As a multicultural and biracial familia, I was pretty clear about wanting to raise a bilingual child. Ah yes! It would be simple! I would speak to our child in Spanish and my husband would speak to him in English. Sound familiar? Yes, we were going to use the OPOL (One Parent One Language) method. However, things are not always as easy as they seem, right? You see, I had the desire but not a plan. I fell into the comfort of just speaking to our baby in English from the day he was born. After all, everyone spoke in English too!

During our son’s 4-year-old annual check-up, his pediatrician excitedly asked, “Is he bilingual?” Those three words weighed heavily on me. Other than counting his numbers and the basic colors that he learned from Dora in Spanish, no, he wasn’t bilingual. That’s when reality hit me! I started to panic! Literally to panic! I felt that the precious years for my baby to learn another language from birth to 5 was quickly slipping through my fingers. What was I going to do? Was it too late?

I started to strategize and make a plan. I started slowly by using the Language Boundary method from the book 7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child by Naomi Steiner. In this method, you use the target language during a specific situation, such as, time of day, location, or depending on an activity. I used this method during our bedtime story–speaking and reading to him in Spanish and then translating into English.

Then I had the opportunity to enroll him in a weekly preschool Spanish language immersion program. He was learning Spanish with other monolingual children his same age. He was excited and eager to learn Spanish. This is when I went into full Spanish-speaking mode with my child. At home, I started using the OPOL method. We read books, sang songs and played games, all in Spanish. I created opportunities for our child to speak Spanish, such as volunteering at his preschool summer camp a Spanish-language program and he was my little assistant. We also had the opportunity to spend two weeks in Puerto Rico during the summer immersed in a 100% Spanish environment.

Today I reflect on this past year and our journey into bilingualism. Looking back my only regret was not having started his language learning sooner. Nevertheless, speaking from my own personal experience, I can tell you that it’s never too late to start your child’s language learning.

My now 5-year-old speaks and understands Spanish very well. His language learning is still a work in progress, but if someone asks, “Is he bilingual?” I can happily respond, “Yes, he is!”

Frances is a part-time blogger, mommy and wife of a beautiful multicultural familia. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration with a certification in Human Resources. She blogs about heritage, culture, bilingualism, multicultural children’s books, and discovering the world through her son’s eyes. You can follow her at Discovering The World Through My Son’s Eyes.

{Photo by Que ma en}

We all know that once we committed to raising bilingual kids, we embarked in a journey that is not always as black and white as it may seem. You may have chosen the best method of raising children in two or more languages that works for your family, or maybe you found an excellent dual immersion program that can provide much of the necessary input. In any case, there are a few things to keep in mind across the board that will help you remain consistent and motivated throughout the first essential years of raising a bilingual child.

Click here to go to my Babble Voices post where I share a simple, yet precise list of 7 do’s and don’ts to keep in mind for parents raising kids in two or more languages.

Do you have what it takes to raise a bilingual child?

Pretty bold statement, huh? But the reality is that many parents make the decision to not teach their child a second language because they don’t believe they’re capable of doing it or they feel don’t have the resources they need. It could be that they feel that:

• they are not fluent enough in the second language
• their partner or family doesn’t support them
• not enough people around them that speaks the second language
• they did speak to or exposed their child to the second language, but he only responds in English now

These are all valid arguments and I completely understand that every family is unique and there are so many circumstances that can lead to the decisions we make with our kids. So, this is not about passing judgement, but about encouragement and understanding that we’ve all been at that breaking point at some time.

Read: 5 Biggest Obstacles When Raising Bilingual Children

I doubt any of us can deny that to raise a truly bilingual child nowadays you must possess these 5 essentials:

1.Desire. This is a key trait in every parent raising a bilingual child. At least one of the parents must have a clear desire and want for their child to speak two or more languages. The motivation behind the desire can be any, such as a need to connect with the language of your family’s heritage or just to give them an advantage in many aspects of life. This desire will drive every other aspect of your bilingual journey plan.

2. Commitment. Once the desire is cemented, the next step is to make a firm commitment to yourself, your partner and your child to take the steps necessary to immerse him in the second language as much as possible in order to give him the necessary exposure. This commitment will become a way of life for your family. It’s better if it starts from the day the baby is born, or even before that, since research proves that for the bilingual brain to develop, the sooner the better.

3. Strategies. A clear map and plan-of-action guided by your desire and your commitment to raise your child bilingually is a must. You and your partner — as well as any immediate family that will be a key part of the child’s life — should choose a method that works for your home and decide to stick with it. Maybe this means that dad is the one that speaks Spanish to the child and mom speaks English because she’s not fluent, but you both make sure that any media exposure will be in Spanish and you will do everything possible to find other ways to expose her to the language. The scenarios vary, it’s up to you to commit to the strategies that work for you and be consistent.

4. Consistency. This is key. The child must know that any strategy you adopt is the way of the land. Children thrive on consistency in most aspects of their life, and bilingualism is no exception. Stick to the strategies you adopt, and if you’re the one speaking in the second language to her, make sure it’s always that way.

5. Resources/Community Support. Not everyone will have a village to help them raise a bilingual child, but it’s important to feel connected and have some access to asking questions, relating stories and finding resources. We hope to be some of that here and on Facebook, Twitter and SpanglishBaby Playground. You can also find or form local playgroups or find a bilingual preschool or school to place your child in to pretty much guarantee their bilingual upbringing.

So now, tell me, do you have what it takes to raise a bilingual child? You’re here. You’re reading this. I’ll say you totally do!

Over the weekend, my husband and I had a freelance television production gig and we got to meet a pretty neat Mexican family. The story they shared with us for the TV program we were working for has nothing to do with bilingualism, but I had to conduct all the interviews in Spanish and I must say I was very impressed by how well it was spoken by the children in the family. What surprised me the most is that both, the young man and woman, were born in the United States and have only been back to Mexico a handful of times.

The most amazing thing for me is that these young people were raised by a single mother who has spent the majority of her time  working at least two jobs to ensure her children got the opportunities she never did. In other words, it’s not like she was home with them making sure they were exposed to the language on a regular basis. And yet, she managed to raise two bilingual kids who today, at 21 and 27 years old, are able to be interviewed on camera for a television program solely in Spanish!

It might not seem like a big deal to some, but in all my years as a journalist I’ve often found that the children of immigrants — particularly the working class — are more or less able to communicate with their Spanish-only speaking parents, but their vocabularies are limited and English is definitely their preferred language. But this was not the case with the Mexican family we met this weekend. The kids English was impeccable, but their Spanish was not far behind. There were no issues with verb conjugations — one of the easiest ways to botch the languages — and there were only two times that the young woman couldn’t remember the words she wanted to use in Spanish.

I was so happy about all that that after the interviews were done I congratulated both the kids and their mom and I asked her how she managed to do it. She said that there was never a question in her mind that — even though they were born here — her children wouldn’t speak her native language, Spanish. She didn’t know anything about methods to raise bilingual children nor the countless myths surrounding this topic, for her it was only natural — and logical — that her kids would speak Spanish at home and learn English in school.

Now, her 27-year-old son is married and thinking about having children. I was delighted when he told me he definitely wants to pass on the bilingualism gift to them. He said he plans on doing it by speaking to them only in Spanish, even if that means his monolingual wife won’t understand. Luckily, she’s all for it!

{Image via kate.gardiner}

In the lasts months I´ve been buried in all types of research and studies regarding bilinguals because of all the material I  needed for the book we´re writing. Not that I need to be any more convinced about raising my daughter bilingually, it´s just fascinating to read about studies that basically take pictures of the brain, called neuroimaging, to clearly map out how the brains of bilinguals are different from monolinguals. They say a picture tells a thousand words, and these do!

One such study was conducted last year at the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. We told you all about it and the findings in this post- Bilingual Babies: The Sooner, The Better.

In a nutshell, their conclusions suggest that the brain of a baby who has heard more than one language since birth (or even in-utero) remains more receptive to learning more languages for a longer period of time than a monolingual brain. That´s why we always say that the sooner you learn a second language, the easier it will be for you to learn more down the road.

What I also found fascinating about this particular study is that while conducting the Bilingual Baby Project, researchers also found and pinpointed three things that are very important for a baby´s overall bilingual comprehension skills; all of which are up to the parents to be aware of and execute.

3 Important Factors to Consider When Raising a Bilingual Child

1. The amount of exposure to each language. Babies and children need to hear the minority language being spoken to them 50-60% percent of their waking hours. It´s important that this exposure comes from human interaction, and not as much from media usage. Media is an important complement, but not something to rely on. Talk to your baby all the time from the day he/she is born. Talk, read, sing-out-loud, immerse him in an all-Spanish environment which could be a playgroup where all the moms are speaking Spanish.

2.The strategies parents use to raise a bilingual child. The two most used and most effective strategies to raise bilingual kids are One Parent One Language (OPOL) and Minority Language at Home (mL@H.) OPOL is when one of the parents speaks one language and the other parent another, all the time. For OPOL to be effective, the commitment from the parents has to be very clear and they must stick to their assigned language all the time. For a deeper insight into the OPOL method, check out these posts.

The mL@H method is the one Roxana and I use because we speak only Spanish at home with our husbands, all the time. English is pretty much not allowed among the three of us in my house. We´ve purposely created a home environment where the minority language can thrive and so my girl can associate Spanish to the comfort of family and home.

In short, what´s really essential is to have a strategy and commit to it. Flexibility is important because you have to adapt with your child´s needs and changing family conditions, but try to be as committed as possible because children do thrive on routine and consistency.

3. The parents’ desires to raise bilingual children. I love this one! Rarely do scientific linguistic research touch upon desire, at least to my knowledge, and I certainly believe it´s one of the most important factors. Both you and your spouse (if there is one) need to truly want and desire for this child to be bilingual. The reasons are usually personal and have to do with nostalgia, family ties, and a cultural bond, and these are the best! It´s that burning desire and want which will constantly drive you to have a method and stick to it; it will also motivate you to find a playgroup, the right dual immersion school, to travel, etc. I will go on a limb and say that desire is the driving force behind a bilingual child. Your desire comes first and that will feed into her´s.

What do you think? What is the one factor that has been the most effective in your bilingual journey, and/or the one you wished you had more of?

{Photo by efleming }

Bilingual Baby Project–a study presented by researchers of the University of Washington and the University of Texas at San Antonio–concluded that the earlier we start exposing babies to a second language, the more flexible their bilingual brains will be and the more they can identify and separate the sounds of the different languages they are exposed to.

The key, researchers say, is that during their first year of life, babies should be exposed through rich interactions to the two languages at home so their brains can absorb all the sounds and retain them by the time this first window starts to close once they turn one year old.  In fact, “the researchers also show that the relative amount of each language — English and Spanish — babies were exposed to affected their vocabulary as toddlers.”

This study is significant because it is the first one to measure brain activity in the first year of age and relate it directly to language learning in babies exposed to both English and Spanish at home.

Knowing this, we give you three strategies parents raising bilingual babies can use as soon as their child is born {or even in the womb!}:

1.  Habla, habla, habla! Researchers also found that exposure to the language does matter. Meaning, the more a baby hears the sounds of a particular language, the larger his vocabulary in it will be.  Talk to your baby all the time in Spanish, or your second language, even if you think she has no idea what you are saying; she’s absorbing every little sound and it will be the building blocks to her own speech acquisition.  Reading and singing in Spanish will also enrich their bilingual environment and get them used to hearing books and songs in Spanish.

You can also organize playdates with other Spanish-speaking amigas with babies so that your kids listen to the chatter in Spanish while you’re all entertained.

2. Have a plan, be consistent and stick to it.  The personal strategies parents adopt to raise their child bilingually are fundamental to creating a rich and consistent environment to learn multiple languages. As a couple, decide early on which of the proven methods to raise a bilingual child you will use in your home: Minority Language at Home{ml@h}, One Parent, One Language {OPOL}, or Time and Place.  Once you decide, have a game plan and stick to it to create familiarity and consistency in the baby’s environment. For example, if the dad will be the Spanish speaker, he will always be the Spanish speaker, sin excusas.

3.  Commit to your decision. The study also showed that the parents’ desires to raise bilingual children is of utmost importance.  Committing to the bilingual journey requires a real passion and desire to follow through. Be sure of what your reasons are and let that passion filter through your daily actions to ensure a fun and immersive bilingual home environment for your baby.

The research is clearly on our side, we really have no excuse to not promote bilingualism in our kids as soon as they are born. Just think about it, they have  no idea of the gift you are giving them and of the incredible ways it will manifest as benefits in their lives, and, the best part is they can’t even complain or argue against it yet.

I do need to add that even though this Bilingual Baby Project finds that the first year of age is the best time to start learning a second language, this in no way means it’s our only window of opportunity.  It is the first one and will set a solid base for a flexible brain, but children until the age of seven are clearly well suited, neurolagically speaking, to easily become fluently bi and multilingual.

Share:  How  early did you start exposing your child to a second language?

“My husband and I are expecting our first child in May 2010. My husband’s native language is Spanish, while mine is English. We mix the two languages all the time at home–often in the same sentence. Although I speak Spanish and am fairly fluent, I think I would prefer communicating with my child mostly in English. I am a little worried though that our child would not hear enough Spanish if only my husband speaks in Spanish. Also, if we mix the languages at home, I wonder if that will confuse our child.

I’ve browsed the site and seen references to a few different types of models. Where are the best resources for beginning to educate ourselves as to these models and other relevant information?

Thanks for your help!

Jana”

Dear Jana,

Congratulations on thinking ahead! This is definitely the time to be educating yourselves. Your best resources for it are right here:  books like mine, Raising a Bilingual Child, to let you see a range of experiences, and a website like Spanglishbaby with timely advice and a way to hook yourself up with other parents with similar needs and interests.

With your language background, you have your choice of the major household strategies: You could do “one-parent-one-language.” You could continue to mix languages and both speak in both languages with your child.  Or you could both speak only Spanish at home. How will you decide what’s best for *your* family?

First let’s set aside your worry that your language mixing will confuse your child.  Mixing is probably the most widespread “system” in the world, and there is no evidence that it is confusing for children.  Your child will likely not mix more than you do, or if so, only for a short time.  So, a household with mixed languages is still in the running. On the other hand, you feel you’d rather speak mostly English with the child. So, you need to look for who else could help with the Spanish end of things if you don’t.

I think you need to look further than just you and your husband. In my book (pages 159-160), I present a questionnaire to help you evaluate *all* your language resources.  What other speakers will there be in your child’s life?  grandparents? friends and visitors? household help?  Are any of them monolingual (in Spanish)?  Are there any bilingual schools in your area?  Do you anticipate being able to travel or make long visits in another country? and so on.  Fill out the self-evaluation questionnaire and then see where you stand.

It will help your child choose to speak Spanish, if at least some of the time it’s the only choice.  So, find some monolinguals.  Even if you decide to join your husband in speaking Spanish with the child (my personal preference), you’ll still want to create a broader community for yourselves and your Spanish. Monolingual speakers will help you, too.

You could use the time now, even before the baby is born, to search out as many sources of Spanish as you can.  Sounds like fun to me.

Feel free to contact me if you want to throw around some more alternatives ….

Best wishes,

Barbara

Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D. – A bilingualism expert with over twenty years of research experience in the fields of bilingualism, linguistics, and communication disorders, Pearson is the author of the informative and extremely useful book Raising a Bilingual Child. She is currently a Research Associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her pioneering work on bilingual learning by infants and children and on language assessment has been published in scholarly journals and in the book Language and Literacy in Bilingual Children. You can see her answers by going here and follow her work through her blog.

Do you have a question for our experts? Remember no question is too big or too simple. So, to send us your question, please click here or leave a comment below. Thank you!

Photo by Kevin N. Murphy

We feel we hit the mark when we decided to dedicate a whole week to the One-Parent-One-Language method of raising bilingual children. If you’ve missed the informative articles prepared by Roxana, experts and guests then click here to read them.

Today is our last day of the OPOL WEEK and we’ve put together a list of useful links related to the OPOL method. Some are great reads from other parents and others expand on what we’ve already talked about regarding the in’s and out’s of this successful method. Never a bad idea to read from as many resources as you can and discover some new sites in the process.

Make sure you make it all the way to the bottom of the post for details on how you can enter to win our last copy of Dr. Naomi Steiner’s book-”7 Steps to Raising a Bilingual Child.”

Articles from parents using the OPOL method

• Bilingual Parenting: A Personal Account by Nadine Lichtenberger

• Notes from the OPOL family–A blog about an English-French bilingual family written our very own guest Ask an Expert this week, Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert, author of a book on bilingual parenting and mother of three more-or-less bilingual children.

• Multi Tongue Kids blog articles on how they use the OPOL method in their multi-lingual family.

• Bilingual Baby website article that delves into the OPOL method–

• The OPOL Method for Raising a Bilingual Child by Margaret M. Williams

Resources

• Language Strategies for Bilingual Families: The One-Parent-One-Language Approach–Book written by blogger and author Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert.

• Any of the books in our top-ten list for parents raising bilingual children will give you a very clear and objective overview of the OPOL method.

• Many OPOL families recommend using baby signing as a common language in the home. To get started you can use  flash cards and this book .

SpanglishBaby Articles on OPOL

We’ve written some articles on the subject and the experts on our panel have answered various questions from parents using OPOL.

Here are some we suggest you bookmark:

• Ask an Expert::Will my Children Learn English

• Ask an Expert::Mixing Languages

• Ask an Expert::I Feel Like I’m Excluding my Husband

• Two Languages Many Methods

To enter to win today’s copy of Dr. Naomi Steiner’s book:

All you have to do is leave a comment below telling us what other topic is important to your bilingual family and you would like us to write about.

That’s it!

Thanks for an amazing week.  Don’t miss out on any of SpanglishBaby’s posts.  Make sure you’re subscribed to our free feed either by email or RSS.  We’re also very fun to follow via Twitter and our Facebook Page is a great place to make new friends.

Giveaway rules.

Photo by gemsling

We went to a friend’s party this weekend and I was interested in seeing how Vanessa would act around the children there. Namely, what language she would be using. We don’t get to see each other very often – mostly due to the distance between us – so it has been a good few months since Vanessa last interacted with my friend’s children who are being raised via the OPOL method by my Argentinian friend and her American husband.

I was interested in seeing in what language the interaction would take place for a few reasons.

First of all, for some reason, unbeknown to me, Vanessa has been using more English than ever. It’s almost as if she just discovered que puede hablar inglés! It all started about two weeks ago and the only thing it has coincided with is the fact that she is no longer attending preschool. I still haven’t figured out how these two events are related, but it’s the only thing different in her life. As you can imagine, I’ve accepted once and for all that my worries about her not understanding English – which I fretted about here - were completely unfounded.

Ironically, lately I’ve found myself taking my own advice – which I dished out here – with my own daughter. When she talks to me in English, I usually just tell her I don’t understand. I wonder how long that’ll work? I mean, she has to know that I do understand. She hears me speak it all the time with those who don’t speak Spanish. In other words, most everyone else in our lives.

Anyhow, going back to why I was interested in how she would interact with the children, the biggest reason for this is because we’re only 15 weeks away from Vanessa becoming la hermana mayor and I have started wondering how this journey of raising bilingual children will work out the second time around. A falta de hermanos, amigos.

I’ve heard it’s a little bit more difficult with the second (or third, fourth, etc) child. I guess it has to do with the fact that among them, children tend to chose the community language – in this case, English. It seems to be almost an automatic thing and when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, in our particular case, by the time BB2 (sorry, we know he is a boy, but we still don’t have a name) arrives, Vanessa will be just over three years old. She will have been going to preschool – albeit only twice a week – for a whole year which equates to being exposed to the English language for that length of time. Remember, we use the mL@H method. So we only speak to her in Spanish. Come September, she will be attending preschool three times a week, so her exposure to English will be even greater.

Besides, as BB2 gets a little bit bigger (i.e. when he can actually interact), and starts sharing experiences with her sister outside our home, I imagine he’ll just follow Vanessa’s lead – as most siblings do. Vanessa didn’t have that.

I have already started telling her que su hermanito “no speak English.” And she always want to know why. To which I respond, because like her, English will come later for him. I’m hoping that will work. Who knows?

The research I’ve read – and there isn’t a lot out there – talks mostly about families using the OPOL method and it suggests that parents tend to be less strict about using the method once a sibling is born. Since this is not our case, I don’t really know what happens in families using the mL@H method. I mean, we pretend to continue doing the same thing we’ve been doing all along, mostly because as I’ve explained in the past, it’s what comes naturally to us.

In terms of what happened at this weekend’s party, I had actually expected Vanessa to use mostly English. But I was happily surprised, again! She actually did her own share of code-switching between English and Spanish and for no apparent reason. I wonder if she’ll do the same with her baby brother? How about: will she correct and actually help her brother with his Spanish? One thing seems to be for sure, BB2 will get a lot more exposure to English – and may I add, much earlier – than Vanessa ever did. How much will that affect his Spanish?

Lots of unanswered questions…for now. In the end, I think it’s important to remember that we are all individuals and personality also has a lot to do with outcome, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

If you have more than one child, maybe you can enlighten me about what lies ahead for our family. Are things really different the second time around?

Spanish Program – Courtesy of Concordia Language Villages

I hadn’t really given language summer camps much thought because I believed Vanessa was too young. I mean, she is still too young for actual going-away type camps, but apparently not for just day summer camps. And I have to tell you, the more I’ve researched this topic, the more fascinated I’ve become.

In case you don’t know, in general, most language summer camps are run the same way a regular summer camp would be – a bunch of different activities both in and outdoors so your kids don’t get bored during the long, lazy summer months – except that everything is done in a language other than English. In other words, not only will the kids be entertained, but they will also be immersed in the target language you’re trying to teach them.

I was actually surprised with the amount of options out there and although they are not cheap, some of the programs offer financial assistance in the form of scholarships – particularly the ones where your kids get to sleep over. But maybe I should start by explaining the differences.

A day summer camp is exactly what the name implies. Your child attends camp daily for however many weeks you’re interested in (or you can afford.) Obviously, the longer your child attends, the better the end result. As far as I understand, the daily curriculum is taught in the target language, which depending on the program you choose, can range from Spanish to Arabic. Normally, age requirements are a bit more lax in this type of setting. At the one I’ve been looking into for Vanessa – the Denver Montclair International School – for example, they accept kids as young as three. By the way, their Spanish program is so popular, it’s pretty much sold out for the entire summer!

“Day camps work really well for really young kids,” says Carl-Martin Nelson, the director of communications at Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota. “We find that half the time it’s the parents who are not ready for regular summer camps and the other half it’s the children”

Concordia Language Villages offers both options – day and regular summer camps – and it’s the kind of place that I would love for Vanessa to be able to attend when she gets older. They have been around for almost 50 years, their curriculum is truly impressive and they firmly believe in immersion as the best method to learn a language.

“We communicate with the children almost exclusively in the target language,” Nelson explains. “There is very little translation going on.”

Children must be 7 years old to be able to attend one of their summer camps in any of the 15 different languages they offer. Each camp can last anywhere from one to four weeks. This means your child is actually away from home for that period of time, just like the thousands of other summer camps that abound in this country, except that they spend their time immersed in the target language.

So how much can your child actually learn in one or two weeks? The truth is probably not much – although you’d be surprised. For most of you; however, who are already raising bilingual children, it can be a great source of reinforcement – especially when kids get to the age that they start refusing to speak in the target language, as we discussed in this recent post.

“We not only teach kids the language, we improve their attitude about learning the language,” says Nelson. “Our primary goal, our job, is to make it the coolest thing in the world to speak the target language.”

Nelson also brought up the fact that this type of program is perfect for families using the OPOL method because it helps to reinforce the language that the child may only get from one of the parents in a completely fun and different way. The same goes for those children who already attend dual language schools. In other words, it’s a great way for them to brush up on their language skills in a non-school setting before the new school year because the emphasis is not only on the physical aspect, but also on the academic one.

“Our experience has been that these kids go back to the classroom excited and enthused about the language they’re learning,” Nelson says.

Sounds like a win-win situation, right?

Before I sign-off, I wanted to share with you that even though we – all of you and I – have gone back and forth (in this post) about whether or not it’d be a good idea for me to send Vanessa to a dual language program in a language other than Spanish, I’m seriously thinking about sending her to the French summer program offered by the Denver school I mentioned above. I just kind of want to see if she’ll pick up some of it if she’s immersed in it during a whole week. I feel like it’d be easier for me to continue once she has somewhat of a stronger base which I’ve failed miserably at providing. I guess I’ll keep you all posted…

Since I can’t include all the different language summer camps available out there, I suggest you check out this website and hopefully you can find something around your area that might work for you and your kids.

And, if you know of any language summer camps that you’d like to recommend or you’ve actually sent your kids to one in the past, we’d love to hear from you!  Leave a comment below and/or start a new topic in the forums.