I write this post as we complete our first year homeschooling R on Italian language. I am proud of her and us for sticking to it, and proud of the results. She’s now a fluent reader and writes her first short stories in Italian. She loves to read Disney comics more than anything else. As of writing this, I have purchased the books for our second year and included some for E as well, who’s excited and thrilled to be included.

Here in Finland, children speaking a secondary language can access free afternoon classes to learn it (one hour a week I believe). However, these classes are organised far from where we live and I heard many parents complaining of their low quality. Part of the issue is that the school groups together children with different language levels. This arrangement didn’t sound effective and worthwhile to me, so I have decided to go solo, at least for now. Since I know that many families around the world struggle with the same challenges, I am sharing what worked for us.

Set goals

It is important to set overall language goals for your children as well as progressive targets. Personally this year I wanted for R to learn to read fluently as well as assimilate few grammar rules. What level of fluency and skill do you want your child to reach? What can you feasibly achieve in few months? Write down a timeline. We used a book with linear structure and chapters, so I leveraged that to set a roadmap for the year. I then complemented the plan with self-made exercise sheets and other books.

Stick to a schedule

Don’t be casual about carving time for this. Schedule a regular time on the calendar and stick to it as much as possible. If it turns out not to be a good time (i.e. the child is too tired or other commitments often jump the line), change it but be consistent. Holidays or social distancing are opportunities to add extra lessons.
Leave some margin in your plan, because a year is a long time and the child’s motivation and commitment might fluctuate.

Motivate with small rewards

Sticker sheets are the way. R gets to apply a sticker a the end of each lesson. For this, it’s important to define what one lesson is: is it a completed chapter? A series of exercises? Is it bound by time?
Every five sticker she can access a prize and the prize size increases over time. Rewards don’t have to be expensive: small toys, candies, a comic book (you see what I’m doing there), a colouring book.

Encourage but don’t force it

Let’s face it, for the child this is extra work. Motivating and encouraging is legit, but understand where the line is. If the child identifies this as a chore, it will be hard to recover. No one likes to be forced to learn! During the year we took breaks as I saw R’s commitment teeter. We started these classes last summer and for instance she was extra tired and stressed when she started preschool. I allowed her to adapt to the new changes and it paid off.

Make it fun

It is not feasible to sit a young child school-style for a hour or so. I alternated formal exercises with videos -Youtube is full of songs and videos on Italian grammar, I found – and small learning games. Examples of games were:
🔸 the hangman game;
🔸 whenever we studied a chapter on a letter, we had to mime in turns things starting with that letter for the other to guess;
🔸 in turns we would name a letter and the other had to find something in the room starting with it as fast as possible.
This motivated R to do her exercises, as she was striving to complete to play with me.
Moreover, this can be fun for parents too! Beside the playing bit, I enjoyed creating personal exercise sheets to complement the books we used.

I hope this is useful to other multilingual families. Do you have more tips or resources to share? Please add them to the comments for my and my readers’ benefit. If this post was interesting or useful, I’d love to hear your feedback as well. Happy learning!

Recommended posts:
Book review of “Be Bilingual”.
Interview to sociologist Soile Pietikäinen on bilingualism in families: part I and part II.

🇮🇹 Risorse per genitori italiani 🇮🇹

Dato tutto il tempo che ho speso nel ricercare e creare risorse, sono più che felice di condividerle con i miei colleghi genitori.
Un sito fa-vo-lo-so è Fantavolando. Ha una marea di risorse e schede per varie età.
I libri possono essere ordinati da Amazon.it. Quelli che abbiamo utilizzato per il primo anno sono stati:
🔸 Il mio primo sillabario di Manuela Duca
🔸 Imparo le lettere con il libro lavagna. Questo è carino per imparare la grafia perché si può cancellare e riscrivere ad infinitum.
🔸 Imparo a scrivere in stampatello maiuscolo e minuscolo. Esercizi da pre-grafia fino a brevi frasi.
Ho anche creato alcune schede di esercizi e grammatica che sono felice di condividere: scaricale da qui.
Se avete altre risorse o idee, per favore condividetele con me. E fatemi sapere se questi consigli vi sono utili, è sempre bello avere del feedback!

Featured image by Angelina Litvin on Unsplash.