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".

What to expect if you visit a speech therapist

As my daughter´s languages developed so did her pronunciation although there were certain sounds she stumbled over,such as the -r in both majority and minority languages. When she was younger, she´d often pronounce the /-r /as a /-l/ sound therefore "Granny" became "Glanny" etc and even when she had learnt to pronounce the /-r/ sound in English,she still had the problem of rolling her r´s in Spanish.This is however a common problem and even Spanish monolingual kids have problems mastering this sound so we weren´t too worried about it although her previous teacher had mentioned that she might need to see a speech therapist. Fast track to this year, when by now at age 5-6 Spanish monolingual children should be able to pronounce all the sounds including the tricky rolling -r  and although my daughter can actually roll her r´s, her current teacher has picked her up on her pronounciation of certain phonemes or sounds,particularly her /-s/´s and advised us to send her to a speech therapist to straighten out her pronunciation. This is because they will start to do dictations next year when they start primary and might affect how she spells words. We were surprised as we hadn´t noticed that she didn´t pronounce some sounds correctly although I had noticed that occasionally she would say things like "gromitar" instead of "vomitar" but I thought this was down to mishearing the word rather than mispronunciation and I usually leave Spanish correction to my husband. I´d go so far as to say her pronunciation in English is near perfect!!

Now we take her twice a week for 1/2 hour sessions before her ballet class to the speech therapist, who works in the school. This can be quite expensive but is also available through the public health care system.This however makes our Mondays and Wednesdays very hectic and it´s difficult to squeeze in English reading or homework.During the first session. I think the speech therapist just asked lots of questions and observed my daughter to find out which sounds she was having trouble with and in the follow-up sessions they have been practising the -s sounds. Usually the parents wait outside while the children are having their session so I don´t really know what they do but I know that they´ve taught her how to position her tongue and lips/mouth when pronouncing the /s/.She also brings home "worksheets" with pictures of things beginning with -s that she has to practice saying and a Ludo type game with lots of pictures of things beginning with -s. She´s only had 4 sessions and they are saying that she can pronoun the sound and only has to practice it now so hopefully she shouldn´t have to go much longer. I´m not worried about it and nor do I think that it has anything to do with her being bilingual as many of her monolingual Spanish classmates are also going to the speech therapist. I´m inclined to think it´s more to do with her having a dummy when she was little and when she first started speaking, she was talking with the dummy in her mouth...however being bilingual could also play a small part in it. Have you had to visit a speech therapist with your bilingual child? What have your experiences been?