How to create a Montessori-friendly bilingual home: I really want to say, before I dig into today's post, that
every family and situation is different, what works for one might not work for
another. This is how we run our bilingual home and it works for us, although
there have been tweaks along the way.
My name is Jo Ebisujima; I'm a Brit and live just outside
Tokyo, Japan with my husband and 8-year-old son (Ebi-kun). From the offset,
there was no question on which language we would use with our son, we knew he
had to be bilingual. Japanese is the community language but I also feel that
the minority language, in our case English, is equally important.
- We introduced the minority language first, knowing that he would soon catch up with the community language, this caused some issues with the in-laws, who were convinced their grandson wouldn't be able to communicate with them! They have finally come round and don't think I am quite as crazy as they used to
- I used the Montessori method when it came to reading and writing, reading did come first as he knew his letters by 2 and was reading at 3 years old but he wasn't ready to write until he was a bit older
- Daddy helped him with hiragana, the first of the three Japanese scripts using Kumon cards where you trace the letters, similar to the sandpaper letters but without the tactile element, he taught himself katakana (much to our surprise) and started learning kanji by himself before he started school
- We bought books, lots and lots of books in both languages. Including encyclopedias and dictionaries and lots of factual books.
- Any labels we use around the home are in English
- Games and activities are all done in English unless he has non-English friends around to play
- When he was younger we only watched English TV or films. We don't watch a great deal of TV and still as a family, we watch things in English but sometimes the boys want to watch football and that is in Japanese. The other thing that came up was that Ebi-kun was having a hard time finding a common ground with his friends at school, there is a particular TV show that all his friends watch, a football animation and so we decided that it was OK for him to watch that a couple of times a week, to make his life easier.
- We don't do workbooks. We do lots of after-school activities, crafts, science, arts but no workbooks. He has some available if he wants to use them, but they rarely get touched.
After lots of reading we decided that at home or as a family
we would use English, we felt that this would give Ebi-kun a bit more exposure
than using OPOL (One parent One Language). We stuck with this until he reached
school age and changed it up a bit. We still use English as the family
language but now when my son and his dad are alone together they use Japanese,
we did this because we noticed Ebi-kun was making some mistakes in Japanese and
needed correcting.
To prevent this post from turning into a book, I will break
things down a bit to what exactly we did.
· When it comes to reading, I read exclusively to
Ebi-kun in English and daddy does the same in Japanese. In a nutshell, we
made sure that he had plenty of access to English in the home, it helped that
he loved books from the offset and will devour anything I put in front of him. There are two key
points that I believe have made a big impact on Ebi-kuns bilingualism.
We Made It Relevant
We made sure from
the start that he knew how important it was to be able to communicate well in
both languages. We talk to my mom in the UK using Skype at least three times a
week plus my friends and he gets to chat to their kids and his cousins too. It
is pretty obvious to a child that the community language is important but if
they are learning a second language and can't see the point, they will have no
interest in trying.
We Created Our Own Community
Foreigners with
kids are few and far between where we live. Ebi-kun goes to an elementary
school with over 1400 kids and as far as we know, he is the only English-speaking
child. When he was a baby I joined a baby group for bilingual children, a few
have left over the years but the core group is still going strong. We meet a
couple of times a month and it's great for the kids and the parents.
The kids understand
that they are not weird or strange because they can speak English and the
parents support each other with tips and resources. We do have a strict,
English-only rule which works well and we rarely have to enforce it (it's
usually a parent breaking the rule!)
Raising a bilingual
child isn't easy and both parents need to be on the same page to help make it
happen. The common factor in our bilingual playgroup is that we make it fun and
make it relevant.
Are you raising a
bilingual child? Share your success stories in the comments below.
Jo Ebisujima is a no-nonsense organizer and child wrangling expert extraordinaire, who believes that a child’s number one teacher is their parent and that it's a parent's job to help their child fall in love with learning.
She understands how difficult it is to squeeze everything into the day and has an uncanny knack for showing you how to break things down into bite-sized chunks plus how to set up systems to make your life run smoother.
