We’ve Joined the Dark Side…
We bought a DVD player for our minivan. I’m not a big fan of the Boob-Tube as it is (I watch, on the average, about 10 hours of TV a month…if that), and I swore a might oath that I would never let my child rot her brain (and fatten her body) sitting in front of one. Especially not in the car.
But it’s for educational reasons!!! I promise!
We’ve got series of Spanish language DVDs coming. The car is where we’ve started listening to a bunch of different language CDs, so watching the DVDs in the car when there’s nothing else to look at sounded like an efficient use of time (not to mention keeping the Punkin’s attention whilst on the 3.5 hour trip to Memere’s, or the 9 hour trip to Grandma’s).
No, we’re not expecting the Punkin to be speaking fluent anything before she hits kindergarten (although at the rate she’s picking up vocabulary, she might surprise us). We’re just trying to keep her language pathways open to as many different sounds as possible. That way when the time comes to learn a foreign language, she’ll not struggle as badly as her parents did/do.
I love languages. Always have. But I have absolutely no ear for them. I struggled through 3 semesters of Russian, squeaking by on my written work since I usually did quite poorly on the oral exams. I can speak decent German, mostly because it’s so close to English.
Memere (my mother) tries to speak French to the Punkin (though the patois of Quebec certainly isn’t your typical classroom French.)
My hubby can handle a bit of French and German, but he is insistent that the Punkin learn Spanish. Says it’s the most useful language to have in the U.S. It’ll be real interesting trying to teach a language neither of us can speak. Maybe we’ll learn by osmosis.
But what I really want to learn is Welsh (Do you know how many Welsh albums you can download off of iTunes? I was surprised.). Or Gaelic. Perfectly useless over here in the colonies, but extremely high on the cool factor.
Or we could get some Sign Language DVDs. Just so long as I don’t try to practice while driving….
October 26th, 2006 at 7:37 am
You might well find she picks up fluent Spanish. Young children are astonishingly receptive to language, but the ability to pick up language declines with age. By the time children are in their teens it’s largely gone – which makes it absurd that so many education systems don’t start teaching languages until high school. In my job I work with clients and academics from a variety of countries and it’s very striking that the Swiss, Scandinavians, Dutch and Germans speak the most fluent English (even though for many of them it’s their third or fourth language), and that they mostly started learning languages in primary school.
October 26th, 2006 at 11:54 pm
Thanks for the encouragement
We knew that kids are language sponges–that’s why we’re starting in early. I’m just afraid of becoming one of those mothers who want their kids to be reading Shakespeare by age three and doing particle physics before they get bundled off to school. Not that she’ll ever get bundled off to school, since (as of right now) we’re planning on homeschooling. Which is another reason Mommy needs to pick up some of this Spanish-stuff too.
October 31st, 2006 at 2:59 pm
What would your kids do if you put in ‘Bullitt’?
June 6th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
She may very well like ASL because she enjoys body movement so much. Plus, as you’ve experienced, it’s a wonderful tool for lyrical expression. Ever tried it while dancing?