Why Count In English When Spanish Is Easier!
Rachel started primary School this week. The sight of her in her ‘big girls’ uniform, walking into the classroom for the first time almost reduced me to tears. Worse was Jakes reaction to the situation, he wouldn’t talk to me the whole way home and spent the? rest of the morning asking “Can we go get Rachel now?”
Typical of Rachel, she settled brilliantly and her only problem with the whole primary school thing is that her teacher asked her not to count in spanish.
i should explain that Gerard took a few spanish conversation classes last year, and ever since has been introducing the odd word and phrase to the children. With the help of her dad and of course Dora The Explorer, Rachel can count to ten, as well as add and subtract in Spanish.
On her first day her teacher must have been trying to gauge her capabilties and was asking her to count some objects. Rachel proceeded to do so in spanish and was most offended when her teacher asked her to do it again in English.
Other than that we have had no issues. Rachel seems to enjoy school, so much so that she declared today “I wish i could stay there forever and never go home.” It doesn’t say much for my parentig skills does it?
1 Comment
Recent Posts
- The Atheist and the Cub Scouts
- Things I love about my kids, part #852: How they totally ‘get’ me.
- Dan’s greatest hits…
- So, how do they train dinosaurs to act?
- How our middle child is overcoming his shyness
- Adventures in parenting #1: Giving them independence
- Metamorphosis
- Blissful Autumn days out with the children
- Rachel At 10
- Do too many computer games make children averse to reading books?
Recent Comments
- Faith on The Atheist and the Cub Scouts
- Scouter on The Atheist and the Cub Scouts
- James on The Atheist and the Cub Scouts
- The Doubter on The Atheist and the Cub Scouts
- Drew on The Atheist and the Cub Scouts



The “Dora” effect is quite powerful. My niece is big fan and we have caught her commenting on cartoons in Spanish. The key is to have children learn foreign languages. My nephew 9, is fluent in four languages. While this is an exception it is not unrealistic to have children functionally bilingual before they are 10 even if they are not from bilingual homes.