Ella has been making steady progress in reading both English and Chinese for the past few months. She is reading so much more fluently now and is able to decipher increasingly complex words. She has also started to read beginning readers in Spanish which have a couple of short sentences per page. The one language I can’t check for progress, though, is French because neither my husband nor I speak or read it.
This afternoon, when I arrived in daycare to pick her up, one of the new substitute teachers (who doesn’t know that Ella can read) excitedly told me, “Do you know that Ella can read very well in both English and French?!” I told her, yes, I do know that she can read English quite fluently but I didn’t know about the French. Well, apparently, Ella decided during their quiet time today to read aloud one of the Dr. Seuss books. The new teacher overheard her reading aloud but thought that maybe she had just memorized the book. So she picked another book randomly off the shelf from the older kids’ classroom and Ella read that one easily too. Then Ella said to her, “I can also read French and Spanish.” So the new teacher (who had taken college courses in French) wrote out several French sentences on a piece of paper and, according to her, Ella read them aloud with near-perfect pronunciation and accent! I was so excited!!! How I wish I had a video of her reading in French! :biggrin: …Since I don’t have one, I am just going to upload her latest vid reading about dinosaurs in English. In this book, she read her longest word to date - Micropachycephalosaurus - and she figured out how to read it the first time by breaking it down into its individual syllables and combining the syllables together. She looked so proud of her accomplishment the first time she read it!
I am now also teaching her to read Japanese - hiragana first, then katakana, then kanji. I can’t believe how fast she is picking it all up. By the way, she is 30 months old.
I think her interest in French really picked up after I started showing her Bali in French and letting her play on the genikids.fr website which were both recommended to me by hypatia. So thank you too, hypatia! I am seriously considering getting Rosetta Stone in French to take her to the next level. Does anyone know if a 2.5 year old would be too young for Rosetta Stone? It is obviously targeted for school-aged children and adults but, if I will be working through the program with her and walking her through it, I wonder if she would be able to do Rosetta Stone now? Any one using Rosetta Stone with toddlers and young children?
I think Rosetta Stone could work as long as you worked on it together. You might just take advantage of the video part of the course since she is still young. If you use just that I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.
By the way, Way to go Ella! I can’t wait until my daughter is reading like that too. Which it won’t be long because she just loves reading since I got the Your Baby Can Read program. Its amazing how much they absorb isn’t it?
As for teaching multiple languages… did you wait until she was reading well? Or did you teach her right along teaching her English and the other languages? I’m trying to figure out when a good time to teach my daughter to read other languages would be. I don’t want to confuse her , but if they can do it at the same time I’d like to take advantage of that too.
Hello,
I am very impressed, my child is 20 months old and I am trying to teach her reading…since when did you started with her and which methods do you use.
When you say “… I started showing her Bali in French” what is this? Can you explain to me?
I use Brillkids maths and reader (but I make my own presentations). Which programs do you use and do you folow a curriculum.
I invest lot of time with my child and I not sure If I am doing well. I see you do it superb!!
regards,
Esther.
Note: sorry about my English, is not my first language.
Do you have the homeschool version or just the regular Rosetta Stone? I was wondering what the difference is between the two versions?
Regarding teaching multiple languages, we have spoken Chinese and Filipino (myself and my husband, respectively) to her since birth. I started teaching her to read English using YBCR at 3 months, then started teaching her to read traditional Chinese at 9 months. We introduced French and Spanish reading at around 14 or 15 months, and Japanese just recently at 28 months. I didn’t exactly plan it that way - it’s just that I wasn’t even aware of the tremendous potential of babies and toddlers to learn multiple languages, even those their parents don’t speak. We had thought that 3 languages was plenty! If I had the chance to do it all over again, I would probably have started introducing the other languages earlier.
I started teaching Ella to read in English at 3 months using YBCR. Then I discovered Brillkids and Little Reader when she was 14 months and we have been using it since then. In addition to following the LR curriculum, I have also used YCCR and some Leapfrog videos but she quickly outgrew them. We read lots and lots and LOTS of books to her - I tried to look for books with large fonts and with text and pictures on separate pages when she was just starting out to read books on her own, but these were hard to find and I didn’t have time to make my own. We used the Maisy books, Ladybird Peter and Jane books, Ladybird Read-It-Yourself books, Usborne First Reading books, and, more recently, the Oxford Reading Tree Stage 5 and 6 books. I have also started reading early chapter books with her - Charlotte’s web and the Magic Tree House series - we alternate reading each paragraph and we only read 1 chapter at a time. She is usually very impatient to know what happens next and always asks to read more, but I don’t want to tire her out or burn her out so we usually stop at one chapter per night.
With regard to reading French and Spanish, we don’t speak these languages at home so I have to rely on a lot of videos and DVDs for this. I have all the LR categories translated to Spanish and some translated into French and I show her a couple of Spanish and French lessons everyday on LR. I also downloaded dozens of leveled readers in Spanish and French from ReadingA-Z.com which her daycare teacher teaches her to read, starting from the most basic and simple books and then gradually progressing to the more difficult ones. I also showed her Little Pim but she has practically memorized all 6 volumes of both languages so now I am letting her watch Professor Toto in French (still looking for the Spanish version) and also some cartoons like Bali to help her pick up conversational French. With Japanese, I am using Wink to Learn Japanese as well as some beginning Hiragana workbooks used to teach Japanese children to read when they start school.
This is a fantastic job. Though you don’t know French, she reads it, wow! Can you share some tips on how you translated LR to French and Spanish versions? How do you manage the audio part?
I show her the Bali episodes from dailymotion.com which is like youtube but it has the complete episodes. http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/joue%20avec%20bali Each episode is only about 12-14 minutes long, which is perfect because I am still limiting her TV/computer screen time. The only annoying thing are the commercials but I think you can get rid of them by saving the videos to your computer using keepvid.com. I have been meaning to save the videos myself but it is still on my ever-growing list of things to do. This is the official site of Bali where you can get the DVDs, CDs, and books: http://www.joueavecbali.com/ but I am just having a friend record the episodes on French TV for me. I AM planning to get her the Bali books though - I found this great French bookstore with lots of children’s books, including early readers that come with audio CDs (perfect for non-speaking parents like me!): http://lecturesdefrance.com/shop/index.php?l=product_list&c=134
