Teaching my Daughter French!

in #education6 years ago (edited)

This week I have started giving French lessons to my seven-year-old daughter and this is what I'd like to share with you today in this post.

Teaching my Daughter French!

In fact, that is not the first time I am teaching her because the French lessons started at birth with baby songs in French she listened to relentlessly. Then, she listened to other French songs while growing up, watched French cartoons and played with apps in French on the iPad.

All photos are mine and taken with my Samsung phone.

Teaching my Daughter French!

I also used the one parent, one language approach at home, speaking to her only in French. The result is a trilingual child who is learning three languages at the same time.

The other two languages are Thai, which she learns from her mother and English, which she learns from school and multimedia.

You may be interested to read the post where I talk about this: Raising a Trilingual Child

Then, last year she started French lessons every Saturday morning and for two hours at the "Alliance Française" in Bangkok and I have this post about it: A Morning at the Alliance Française in Bangkok.

Teaching my Daughter French!

I tried repeatedly to seat with her at home with a book, but she was not interested to learn that way. She learned words and sentences with me just by talking, but this is not enough, reading and writing has to come into the picture.

Teaching your kids is a very difficult thing because of the parent-child relationship, and I admire people who can homeschool their kids.

That is why we enrolled her at the "Alliance Française" last year and this has helped her progress and be motivated to learn more.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a book at the "Alliance Française" in Bangkok planning to try again because she has just started Grade 1 at school and this is a good time to get serious with it.

I thought that if I can go through with this book, then I will order the books they use in French classes from Grade 1 to Grade 6, and do the French class myself at home, in addition to the "Alliance Française" because there is no way to skip that.

So this week we started the French lesson, which will be every day at 7:00 p.m. for 10 or 20 minutes. This is how I am creating the habit, a regular time and short duration, because it has to be fun for both of us, otherwise, this won't last long.

Teaching my Daughter French!

This time, she has agreed that we seat together and learn with the book. The motivation is that being in Grade 1 she feels like she is not little anymore and that it is time to learn seriously as she is doing with English, Thai, Maths and Music.

There is also a special motivation because in October we are going to spend a 3-week vacation in France, which will be memorable with something we haven't done before. I will talk about it in a Steemit post soon.

The book we are using is "Mon premier dictionnaire en images," which is a French dictionary of 1,000 words with pictures.

Teaching my Daughter French!

Here we go, reading and writing 10 or 20 minutes a day every day. We will see how it is going, it takes 20 days to create a new habit, so in a month, this should be routine.

Teaching my Daughter French!

Thank you very much for reading this post, I hope you have enjoyed it and maybe you can tell me in the comment how you are doing when you want to teach your kids.

All photos are mine and taken with my Samsung phone.

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Michel Gerard

www.michelgerardonline.com

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wow,great job.
best of luck to your daughter.

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My situation is similar but with very very different results. 99% of the time, it is always an asian girl + a foreign man. The child will always cling to its mother for security, and so that is why I have discovered how the expression "mother tongue" came about. We do not hear too often about "father tongue," even though it exists. It can be difficult for a child to learn the father tongue, I understand.

In my case, my son is 6 years old and was born in South Korea. You would naturally think he would be able to speak Korean because he was born here! But not the case at all. From Day 0, I spoke English to him, sang to him, played games in English, and watched A LOT OF English cartoons with American culture in it (not just regular TV). Growing up in another country lets the child "miss out on" his own other culture. He decided and declared strongly from the age of 3 his identity. He said, "I'm not Korean. I'm English." It meant in a sense, "I don't speak Korean (meaning "I refuse Korean", and I only speak English (because that is what I am comfortable with.)

We were kind of tormented by Korean society psychologically as to why he chose English as his main language. PLUS! He is a boy and boys don't work so hard like girls do when they are young. Boys are boys, if you know what I mean. This is getting long here. I feel like I could write a book on the topic of raising bilingual children! If you are interested, maybe I could write more professionally on my blog about that and HOW I had to deal and WHAT I did to overcome the trials.

Thank you @gungho for sharing with us your experience with teaching your son. I understand that each child is different and respond differently to learning languages. Writing post about this topic will interest people for sure and I encourage you to do it.

I think you are doing an awesome job as a dad to take responsibility in teaching your daughter French. Your devotion to teaching your daughter is just great to hear! She will definitely benefit from this later on down the road. Please keep us updated on her progress and I'm looking forward to hearing you share with us what you discover along the way.

Thank you very much @gungho for your kind words.

knowing multiple languages has several mental benefits other than knowing our native language

I totally agree with this because I am trilingual myself. Thank you for commenting @imran-aslam.

Thanks so much , I am struggling with my 5 years old son, he is not interested in learning french at all, so I am trying to find video games in french for him, as that's what he loves , especially car games!

I'll check out Mon Premier Dictionnaire En Image!
Merci Michel!

My daughter started to get interested in her first class at the "Alliance Française" because then she realized that the language was spoken not only by cartoon characters and myself, but others too. 5 is still young, the interest will come.

Very interesting post!
I have a small gift for you- your portrait:)

Great Michel i am absolutely agree that teaching is very difficult because parent child relationship.However it is a great task for you.

Thank you @tanveerali for your kind comment.

Je ne comprend pas.

That's one of the things I remember. Not really much. I really love the trilangual part. If I have time I will read that post a bit later.

Thank you @crypto-econom1st for commenting. French is a beautiful language, but difficult.

Cool, how did you end up living in France?

Oh must be tough if you're English. I'm in Montreal so it's half and half.

This post has received a 21.26 % upvote from @boomerang.

This post has received a 4.27 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @gmichelbkk.

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