
It’s been a real struggle to get my 8-year-old excited about reading and writing in Spanish.
One day we were working on his Spanish grammar lessons. He starts by whining, and complaining, “Why do I have to learn Spanish?”
Then it was he, who was shocked and quickly said, “¡No, Mamá! Yo no dije eso.” (Yeah he responded in Spanish. Go figure!)
He apologized, and I stressed how important it was for him to know how to speak, read, and write in Spanish. Even though he may not understand it now in the future he will thank me.
However, I am not one to get easily discouraged, and I keep looking for ways to make language learning fun for my child. Perhaps, finding other children who speak and also read in Spanish will help.
Ah! How about starting a Spanish book club for kids at our local library? Even if the opportunities are limited or non-existent I still push forward.
This made my day! I praised my child and told him how proud I was of him, and that he should be proud of himself.
I asked him if any of them knew Spanish.
If you’ve been following us for a while you will know that this has been no easy feat for us. We started late, and aside from all of the challenges I can see the progress. Raising a bilingual child will be a lifelong journey, and we’re barely getting started. So we’ll deal with the ups and downs as they come along.
I am not alone in this crazy bilingual journey read about these other mamas who share their own bilingual parenting challenges.
Such as Diana’s “I don’t want to!” The Hardest Moment When Raising a Bilingual Kid post on her son not wanting to speak French or Spanish, and Sarah’s own The Ups and Downs of Raising Bilingual Kids. Rita shares in her series “From the Diary of a Bilingual Mother, part 5” the ups and downs of raising bilingual children in a new home country, and in this post a mama shares how she encounters a lot of ups and downs and uncertainties along the way while “Raising bilingual children isn’t a straightforward one-two-three process.”
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