methods

We always get asked if there’s a window of opportunity when it’s  the ideal age to raise bilingual kids.  There are actually several windows, or critical periods, for language learning when our brain is more adaptive to absorbing the new language(s), the broadest being from 0 to seven years of age, even before we learn to talk. 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 weRead More ...

This contest is now closed. The week’s final winner is:  Susan. Congratulations!  Thanks to all! 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 areRead More ...

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 i ...

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" ...

From all the reading I’ve done since the creation of SpanglishBaby, it seems to be that one of the biggest issues parents who are raising bilingual children eventually face is that their kids won’t answer back in the minority language – particularly after they start school. Although I really can’t envision this being a problem for us, I know I’m delusional – especially now that we live in Colorado! As I’ve mentioned in the past, I helped raise my nowRead More ...