Practicar, practicar

Graphic: Google image search, from Greenburg-art.com

  
I still keep waiting for that memory click for Smarty Pants when it comes to speaking Spanish.  For the first 5 years of his life, Spanish is the only language he heard.  Sweet Thing heard it for 3.5 years and Drama Mama 2.5 years.  I'm not sure it will ever happen, although I think it will ultimately make (re) learning Spanish easier.

If there is one thing I regret in my parenting, it is that we did not keep them fully bilingual.  Once Smarty Pants started school and felt like speaking Spanish was a bad thing, it just became easier for us to slide into English only.

After living in Puerto Rico for nearly two years and only seeing a minimum improvement in their speaking skills, Papa and I are serious about buckling down.

Last weekends experiment was really rather successful. The kids were able to use more Spanish than I think they thought they were capable of! It gave them enough confidence to agree to continue on Sunday.  We've now decided that every weekend we are going to speak in Spanish only.

I even turned my FB page over...Spanish settings and all my posts/comments were in Spanish. 

Overall, it was a good change for the family.  Even Goofy Girl and La Loquita participated in it, limited as they were. 

We signed up all the older 3 for Duolingo and they've all been practicing.  123TeachMe has also been a good tool for us, but we needed something extra. 

I have a Spanish Word A Day email from Dictionary.com that I've gotten for years now.  So we are now adding 5 new words/verbs for the kids to write down and define.

We have taken this challenge seriously.  By the end of the year, I want all 5 kids to be speaking Spanish fluently. 

I want this to by one of my greatest parenting successes!