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!

Two languages for a special needs child?

Can it be done??

For those of you who don't follow my other blog La Mama Loca I'll recap our family situation here.

We adopted 5 children after fostering them for several years.  Our daughter Goofy Girl was exposed to alcohol while in the womb.  We have at this time chosen not to have her formally diagnosed, but she presents all the signs of a child on the Fetal Alcohol Spectrum.  She looks perfectly normal on the outside, but on the inside, there are times there are 'holes' in her learning and understanding.

We have struggled with her learning to read/write in English and I'm always wondering how much we should teach her in Spanish.  One one hand, I think she would find learning to read and write so much easier in Spanish.  However, I know we live in a primarily English world, even here in PR, and our return to the States is likely.

I know she can speak both languages...she understands so much Spanish and definitely knows how to use it to fit her needs at the time, especially when it comes to Abuela and her love to feed her!

After much debate and prayer, we decided that we will do our best to teach her to read and write in Spanish...how much she picks up and uses will be debatable and English will be the one we push harder.  However, I never want to limit her abilities because of what *I* think she is capable of!

So it may be a challenge and I may want to scream, but I think it will be worth the effort!