Multilingual Homeschooling Questions

When I was first interested in homeschooling my children, I was often confronted with the issue of mutli-language learning. I kept asking myself questions like is it better for them to learn English first and then French, but then what about Turkish and Arabic ? Is four too much ? How about reading and writing ?
As I was researching and trying my hardest to find answers to these tough questions, I stumbled upon this website, multilingualparenting.com and their weekly Q&A sessions. I quickly sent Rita Rosenbeck a question hoping to have some answers so that I could start planning my school year.

I have been following your Facebook page for a while and I have really enjoyed the articles that you post. I may not have read all of them, but I have saved most for later when I find time.
I am contacting you to seek some advice or possible resources to implement in our multilingual and multicultural family. I am American and my husband is Turkish (he speaks two other languages as well). We live in Paris, France with our two children (two and a half and one) and we are a Muslim family so we are learning Arabic all together at the same time. My husband and I speak French together as we are unable to communicate in each other’s languages.
We follow the one parent, one language approach but sometimes I speak French in with my kids. We are going to be homeschooling our oldest in preschool next year and I am concerned that she will not be exposed to the French language as much as she would if she was at school. We will try to visit the library and go out and do activities as much as possible but I am still afraid that she will not be speaking it as much as English or Turkish. Both my husband and I are not fluent in French, I do however speak French a little better than he, so my questions are:
1. How do we teach French to our children as a non-native speaker? My daughter has already started speaking a little French, thanks to La Maison de Mickey that she watches daily.
2. Will she pick up my English accent when speaking French? Will this cause problems later down the road if she goes to school?
3. How do we expose our children to all our languages throughout our homeschool day? Should I do one day in French, one day in English or alternate throughout the day? We’ve been reviewing the alphabet and numbers in French. I have decided that at least one day a week will be dedicated to French, exclusively speaking French. Please let me know if this is or isn’t a great idea.
4. How do I start reading and writing with all the languages?

Although I didn’t get the answer as soon as I would have liked, her answer did help and provide me with the resources so that I could start answer my questions and eventually planning my activities. Still 6+ months later, I am referring back to the answers and using her tips to enhance my activities.
Here is the link to the answer I received : http://multilingualparenting.com/2016/06/12/qa-bilingual-homeschooling-how-to-successfully-integrate-more-than-one-language/

Ocean Theme Unit

I decided that I would start planning month-long units to help save time on planning and prepping – because I’ve been struggling to find time for all the stuff that I “try” to do daily/weekly.

This is how I plan a lesson : I start pinning a board based on theme of the unit : ocean, for example. Then I look through all of the ideas that I pin, decide on what I would like to do with the kids, print out worksheets, gather the needed materials (like manipulatives), laminate the worksheets and then decide when and how I’ll present each activity.

Currently we our studying about the ocean : sealife, animals, story of Prophet Jonah (Yunus) and the whale, water and land formations, etc.

Here are some the activities we have been enjoying so far:

Will the egg sink or float ?

The egg definetly floated in the salt water (above picture). But the activity quickly turned to be more of a bath than a science experiment, Z enjoyed sticking his hand in the cup and then splashing the water around.

 

Introduction to Land vs. Water animals

Blue bowls represent water and the green represents land

“Starfish” beads transfering and counting in land and water trays

Z decided to create a drum with two spoons and an empty container while we explored our ocean sensory bin – he came with the idea himself

Coloring sorting “smartie” (french m&ms) in the matching boats

We either read this book in French (like it is written) or we translate it into English

F has an interest for penguins. She likes to waddle around like one and talk about them all the time

For more of our activities : follow us on Instagram - @resourceful_muslimah