“Nena, aquí es donde vas aprender inglés, pero con mami y papi vas a seguir hablando español, ¿okay?” (This is where you are going to learn English, but with mom and dad you’ll continue speaking Spanish, okay?)

“Mami y Papi español.” (Mom and Dad Spanish.)

“Si, en la casita de Sabrina hablamos español.” (Yes, at Sabrina’s home we speak Spanish.)

“Casita español, mami.” (Little house Spanish, mommy.)

I had a knot in my throat and my eyes were beginning to swell up with tears as I kissed my  2 1/2-year old’s forehead. This was her first day in an English immersion setting. From the day she was born her interactions with others (including daycare) occurred +90% of the time in Spanish. I knew that today and the weeks to come marked a new chapter in her life. I knew that it would likely change her. I knew that she would learn English at an extremely fast pace given the amount of exposure she would have — she was also going full-time to daycare for the first time. What I feared most was that our Spanish-speaking relationship would change.

On the bright side (luckily), we learned that her teacher took six years of Spanish through high school and college and that the assistant in the classroom was a heritage speaker of Spanish. Between the two of them they have (today is day 4 of school) openly tried to support our efforts in teaching Sabrina Spanish. So far the teachers have taught the other children in the class to say, hola or adios to Sabrina as she makes her entrance or exit from the class. When I pick her up from daycare she continues to speak to me in Spanish. Just the other day, she was telling her teacher “Es mi mami” and pointing to me.

Most importantly though and I cannot stress this enough, Sabrina is emotionally happy at her new school and, according to her teachers, she is very social and loves to talk to her peers in Spanish. Though I know speaking Spanish to her peers will change the longer she is at her new school, I hope that our well-established Spanish relationship will remain intact. Only time will tell…

To the readers, how has English-immersion schooling gone with your Spanish-speaking children? What are some of the strategies you use to maintain Spanish in your home after exposing your children to an English education?

{Photo by mrchrishill}

Photo by me

Last year, after my daughter Vanessa turned two, I enrolled her in a Parent’s Day Out (PDO) program at our local church. She goes once a week for 4 hours and seems to get a kick out of it. During orientation, we made sure her teachers were aware that, up to that point in her life, she had been exposed only to Spanish with very few exceptions here and there–we live in Colorado, after all. The first day of the program, again I reminded her teachers that although she probably would understand their instructions because of their simplicity, she only knew to communicate in Spanish. They told me not to worry, that everything would be fine. But like any “normal” mother, worry I did. A lot. I mean, I knew nothing bad would happen, but I wondered how in the world she would communicate her needs to her two teachers…

When I went to pick her up after that first day, I was relieved to find her smiling, wanting to tell me all about her day. I approached one of her teachers and asked how she had done. I was told she was an angel, but a very quiet angel. “She didn’t say a word,” Ms. P told me. I was fine with that because I knew from her demeanor that she’d had a good day. However, I wished her teachers spoke Spanish so they could be as amazed as I was at her extensive vocabulary–in Spanish. At 25 months, Vanessa said a lot more words–and I mean a lot–than most kids her age. In the end, I guess I just continued worrying about her ability to be understood.

As time went by, I noticed that she had picked up a few phrases in English–even though she only attends the PDO program four hours a week. She’d come home and say things like “he ya go,” “am soyee” and “am okay.” The crazy thing was that she would say these phrases at the appropriate times. When handing me a toy, throwing her cup or after tripping and almost falling, for example. My husband and I found it amusing, but more than anything, amazing to realize that she understood the actual meaning of each phrase. My worries about her abilities to communicate with her teachers started to dissipate, albeit just a bit. On occasion, I would still ask her teachers how she was getting along in respect to the language and they would say: “She doesn’t say much, but she seems to understand everything we tell her.”

Photo by sknaB noIA

So on we went, until one day recently, a crazy thing happened. A crazy thing–that I still can’t believe–happened! Check it out:

It was kind of late–which translates to: I was very tired–and we were finishing having dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant. Vanessa was sitting in her high chair playing with some fortune cookies, minding her own business. My husband paid the bill and for some unknown reason gave me the pen the waitress had brought for him to sign the check. Without really thinking too much about it, I said to him: “That’s not mine.” In English. Just like that. Vanessa looked at me and said: “Mami, ¿eso no e tuyo“? To which I responded, completely oblivious to what had just happened: “No, Vane, eso no es mio.” Immediately after both my husband’s and my jaw dropped to the floor. What had just happened? Had she translated my sentence word-by-word? Yes, she had!

When did she start doing this? How did this happen? How did she know? Who told her? So many questions, none of which could be answered. Maybe it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but to us, it was a HUGE deal. For us, it meant that Vanessa is really on her way to being bilingual, that she gets it and maybe it also means that we’ve been doing the right thing! It’s nice to get some reassurance once in a while, don’t you think?

I still smile when I think about it! I’m sure she probably thought I was crazy to make such a big deal out of it, but I believe in celebrating her each and every chance I get

Have your kids done things like this that make you feel you’re right on track? Do you have a story of a small triumph like this one you can share with the rest of us?

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Photo by creo que soy yo

Why is it that even though you’ve read tons of books and sites on the subject, and have freakishly asked all your friends-who already went through it-for advice and have been reassured that it’s totally normal, you still panic when it starts happening to you? OK, here’s the issue: my daughter, Camila, started going to daycare last November for two days a week. She was 15 months at the time. Until then, her primary source of language-learning was at home with Mamá and Papá, both native Spanish speakers, using the mL@H (Minority Language at Home) method – not because someone told us to, just because that’s what comes natural to us.

The point is that at 15 months, Camila started spitting out words like crazy, exactly at the same time she started daycare. And with this came our worries that being exposed to English just when she was starting to learn Spanish, would confuse her to the point that my husband’s nightmares would become a reality. You see, ever since she was born, he has nightmares where his daughter asks him to take her for a ride in his troka to the marketa. So you can imagine how important an issue her acquisition and fluency of both Spanish and English is in our home. We don’t want her to just understand Spanish and speak back to us in English; we want her to be able to communicate with her grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in Mexico and El Salvador in their language. We don’t want her to feel embarrassed because she speaks Spanish but speaks it differently. Anyway, it’s just sort of a turn off for us even though we completely understand how it can easily happen and don’t judge it in that way.

The Más/More Challenge

The three amazing ladies that take care of Camila, speak Spanish to her per my request. However, she spends the day surrounded by English-speaking toddlers and, I’m sad to say, she prefers to learn from them than from her Mamá. I had no idea peer-influence started at such an early age!

Photo by Gaetan Lee

I was so excited she finally started saying “más¨ when she wanted something (um…all the time!). Then, one day, ¨más¨ started sounding like ¨mooo.¨ And that’s all we would hear (yes, all the time!): ¨MOOOO.¨ That’s when it hit us that our bilingual journey had truly started. She was learning ¨more¨ at daycare and ¨más¨ at home. She knew that both meant the same thing, but she was confused as to which one to use. So it started sounding something like: ¨moo…má!¨. Hilarious. Then I started panicking thinking that we were confusing her. That’s when all that research and advice went momentarily flying out the window.

Photo by clspeace

I’m happy to report that, three months later, she still uses both words, but already figured out that at home it’s ¨más¨ and at daycare it’s ¨more.¨ I still need to keep reminding myself that even if she does seem confused, it’s all part of the process of her sorting out both languages and that she is fully, innately capable of doing it on her own.

Have you had moments of doubt in your bilingual journey? How did you handle them?