Repatriate Me!

My kids have been in Summer camp for almost four weeks now – Friday will be the end of the fourth week. They’re both doing great and enjoying it alot.

My daughter, 9, has adjusted really well. I haven’t noticed too much improvement in her vocabulary or grammar yet. However her confidence in English has improved a lot and she’s using English a lot more with me now. In any case she can usually get her point across and understands almost everything she hears. Hopefully when she starts grade 4 in the fall she will be able to handle everything.

My son, 5, is also doing quite well as well. Before we came to Canada the only thing he could say in English was “hi” though he could understand quite a bit. In the last few weeks he has progress from that to using simple three and four word sentences with poor grammar. He is trying really hard and is now daily surprising me with new things that he says.

He is also struggling some what. He has asked to skip camp twice now because he’s tired and is frustrated because he can’t communicate very well with the camp counsellers or the other kids. The tired part is expected as he is the youngest kid in the camp and the pace is geared for kids 2-4 years older than he is.

Another example of his need to communicate freely is that our neighbor across our backyard fence is an older Korean couple. My son has started to call to them from the fence and talk to them as much as he can. They seem very patient and understanding of him, but obviously we are trying to discourage this as we don’t want our neighbors to be disturbed by our 5 year old nor do we want to become “those” people.

In any case my sons language progression is interesting to watch and it makes me wish I had kept some of my second language acquisition textbooks so that I could refresh my memory on what I had learned.

Aug 10, 2011 Comments(3) Tweet

children - english - schools