Toma una foto de...

...un carro

Like I said in my previous post, it has been a pretty good day for languages.

After tricking Ben into reading and writing English, with great success, I still had to come up with a plan to keep him from whining about how incredibly bored he was. (He had gone to see a friend down the street after he finished his writing, but his friend was out and so he came back and hung around us even grumpier than before...)

Dad gave him the camera and told him to go up to his room and take some pictures of his toys. He came back after half a minute with one photo of a teddy bear and two of a Beyblade stadium. And now I suddenly got the idea that I could use this game to practice Spanish words. I asked if he wanted to play and he agreed. 'Ok', I said,'go and take a picture of something...verde!' Ok, said he, and disappeared upstairs. A minute later he was back with a picture of a green part from a toy.



'Brilliant!', I said. After that I made him take pictures of something rojo, azul, amarillo, blanco, naranja, negro, marrón, gris and rosa, and he managed all of them on his own except marrón, when he needed a hint.
When we ran out of colours I made him take photos of a few things; leche, agua, lámpara,cama,carro,chaqueta and zapatos, which are words I knew he would know, plus a few new ones; hermano, hermana and papá.



Nic was paying close attention to all this and when Ben was done playing and had left the room he looked at me knowingly and said 'hey, you just made him practice Spanish and he doesn't even know. He just thinks it's a game!' ...'Can't you turn my homework into a game too, mum?' :) I told him I would another time.

Ben and Floppy

It's been a good day for languages at our house today. English first, and then Spanish (which I will have to come back to in the next post).

It got off to a very slow start though, with Ben refusing to read his 'Biff and Chip' book for school tomorrow. They use the Oxford Reading Tree literacy programme at their school and he is currently on stage 1+, or purple books as we like to call them. He'd already completed the green ones and the grey ones when all of a sudden he lost all interest in reading. :S His teacher wanted him to stop taking reading books home for the next 3-4 weeks, to give him a break, but I feel it's better if he takes at least one bok home each week so he doesn't forget what he already knows. I also hope that I will be able to trick, threaten and bribe him into reading a tiny bit. Better a page here and a sentence there than nothing at all, I think.

So, today I started out very optimistically by asking him if he would read to me. He made a face and told me 'No!'. I begged. He still refused. I offered him cake. He refused. I told him there would be no more video games or computers or tv until he read those 8 pages. He refused. I asked him why he didn't want to read. He said he hated reading because it was 'SO boring'. 'Is it boring because it takes such a long time to figure out what the words mean?', I asked. 'Yes.' Then I told him that the more he reads the easier it will become. He didn't seem convinced.



After breakfast I didn't really have time to bother with Ben's reading as I had my own reading to do, preparing for a pedagogy seminar (I'm working on my teaching qualification) tomorrow. Ole (aka Dad) sat down with Nic to help him with the rest of his homework. Ben ran around the living room bugging us, whining about being bored when I had an idea. I took him into the kitchen and found some of the fridge poetry words. We have some ready made ones, and a few I made myself with vocabulary from the ORT books on to help Ben recognise the most common words. I picked out some of the names and words he should know and made him try to read a simple sentence. I am Floppy. I could never find enough words to make a proper story so I ended up making a story about Floppy going to the park, having Ben read the odd word in between that I was able to find on the fridge. He really enjoyed that and made me repeat the story twice, helping me read the words.

I figured I might be able to take this one step further and took five of the word magnets back to the dining table where the others sat with Nic's school work. I wrote the story on a sheet of paper, except for the words on the magnets and put them in the appropriate places. Then we read the story together. Afterwards I asked him if he would like to write the words from the magnet on the paper, completing the sentences. He was very happy to try that, and did so in no time, working very diligently. Finally we read the story again and we were all very proud of his efforts, but none more than the author himself. And just like that Ben had spent the morning reading and writing!

Back to school II

Today it was finally time to move back to the good, old, new school :) Like I mentioned earlier the parents were not allowed in in the morning. We were forced to stand outside in the rain and listen to an inaudible speech for 15 minutes before the kids entered the buidling though. I won't whine to much about that. After all it was for the kids, and they were all really excited :D

At 2 p.m. we arrived at the school and wow, it was so different, and yet the halls, and most of the rooms were still the same, though they had changed colour from shades of green and off white, to various shades of light grey. The doors to the classrooms all had large windows in them now, and some of the classrooms had additional windows facing the halls as well, which lent a very airy and open feel to the place. The lighting was a bit bright though, and the lack of posters on the walls made it feel a wee bit like a hospital, or an insane asylum (not too far from reality... LOL).

Ben and Nic are both on the first floor and Christi is on the second. On the third floor there's the music room, the D&T/Art room and the new library, which is absolutely fabulous!



Ben's classroom is the traditional Y1t room , and it feels the same, though the ceiling is now considerably higher. They have also bought a whole bunch of new toys and a new computer too :)




The inside was very impressive, but the playground is not done yet, and it is a giant step down from the wide open spaces at Brøset. You win some, you lose some. Luckily there's a park across the street from the school so there should be lots of opportunity for playing anyway.

Spanish
No sign of the flash cards yet :P But a few small victories again to make up for that: Ben came home from school telling me that Simon (his best mate) had called him señorita (LOL) and also said 'that word that means good in Spanish'! I was very amused that though he couldn't remember the word he had understood it. I said 'oh, you mean bien?', and he said 'no, muybien' :) - Then later, when I went to tickle him he yelled 'no tocas!', which I'm also going to count as progress. :)

As for my own studies, I had another Skype date with Ana. We were going to discuss travelling but as I still found it very hard to say anything in the past tense she suggested we'd rather talk about a topic in the present. So we ended up telling each other about a typical day. She did better than me! I needed quite a lot of help, but on the bright side I learnt a lot tonight. :)Like how to say "llevo los niños en coche a la escuela" and new words like "deberes" and "sobrina" :) Iremos hablar otra vez jueves, sobre nuestros hobbies. Puedo aprender como hablar sobre el (la?) ukulele. :)

Mi español

This post is really not about the kids but rather about me,
and my attempts at learning Spanish. The flash cards still haven’t arrived and the second set I made for the kids sparked little if any enthusiasm. Quite frankly I worry that they’ve stopped caring. Did I push them too much? I hope not. I guess I just need to find some middle ground between my own obsession-like interest in learning and the kids’ nonchalant attitude to the idea.

Nevertheless I keep going with my own studies. Earlier I have mentioned using electronic flash cards, MosaLingua, on my iPhone. They have been, and continue to be invaluable in my language adventure, but if I have any hope of becoming fluent I need to immerse myself as much as is possible in my situation. Since August I have been a registered member of a language social network site called ‘The Mixxer’ (www.language-exchange.com) . The whole point of this site is to provide language learners with partners, in many cases native speakers if the language you’re studying, which you may write with, or even better talk to using Skype.

My first contact on the mixer was Ana from Spain. She used to live in Norway a few years back and was interested in learning Norwegian properly. (Believe it or not she never learnt Norwegian while living here because she was a student in an international environment and thus could get by using English. A very common story for many international students in Norway…)

From August on Ana and I would write short messages to each other, I in Spanish and she in Norwegian. We would correct each other’s messages before replying. I believe these messages has helped a lot in developing my Spanish in that I had to use what I had learnt, and not least that I had to expand both my vocabulary and my knowledge of grammar in order to communicate.

We had talked ever since late Summer about Skyping but we kept putting it off because other things got in the way, and also because we were both slightly trepidatious about actually talking. On Thursday we spoke for the first time, and I won’t lie, it was awkward and hard, but I’m sure it will do wonders for the progress of both our languages. What was the hardest for me was to remember simple words and also conjugations. These last few weeks I have finally started to be able to talk about things in the past and the future but the second I wanted to say something about stuff in the past I couldn’t remember a thing. It wasn’t just me though. She struggled too. I don’t want to sound mean, but I like that we seem to be on the same level language-wise.

This first time we only talked about how weird talking was, and how embarrassed we both were that we couldn’t remember things. We also agreed to talk again on Monday and we agreed on a topic. I suggested travel or holidays. I suppose I should be studying vocabulary relating to travel now. I don’t even know what the different countries are called in Spanish :P

Right now I’m making an effort to get more familiar with hearing Spanish by listening to the wonderful podcasts ‘News in slow Spanish’. I can actually understand a bit, and I try as hard as I can to not translate in my head but rather just understand. I don’t know if that makes any sense at all.

Back To School :)

The children all attend an international, English immersion school, normally located in the centre of town in a purpose built school building from the late 19th century. For the past year this building has been closed for refurbishment and the kids, and me, have had to trek across town to an interim school. Made up of barracks the school has been remarkably comfortable, though it lacks a gym and a room big enough for assemblies. In addition the drive is quite long, not to mention expensive.

However, this week, after 14 months of exile, they’re finally moving back!! Tomorrow will be the final day in the barracks and on Monday there’s a grand opening of the “new” school! I can’t wait to see what they’ve done to it.

To be continued...

The spelling test

I don't know whether giving my kids a spelling test on Spanish words is a good idea or not, but following my new plan to take into consideration how my kids say that they want to study that is exactly what I've done. As I mentioned in the previous post I made them a few flash cards the other day, and after having played with them for a couple of days both Christiania and Nicholas got a full score on their tests :-)

I will definitely make more flash cards, but I think I might try and plan better for the next batch. The thing I did after the flash cards was putting tags up all over the house naming different things. When we lived in England i 2005/2006 we let our house to an American family. When they moved out and we moved back in there were still Norwegian tags hanging all over the place :-) They had the Norwegian word on them and then under, in brackets, the pronunciation written phonetically in English. I don't feel the need to have a pronunciation guide on my Spanish tags because it's quite straight forward, and Norwegians only pronounce a few sounds different anyway, mainly 'o' and 'u', and once you've learnt that you're good to go.




The main challenge when making the tags are knowing which words are common in Spain and which are typical for Latin America. When I started out I was using the Pimsleur course, which to my knowledge was based on Mexican Spanish. I was fine with that because I'm not a huge fan of the Iberian lisp on the 'z' and some 'c's, but the more I read about Spanish the more I've come to appreciate that while there are few differences in general it might make more sense to try and learn the Iberian version as much as possible, as we live in Europe and will most likely only be able to practice what we've learnt visiting Spain. I don't think I've done too much damage so far. We do say 'jugo' instead of 'zumo' and 'banana' instead of 'plátano', though I have informed the kids that there are some differences, and we can always practice the Iberian words a little before going down there :) Now, back to the tags, I'll try not to keep ignoring Iberian Spanish when learning new words so I'm spending quite a lot of time trying to get the names of things right. Like 'living room'... Is it 'salón'? Sala de estar? Or simply 'sala'? And what is a bedroom? Habitación, dormitorio, quarto? For now I've gone with 'sala' and 'habitación' and I'm consoling myself with the fact that which ever word I choose the chances are we will be understood.

Flash cards

I mentioned earlier today that Nic had expressed a wish to have some proper flash cards made. I perused amazon and found a set of basic flash cards for kids to the laughable price of £0.22! Though to be fair they actually charged seven quid to send them over here... It was still a pretty good deal!


I of course do not possess the patience to wait for those to arrive to test the idea of using flash cards with Nic so I set to making some of my own this evening. My total lack of planning skills made it harder than expected to come up with sensible words to start with. I was going to go with some food vocab seeing as we have been meaning to get into the Spanish breakfast thing again but the ones we would get the most use out of are the same ones the kids already know. In the end the selection of words turned out slightly random but nevertheless all the children seemed thrilled by them. :)



I made 18 cards with nouns on them and the a few bigger ones with useful phrases. At first I tried using all of the small ones but they were too many for Nic to remember, so I selected 7 that were more or less related (mesa, silla, plato, vaso, queso, cama, libro), and we played with those for a bit. And then we added three of the phrases; 'tengo hambre','tengo sed' and 'estoy cansado'. We did this at bedtime and Nic was sure that latter one was made to trick him into actually being sleepy. LOL. Christiania came in and wanted to flip through them as well, and then I assured them that the promised spelling test would be given tomorrow. (What precious geeks they are!)

Ben doesn't read very well yet, and with no pictures the home made cards were not for him. Instead we played with the new Flip Cards App on my phone. With this app I can make my own sets of flash cards with pictures and/or text. I had made a set with the colours. He still remembered azul, rojo, naranja, blanco and verde, which impressed me no end, and he picked up rosa (same in Norwegian), gris (meaning 'pig' in Norwegian) and negro fairly quickly, but struggles a bit to remember púrpura, marrón and amarillo. I'm chuffed to fluffy fairy feathers that he can remember this much! He's a genius, surely :-)

A stroke of genius... or rather an obvious thought to some.

So, yesterday it suddenly dawned on me that in my pursuit of making my kids more interested in learning Spanish I might actually ask them how they would prefer to learn! What a novel idea, right? I can't believe I haven't thought of it before :-P

It turns out Christi would prefer spelling tests (!) and even more shockingly Nicholas liked that idea too. I guess their school does a good job of brainwashing them, because they have weekly spelling tests in school from Y2 and up. I was sceptical at first but after considering it for a bit it's not that different to flash cards, which work a treat for me. Nic said he'd also like real life flash cards that you can actually hold in your hand! LOL. He's so young that he believes the electronic ones on the phone came first. I will make some, and maybe in pairs so we can turn it into a memory game as well :-)

Our Spanish breakfasts are not off to a flying start... This was day two and I forgot both yesterday and today...



On the plus side we watched some Spanish Pocoyo yesterday. My kids, with the possible exception of Ben, are a bit old for Pocoyo but the simple language makes it very useful anyway and I quite like it myself. I was really pleased with myself when Pocoyo ran out of water and I commented "No hay agua" and the narrator said the same thing two seconds later :-D Small victory! And I know Ben was listening intently because he thought Lula was the word for dog. It is in fact the name of the dog but I was happy that he was actively trying to learn. And then we had the opportunity to practice the word 'perro' :)

Code switching robots

The boys were playing downstairs on New Year's Eve, waiting for midnight. Every once in a while they would pop upstairs to let me know what they were doing.

Nic: Vi va robota i fræmtida åsså kom det en komet mot jorda, men vi kun lag et force shield for å protecte oss så kometene bare bounca off. Men ætterpå va vi så sliten at vi hibernata i fire år.

(We were robots in the future and then there was a comet coming towards earth, but we were able to create a force shield so the comet just bonced off. But afterwards we were so tired that we hibernated for four years.)

My comment to this was simply "I'm glad you speak Norwegian so well." Tongue in cheek obviously ;-) To be honest I am impressed at how easily he fits the English words into the Norwegian grammar structure! The English verbs have all been conjugated according to Norwegian grammar. :-)

I forgot to ask the boys which language they were playing in but I guess it was English since retelling it in Norwegian proved such a struggle. LOL