Homeschoolers united!

Ask specific questions about your target languages. Beginner questions welcome!
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Ani
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Re: Homeschoolers united!

Postby Ani » Wed May 23, 2018 11:32 pm

Systematiker wrote:I think it had a lot to do with early exposure - when he was really young, I worked a lot from home and hung out with me, so he got like 25 hours a week of podcasts on in the background while we played or I worked. And it’s not like he didn’t hear us use Spanish or French from time to time (with other people, or, I’m not above using Spanish with my wife when I don’t want him to understand something), I just say it’s podcast related because he started with it at a time when he hadn’t heard either of us in either of those languages for a week or so.


Dang I need to up my game....

IronMike wrote:Not much to report here. HS is finishing up for our senior. She's pretty much done. She took her SAT a couple weeks ago and was upset that she lost 40 points from last year. (Her verbal went up, math went down.) I told her not to worry. She worries still.

Wife is compiling books and resources for the youngest, who'll be a homeschooled 10th grader next year in Boston. Should be fun with all the history up there. Poor girl wants to continue Russian, but we're all pretty much sick of it by now, and have been planning on studying Spanish once back in the states. We'll see what happens once we get up there.

Can't believe we're about to start HSing our last kid. Where'd the time go?



Don't they still do combined scores for SAT's? So the lower math score disappears and the higher verbal sticks. Unless things have changed, everyone just uses highest verbal + highest math.

Maybe your 10th grader can do Russian with By The Onion Sea. I can totally understand feeling ready to move on from Russian after such disappointing end to your time there. I'm sure eventually the feelings will soften and it will be great for your daughter to have kept up the language.
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Re: Homeschoolers united!

Postby IronMike » Thu May 24, 2018 10:20 pm

Ani wrote:Don't they still do combined scores for SAT's? So the lower math score disappears and the higher verbal sticks. Unless things have changed, everyone just uses highest verbal + highest math.

Maybe your 10th grader can do Russian with By The Onion Sea. I can totally understand feeling ready to move on from Russian after such disappointing end to your time there. I'm sure eventually the feelings will soften and it will be great for your daughter to have kept up the language.

OMG, had never heard of Score Choice, but looked it up, and sure enough, that may be the way for her to go. She feels a lot better now after hearing that.

Passed the By the Onion Sea website on to my youngest. Mom is moved by a persuasive argument, so if the DD can propose a plan to mom that makes sense, she may go for it. I'll report back on these family politics in my blog...

Thanks Ani!
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Re: Homeschoolers united!

Postby Elsa Maria » Fri May 25, 2018 1:40 am

IronMike wrote:
Passed the By the Onion Sea website on to my youngest. Mom is moved by a persuasive argument, so if the DD can propose a plan to mom that makes sense, she may go for it. I'll report back on these family politics in my blog...

Thanks Ani!

Mike, I just sent you a message about our Russian tutor.

--
My youngest will be in his senior year next year. He will take his third year of Russian. We are looking primarily at colleges where he can continue studying Russian, but admittedly there are a few on the current list that do not offer Russian.

Here is his language journey to date:
We lived in Denmark when he was in 5th through 9th grades. So he of course studied Danish during those years. He has had no real desire to keep it up since we left. I do still speak to him in Danish a little bit.

He did a lot of dabbling while in 6th and 7th grade. I recall Modern Greek and Latin. We got more structure starting in 8th grade.
8th grade was Latin I with an online class plus Danish I with a private tutor.
9th grade was Latin II (same online teacher) and Danish II with the same tutor.
10th grade was Russian I with a private online tutor. We started out at once per week with her, but switched to twice per week.
11th grade was Russian II continuing with the same tutor. Still 2X per week.
12th grade will be Russian III continuing with the same tutor.

I will be very interested to see where he places in a college placement test.
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Re: Homeschoolers united!

Postby Ani » Fri May 25, 2018 6:32 am

IronMike wrote:OMG, had never heard of Score Choice, but looked it up, and sure enough, that may be the way for her to go. She feels a lot better now after hearing that.

Passed the By the Onion Sea website on to my youngest. Mom is moved by a persuasive argument, so if the DD can propose a plan to mom that makes sense, she may go for it. I'll report back on these family politics in my blog...

Thanks Ani!


Yay so glad it helped.
Score choice looks a lot more official than in did back in my day ;)


Elsa Maria wrote:
IronMike wrote:
Passed the By the Onion Sea website on to my youngest. Mom is moved by a persuasive argument, so if the DD can propose a plan to mom that makes sense, she may go for it. I'll report back on these family politics in my blog...

Thanks Ani!

Mike, I just sent you a message about our Russian tutor.

--
My youngest will be in his senior year next year. He will take his third year of Russian. We are looking primarily at colleges where he can continue studying Russian, but admittedly there are a few on the current list that do not offer Russian.

Here is his language journey to date:
We lived in Denmark when he was in 5th through 9th grades. So he of course studied Danish during those years. He has had no real desire to keep it up since we left. I do still speak to him in Danish a little bit.

He did a lot of dabbling while in 6th and 7th grade. I recall Modern Greek and Latin. We got more structure starting in 8th grade.
8th grade was Latin I with an online class plus Danish I with a private tutor.
9th grade was Latin II (same online teacher) and Danish II with the same tutor.
10th grade was Russian I with a private online tutor. We started out at once per week with her, but switched to twice per week.
11th grade was Russian II continuing with the same tutor. Still 2X per week.
12th grade will be Russian III continuing with the same tutor.

I will be very interested to see where he places in a college placement test.



Wow so dabbling and language changes don't seem to have hurt him :) Good luck with the college hunt. It's hard for me to believe I'll be doing that some day.


I know I said I'd come back and post about my 3 year old.. Now I'm not even sure what I wanted to say.

He is.. well he's learning French but not as amazingly as I'd hoped. The number of hours/day we are getting in are insufficient. He talks to me, but he spends more time telling to his siblings in English. There are days, even weeks when I don't read him a single story. We had been in a really good habit but bedtime stories disappear at the first stress. He definitely understands, but he won't speak much. Unsurprisingly, "je veux ..." Constructions are pretty much the only thing he's guaranteed to use French for. Most of the time he speaks to me in a very funny franglish that seems like he's switching languages every other word. His English is really good and mostly uncorrupted when he speaks with other people, unless he only knows the word in French, so I'm not worried that I'm dooming him to a life with no proper language.
My goal is to get the other kids wrapped up for their school year and then design a preschool/petite section plan for him and actually mark out songs, reading, conversations & activities that I want to have/do with him the way I schedule assignments for the big kids. Plus I want to start tracking actual hours per day that we're working, have French in the background, and hours he's watching French TV. I'm sure there will be much room for improvement.
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Re: Homeschoolers united!

Postby Systematiker » Fri May 25, 2018 12:35 pm

Ani, do you notice a big difference in pronunciation for your 3yo in French and English? My son seems to have trouble with a sound in English that is no problem in German, e.g. “hone, hore, hive” but “Telefon, vier, fünf” and it drives me crazy. And Elefant is fine, but in English it’s afflump or worse, asslump....
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Elsa Maria
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Re: Homeschoolers united!

Postby Elsa Maria » Fri May 25, 2018 3:45 pm

Ani, now that I am mostly looking back at the homeschool language journey I will say that I am content with our path. No, we did not reach a high level in a particular language. But (1) my student is a confident language learner and (2) he enjoys the process and (3) is in a position to study Russian at the intermediate level in college.

Becoming conversationally fluent in Danish with nearly perfect pronunciation gave him confidence. Languages do not seem impossible to learn. The case system in Latin made grasping the Russian cases easier. Previously tackling the Greek alphabet reduced the hurdle of the Cyrillic alphabet. And so on.

Colleges in the USA like to see at least two years of the same language. For many schools, this is a requirement. So dabbling can only take you so far if you want to apply to college in the USA.

Last but not least, I will admit that we have invested a lot of money in the tutors. I consider it money well spent, but it certainly is not the cheapest way to homeschool.
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Ani
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Re: Homeschoolers united!

Postby Ani » Fri May 25, 2018 7:59 pm

Systematiker wrote:Ani, do you notice a big difference in pronunciation for your 3yo in French and English? My son seems to have trouble with a sound in English that is no problem in German, e.g. “hone, hore, hive” but “Telefon, vier, fünf” and it drives me crazy. And Elefant is fine, but in English it’s afflump or worse, asslump....


Yeah I do. I'm not sure it is exactly the same but his French is almost a year behind his English at this point. I'm hoping this summer I can really close the gap. There are certain sounds he couldn't say in French but could produce in English up until pretty recently including /j/. For the last couple years he used to say "I t'aime, mamoo" just the last week he started trying "je love you, maman". Like he learned to say /j/ and everything else broke :)

It's pretty normal for all kids to have missing phonemes up until age 8, and end of word, middle of word and beginning of word are all different developments so I wouldn't be surprised if different languages are different because of the sightly different mouth position. And hey elephant is a pretty hard word :)

Elsa Maria wrote:Ani, now that I am mostly looking back at the homeschool language journey I will say that I am content with our path. No, we did not reach a high level in a particular language. But (1) my student is a confident language learner and (2) he enjoys the process and (3) is in a position to study Russian at the intermediate level in college.


I love that. Those are my goals for my oldest. I mean I started out hoping for one language done really well, but the effort required didn't match his needs at the time so I've spent a lot of time thinking .. really confidence and love of languages is the much more valuable asset.

Last but not least, I will admit that we have invested a lot of money in the tutors. I consider it money well spent, but it certainly is not the cheapest way to homeschool.

Good education doesn't come cheap :) We're pretty lucky that Alaska has homeschool charters to pay for most of our homeschooling costs.
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Elsa Maria
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Re: Homeschoolers united!

Postby Elsa Maria » Sun May 27, 2018 11:21 am

One more thought: Many (most?) of you have languages that you can teach to your children. I did not have that - we were always learning together. You might not need to use tutors.

But I am not complaining, because now I have a household member who can help me learn Russian, LOL.
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Re: Homeschoolers united!

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sun May 27, 2018 10:33 pm

Elsa Maria wrote:One more thought: Many (most?) of you have languages that you can teach to your children. I did not have that - we were always learning together. You might not need to use tutors.


During one of Polyglot Gathering talks (I don't remember which year), Richard Simcott mentioned that he taught his daughter German, French and Spanish. Add English and Macedonian as family languages. Inspiring.
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Re: Homeschoolers united!

Postby Elsa Maria » Mon Oct 01, 2018 6:22 pm

Anyone else homeschooling this year? Anyone contemplating homeschooling?

My youngest is a senior this year, so this is my last year of homeschooling. The college application process in the USA is rather complex, and it is even more involved for homeschoolers. I will breathe a sigh of relief once all of the applications are in. And then shout for joy when the first acceptance is received.
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