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Changing the language of school at age 8
Written by Silke Rehman
Dear members,

I wanted to update you on our move from Dubai to Germany and how it affected our 8-year-old daughter and her languages. After 2 baby years in French speaking environment, 6 years in English speaking nurseries/schools and a mother (me :-) !) only speaking German to Chiara.... Chiara has managed just fine to follow her new German speaking school !!!! Yeah !

I know this is due to me rigorously following the language strategies I had chosen in her baby years (one-person-one-language) and NEVER speaking anything but German to her (which was tough with an English speaking husband, English speaking friends, English peers in school and English speaking school !). But it has all been worth it. She is doing fine, follows well.

I must say, though, that it helped enormously, that I started the German reading & writing course 1.5 years ago and taught my little group of half German kids (who were all going to English school) how to read in German. For the last 6 months before our move, I also taught them how to write in German....at least the basics of it. Given the kids could all read and write in English, it did not seem difficult as loads of reading and writing skills are actually transferable (e.g. they know what letters, words, punctuation are and they already have strategies for reading and writing).

Now, when I decided to offer the reading & writing course I had no idea we would ever move to Germany. What I had was my objecitve and strategy, that I worked out years ago and stuck to rigorously (sticking to a well chosen language strategy is one of the success factors for raising bilingual children). My objective was that for English and German I wanted Chiara to reach university level, so she could choose where to go to university without language getting in the way. So, that's what had motivated to teach her reading and writing in German...and now it has paid off !

I wanted to share this first report with you and will keep telling you how we are doing. If you would like to share your experiences regularly on this site to help our fellow members, just let me know by mailing me at silke@themlnetwork.com and I will get you set up from your home computer.
Talk again soon !
Silke
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