Day 16: German Lessons

For years, I have refused to teach my kids German. *gasp* I know. To me, it was always more important that they learn to speak proper English and learn how to behave. I had read articles where it was explained that multilingual children had a disadvantage in lower vocabulary than kids who only speak on language. It made sense to me and so I decided that one language was more than enough.

Now the time has come to learn a second language. We have tried Spanish before and it did not work well. Now we are trying German. I bought this book that seemed simple enough for Coqui to do on his own for the writing part. It is called German in ten minutes a day. Coqui was a bit reluctant when I told him we were learning this, but now he likes it enough for the words to stick. Some days, we literally put the timer on for ten minutes and we will stop when it goes off.

You say that ten minutes is not enough? It is! Now I see that he actually retains more words in ten minutes only because he doesn't feel overwhelmed being bombarded with a bunch of words. Ten minutes IS enough to learn the days of the week. He writes them, makes some sentences, and sometimes we try to find a song for the material.

Today we started to work on the twelve months of the year. We repeated them over and over, copied all of them, but only got to make four sentences with them. Then I went on youtube to try to find a song and I was very successful. The kids have been singing it all day. The parts where they don't really know what is being sung, they just hum it. Here is a link to the video: Rolf Zuckowkis - Die Jahresuhr.  We actually know this artist from a Christmas CD my aunt bought me a few years ago. The songs are very catchy and that is what we are going for here. In the picture above you can see them dancing and singing. Learning can be so much fun. And this way, even the girls can hear and learn.