I have been ruminating on how to teach a foreign language to a 5.5 year old and 2.5 year old, simultaneously, and for free until I order curriculum for next year. I didn't want to have to buy anything right now, and since one of the children is non yet reading it needs to be oral. I did a lot of searching around the internet, and I either found that I will need a curriculum or I'll never do it right, or to just start speaking. Neither was working currently- while I am fully capable linguistically of interjecting French randomly it just didn't seem to be happening.
So! More planning. I think that this way I have a method that will work for me, and hopefully the children. Maybe someday it'll be my super best selling homeschool curriculum of my own... but I don't think so.
I spent time looking at most commonly used words by adults, preschoolers, and toddlers. Lists online abound. There is a lot of cross-over. I like this idea because I get a set number of words, with a sampling of nouns and verbs. It doesn't require reading or writing for my little one, but I can incorporate both for the elder- if I want. I'll also be doing a few verb tenses- mostly present, future, and one past tense.
That's the current plan. If anyone is interested- I can share links for word lists and whatnot.
So, I'm curious, did you travel to a French speaking country or how did you get so good at French? I had a terrible high school French teacher and even though I had 4 years of French-Je ne parle pas francais. Je ne comprends pas francais!
ReplyDeleteI think you have a good plan here for teaching French.
I went to France with a good friend in high school and her family- her extended family lives there. I spent the whole summer there. It really, really helped with both fluency and retention.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to start a french playgroup- to expose my kids to speaking with other kids- but there's not a big market up here for that. ;)
It's so funny you posted this, because I am thinking of taking a similar approach with Latin this time around. I tried to start EG on Latin classes and curriculum early, and while it wasn't horrible, I think it wasn't the best focus. So I'm thinking I'll take the vocabulary from Lively Latin and just teach the vocabulary over 1st & 2nd.
ReplyDeleteKash- I think that's really wise. And your write up on Latin helped validate for me why we aren't doing it right now- so thanks for that!
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