So, I did it!! I've been playing with the idea of full-time homeschooling for years. I've been part-time homeschooling my younger kids (pulling my kids out of public school about one day a week) since Kindergarten. (Posts about Part-Time Home Schooling). But this past September, I decided to pull  Jonathan out of school and homeschool him full time for various reasons. And, after seeing how much ..read more

Just a few months ago, our fourth-oldest, Dallin, came home from serving a 2-year mission in Brazil. During that time, he didn't ever use his German. However, he became quite fluent in Portuguese! When he left for his mission, the three little ones were still speaking only German with each other and with all of us. In fact, 2 years ago, they spoke almost exclusively German at home. Since that ..read more

I thought I'd throw in another video from the good old days!! Watching this brought back lots of memories from the beginnings of our non-native bilingual parenting adventures. I remember that when the kids were first born, that it was hard to speak to them in German. It felt unnatural. However, as we persisted, it became more and more normal. This video is taken when Ben is two years old and ..read more

So, we have had an interesting language set-up in our house for the past decade: When the three youngest children joined our family, the older children and my husband and I decided to only speak German to them, so that they younger ones would learn German just like the older ones did. However, at that point in our family, the older kids were mostly speaking English to each other and to us. My ..read more

I came across this little snippet from almost 25 years ago. It reminded me how far we've come in the last 25 years. I remember having no idea if our little German experiment would work. Ben was our first child. We were college students at the time and dirt poor and so we only owned a handful of German books. But we read them a lot. We loved the picture dictionary books. The book that I'm reading ..read more

In order to help the kids continue to immerse themselves in German, I pull them out of their regular school about one day every week (or once every other week) and home school them in German. Like I've mentioned before, my kids' primary language is slowly switching from German to English. This is inevitable, since we live in the United States, my husband and I are native English speakers, all ..read more

We are continuing to "part-time home school" our three youngest children. I keep them home from school one day each week (more or less). On that day, usually it's a Wednesday, we do German lessons. I have a German 2nd grade curriculum that we work from . We also work a little on math and, often, I have them work on their regular school (English) homework. I especially like that our German ..read more

With half the kids grown up and moved out, it always makes me so happy when I see the older kids interacting with their siblings who are still at home via phone, skype, and text--especially when that interaction is in our target language: German. This afternoon, I caught Simon on the phone with his older sisters Kiana and Michaela. One of the reasons I recorded the conversation is because I ..read more

I try to have an honest blog. Raising kids is not easy. And raising kids in a language which you do not speak natively can be downright hard at times. But I know it can be done. I'm not the perfect example of non-native bilingual parenting. I know there are plenty of families who do a much better job than we have done. But neither we, nor any other family, is going to do it perfectly. Each ..read more

It's fun to see the kids reading in both English and German. We had a litter of kittens this winter. The kids love playing with all the kittens. She is excited to read her German cat book to her kitten. Even though the kids are speaking more English lately, they still speak a lot of German, too. We're trying to encourage them to read more German books so that they continue to learn new vocabulary ..read more