Multilingual family: Celebrating the wins!
While Husband has been brilliant with sticking to German when talking with the kids, it has been one of the challenges to give them enough exposure--especially now that Engineer (11) and Tigerlily (9) are old enough to be (ideally) reading/writing some.
We finally decided to look for some external help and were happy to find that the Goethe-Institut offers children's classes, one track for children who used German at home ('German as a second language') and another for children who were learning it as a foreign language.
So we took Engineer and Tigerlily to meet with a teacher and get an assessment on how they were doing...and lo and behold!
The teacher said Engineer was doing fine and could join the 'German as a second language' class, as he could speak well enough and do some reading/writing already. And even Tigerlily, who is not so strong in languages, was above the beginner level for 'German as a foreign language' class.
Tigerlily seemed a bit deflated that she wasn't at the same level as her big brother, but I tried to make it clear to her that her being able to speak and understand as much German as she could simply by interacting with her Papa was remarkable.
Besides, she is younger than Engineer so he has a clear head start.
After some (sincere!) gushing and praise from me, she perked up, so I hope she doesn't feel like she's inferior to her brainy brother.
We signed Engineer up the next day and he's started his weekly classes already. Unfortunately Tigerlily's level class is full but she's gotten permission to watch German videos at home :D and she'll practice a bit more with Papa, like Engineer had done.
It's hard to know how one's family is doing when one's mucking about a bit blindly, so it was great to know that the kids were making progress in their own way. And it validated my poor husband's efforts as he plods away on his own! There's hope!
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