Education and Language - update through August

Several months ago, we started having playdates with a neighborhood girl about Natalia's age.  Even though both her parents speak languages other than English, English is their native language and they are raising their daughter monolingual.  When the two girls were first hanging out together, I noticed that my daughter's friend was using two-word phrases already while Natalia was still in the single-word phase.  Of course, I knew not to compare the girls because Natalia was having to make sense of three oral languages with ASL thrown in for good measure, and I thought she was already well ahead of what I expected from what I had heard and braced myself for - namely that multilingual children are initially delayed in their language acquisition, though they catch up to their peers within a few years.  So I wasn't worried about Natalia, just noticing a difference in the girls' linguistic abilities. 

Then the little girl and her parents went on vacation for a few weeks, and by the time they got back three weeks later, Natalia had already caught up with her friend.  At 21 months, she uses two and even three word phrases, including "Mamusia cima" (Mamusia trzyma --> Mommy is holding), "Kalka pic miko" (Natalka pic mleko --> Natalia drink milk), and to various bugs, especially flies: "go away" (no translation or explanation needed!)  She also has started four-syllable words.  Her current favorite is "dinosaurio" (dinosaur).  As you can tell, there is a mix of Polish, English, and Spanish in her words.  She does not separate the languages yet, which is completely developmentally normal.  She understands requests, questions, and comments in all three languages, though the majority of her vocabulary is in Polish.  

Though I am glad that she uses a lot of Polish, since Polish is the language that is hardest to maintain in the United States, I do worry that her Spanish is not where we'd like it to be.  I stay home with her, so she hears Polish all day long, every day.  She only gets Spanish from her dad on the weekends and in the evenings for several hours.  But those times are actually diluted because when all three of us are together, Oscar and I speak English to each other.  

Furthermore, she has two tv shows that she watches on YouTube.  I am conflicted about this, since I know ideally she shouldn't be getting any screen time before age 2.  But she is very clingy and there are things I simply cannot get done unless she is enjoying her Maya the Bee or Peppa Pig  (like take a shower, for instance!).  The good thing is that she watches Maya the Bee in Polish, and Peppa Pig in Spanish, so we justify the shows because they reinforce the languages she hears from us.  She has learned various vocabulary from watching the shows that she may not have gotten from conversations with us.  Still, I am actively working on limiting her screen time nonetheless.

Finally, another concern I have is that since she speaks predominantly Polish, her dad sometimes asks me to translate what she's saying... though to be fair, I've had to ask Oscar what she's saying as well. One day she started stomping in a little puddle on our balcony and saying "charcos".  Well, I didn't know the word, and I was trying to figure out what it could be in Polish or English.  I asked Oscar, and then realized she was saying "puddle" in Spanish!  Then she expanded with "charcos de barro" (mud puddles), something she learned from watching Peppa Pig and her brother.

ASL was meant to be a bridge between all of the oral languages, however to be honest, it's been much harder to incorporate more and more signs since Oscar is the only one who actually uses it regularly at work.  Natalia does automatically sign certain words along with the oral words, which is a good sign, I suppose.  She is also open to learning new signs, but the baby signs books and videos I've found at the library so far have been mere review.  I think at this point, we need actual ASL.  Some of the signs are even not proper ASL but more like simplified home signs.  Most people don't intend to learn ASL when using baby signs with their kids.  Most people abandon signs altogether once the child starts to speak.  So we'll see if we'll be able to keep this up.

As a more general educational note, I've caught the inspiration bug for homeschooling again (it comes around every now and then), and have been planning a loose preschool structure to our days.  This is in its beginning stages, and I will share more in a future post.