ample opportunity to use the language at school and with me. I do think it was a special experience for Ben who expressed surprise on discovering that “everyone in England speaks English!” LOL

In my last post I wrote quite a bit about our plans for learning Spanish. Over summer it became a bit difficult to keep up to be honest. The books I got them stayed unread on the shelf as both Ben and Nic felt it took too long to read them in both English and Spanish, and reading them just in Spanish meant they wouldn’t understand anything. The few words we did practice, usually at breakfast, did stick though. Ben came home from school the other day and proudly told me that he had told the kids in his class what agua means. :-) I asked him how it came up and he told me that he’d said he was “going to drink some agua”. Code switching already! Normally code switching could pose a problem but right here it just shows me that; a) he retains the Spanish he’s learnt and, b) he’s proud to show off his language skills, which to me are signs that he is ready to learn more.

Ben’s little story prompted Nic to start a spontaneous game of carro grande, carro pequeño on the ride home, sorting all the passing cars into big cars or small cars, thereby showing the same signs I see in Ben. When we came home there was a digger outside our house and because we didn’t know what it was called we had to look it up so we could sort it together with the cars. It turns out it was an excavadora. And just like that we had all learnt a new word!


This experience made me decide to make more of an effort with the Spanish again, and I’ve been spending the last few days looking for more resources. After hearing so much about Speekee I decided to sign up for the 2 week trial yesterday. I watched it first and didn’t really like it. I don’t like the way Speekee looks, I think the production looks annoyingly cheap and I sort of hate the singing. BUT, and as you can tell it is a bit but, I didn’t want to discard it without letting a representative of the target audience review it first, so I asked Ben (5) if he would mind watching it. He did and he LOVED it! :-) He has asked me two or three times since yesterday if he could watch it again, so I guess the people behind the show know their audience.

I’m also very lucky in that I have made a friend online who has been so kind as to provide me with some everyday expressions I can use with the kids. I plan to keep up with my initial idea of doing Spanish at breakfast and while we, before summer, were only throwing in the odd word like leche or jugo, I’m now asking them in Spanish what they would like to eat. They don’t have to answer back in Spanish though they do when they know the words. If I say quieres leche o jugo? they’ll answer with leche or jugo, but if I say que quieres para desayunar they might just answer ‘the same as yesterday’. Nic is normally the one who will try the hardest to answer back in whatever language I throw at him. He’ll go tostada…with Nugatti!








In addition to the Spanish we do at home Christi is now going to Spanish Club at school for one lesson a week. It’s not much but I think it’s still good practice for next year. She has also told me that the teacher only speaks Spanish to them, which I think is terrific. So far they have covered talking a bit about themselves, the colours and Spain. Last weekend one of Christi’s friends came hiking with us. She is in middle school and has to decide whether to study Spanish, French or German. Christi spent most of the trip teaching her friend Spanish words and phrases, like me llamo … and soy de Noruega. Needless to say this was good practice for both Christi and her friend.

Ok, I could ramble on forever about all this but I might save some for the next post.

Hasta pronto :-)