A quick update

 I had a couple of posts planned,one about Easter, but didn´t get round to it so thought I´d give you a quick update instead.

A couple of days ago my daughter had her last session at the speech therapist,although this was more of our decision rather than the speech therapist telling us that it was no longer necessary. We just felt that our daughter´s pronunciation wasn´t such a problem to start with and her pronunciation of /-s,/which was her main problem,had improved a lot and as she´d been going nearly two months now,it seemed like it was enough.Plus,it´s not cheap!!There are some words that she still finds difficult to pronounce,such as " significa" but I also had problems with "shoulder" and " soldier" when I was a child.I seemed to always mix them up.

We´ve been working on her reading and writing and establishing a homework routine.This is pretty difficult as she´s very strong-willed and resists doing it as she´d prefer to play.I´m trying to find ways to do it in a fun way. There are some really great activities and resources(many are downloadable and free too!) from Growing Book By Book and This Reading Mama. I found some great monthly writing prompts and using one of May´s prompts managed to encourage my daughter to draw a picture and complete the sentence" My favourite flower is...." Even if she copied the words "a sunflower" at least it´s a start.I´m trying to encourage my mum to write to her and then my daughter can reply and practice more and I´m also trying to find my daughter a penfriend of a similar age. I also downloaded some Colour by Sight Words and I´ve persuaded my daughter to colour two of them!! In Spanish, my daughter has just started "Cartilla 3" or" Letrilandia 3" so her reading in both languages is coming on slowly but surely although I still don´t think we´ve succeeded in turning her into a bookworm just yet!!

I still haven´t told you too much about my 19 month old as he´s not really saying very much at the moment. One big difference to his sister is that he doesn´t go to nursery school, whereas my daughter went from turning 1 till she started school, so in theory this means that my son is receiving more exposure to the minority language than his sister did. Unfortunately,however, I feel that I don´t have the same time to spend on him as life is so much busier with two...the curse of being the second child!!

I try to read to my both kids every day and my daughter usually gets an English story and a Spanish story before she goes to bed, my son only usually gets an English story read to him. Sometimes we have to skip nights or my 19month old is very tired so I have to get him to sleep and then it´s too late for me to read to my daughter. Juggling both of them can be difficult and sometimes I read one story to both of them(although my 19mth old doesn´t sit still!).

My 19mth old can say a few words and like his elder sister appears to opt for the easiest word in each language, saying byebye and ball but not adios or pilota,but hola & agua instead of hello and water. Other words he can say are "mama","papa", "yasta", "book", "pooh",´nana for banana  and one of his first words,believe it or not was "ketchup" because his sister is always asking for it!!He also says ta/thank you and si at random and repeated a couple of words like Grandad for awhile,then seemed to stop saying them.Oh and he also said ooooh-la-la....again imitating his sister and the other day it sounded like he said or was trying to say "milk".

Bilingual Tots: 18-19 months

December has been a busy month with Christmas and everything so I just haven´t had much time to blog. Chloe has not long turned 19 months old and her language and speaking is coming on in leaps and bounds. Although she is still babbling loads and uttering gibberish, it is clear that she is definitely trying to communicate with us and get something across to us. She also points to things or pats the chair etc to let us know what she wants to sit down on the chair or that she wants something.

What I´ve noticed is that she seems to say certain words in one of her languages and other words in the second language as if whichever word is "easier" in one language,then that´s the word she´ll use. I don´t know if I´ve explained myself very well. For example, she says "ball" in English,but has never said anything that remotely sounds like "pelota" in Spanish and my theory is because the English word is shorter and therefore "easier". Apart from the words that she started saying when she 16-17months old listed in this post,  her vocabulary has increased to include "cheese"(although she doesn´t say it correctly),teeth (which sounds very much like cheese and is sometimes hard to distinguish whether she´s actually saying cheese or teeth), pa(n) which is sometimes "pan" for bread or "patatas" for crisps, caca for ColaCao(a Spanish chocolate drink) and I think she´s just starting to say it to mean poo too, "Winnie the Pooh"(although she pronounces Pooh like "po"! and "Peppa" although it sounds more like "Papa",do(dos-she can´t pronounce the -s very well yet!) and tries to count with us..."wa-wa" for water...my parents actually thought that it sounded like she´d kind of mixed up both words "water" and "agua" and come up with a Spanglish word "wagwa". She also knows to say "pooh" when something is smelly for example for a joke I smell her feet and say pooh as it makes her laugh and she sometimes puts her feet underneath my nose after a bath or when I´m changing her and says "Pooh!". I have another cute story about this which I´m saving for another post!She also says "nigh-nigh(night night!) which is really cute too!She repeats words or phrases more and more frequently.The other day my mum said something about her being beautiful and my husband said" Of course" and she repeated "Of course" and we just cracked up, then because we were laughing she repeated it a few more times!

She also says the pronoun "tu" and is starting to string words together to form short sentences e.g. "allí", "allí está!", ¿Dondé está?".She understands everything we say 100% and will follow orders such as "Put it in the bin" or "Sit down" and can point to parts of her body if we say "Where´s your nose?" ¿Dondé esta tu nariz?, Where´s your head?/ ¿Donde esta tu cabeza? in both languages. We have kept up with reading in both languages and sometimes she likes to turn the pages and babbles away as if she is "reading" us the story! We do a lot of pointing to the pictures and saying things like "Where´s the red balloon?" etc in both languages and then she points to it.Sometimes we are really surprized at words that she knows or understands!One of her favourite books for this "game" at the moment is "What the Ladybird Heard" by Julia Donaldson, as you have to spot the glittery ladybird on each page!
I´ve also been singing nursery rhymes a lot to her as usual, all the songs I´ve mentioned on previous posts plus One, Two ,Three, Four ,Five, Once I caught a fish alive and "She´ll Be Coming Round the Mountain".It is very exciting seeing how she is acquiring languange and developing both language skills.She´ll be chattering away nineteen to the dozen in no time!!