>>Has anyone incorporated the second language into homeschooling successfully? <<
Yes, lots of people! :-) Have you joined [EMAIL PROTECTED] It's very quiet, but when anyone asks a question, there are always good answers. I'm also on two German-language homeschooling lists, one more about making homeschooling legal in Germany and the other more for German-speaking homeschoolers in a non-German-speaking country. Those are [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED], but I can never remember which is which. The one at .com is probably the U.S.-based one, run by Ute in California. :-)
>>Like if the curriculum is in English, the majority language and you try to speak only German, the minority language to your kids, do you teach them in German or English?<<
In our case, the majority language is German and I speak only English with the children, and my husband speaks only German with them. Any work I do with them is in English (except for Spanish, which I'm teaching them as a foreign language), and what my husband does is in German. (Again, except for reading to them in Spanish.) The only subject he does regularly, though, IS German. He also sporadically does social studies (Sachkunde) with a German textbook we have, but mostly just reads to them a lot and lives with them. :-)
>> Of course the curriculum will be in
English...<<
Just out of curiosity's sake, why "of course"? There are very, very few choices of German curriculum, that's true, but there is SOME available, and with English being your majority language, it could be worth looking into the little German material that there is. Your boys are still pretty little, though, lots of time. :-)
>> In a way I think the homeschooling is great because you
can be more flexible and teach some German history and geography etc <<
Absolutely, not to mention getting to travel off-season and strengthening the minority language in other ways.
Our list of reasons for homeschooling is VERY long, way beyond the scope of this group, but the language issues are definitely a big part. The minority language is considerably weaker in the bilingual families I know who send their children to German school, than in our family. Our children are actually stronger in English than in German, but even so, our now almost-seven-year-old was judged to have a "high level of German with an excellent vocabulary" by the school principal a year ago, who simply couldn't understand that she was bilingual. (One of the points we mentioned in our letter informing the school that our daughter wouldn't be going there, incidentally...) And when our five-year-old son was evaluated for speech therapy in April this year, the therapist also didn't realize at first that he was bilingual, and then assumed that his English must be weaker, because his German was perfectly fine. Even our two-year-old was speaking so much with the dermatologist a couple of days ago, that he asked me, concerned, if I wasn't speaking English with him! Not that a dermatologist is an expert on language! LOL My point is just that "outsiders" virtually never realize from their German that my children are not monolingual-Germans, although their English is actually stronger, so something is obviously "working". :-)
--Sheila in Germany
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