Thursday, September 03, 2009

Tarde

Now that she is in her kindergarten year and has a second work cycle instead of napping after lunch, we have a new phrase. When the Lone Star Baby is telling me about her day, she tells me about the trabajos she did, and says things like "I did sumas in the tarde" - always pointing out what was done in that second, new work cycle by saying "in the tarde*". I think it's so cute - my big girl.


*Tarde means afternoon or evening.

4 comments:

Andrea said...

Wow! Bilingual babe!

Lone Star Ma said...

Her school is Spanish immersion - no English.

Saints and Spinners said...

I think it would be cool if Spanglish would become more mainstream a la "Firefly" with Mandarin/English.

Lone Star Ma said...

Well - it is here. And in CA and NM, I expect. We and CA have the largest populations in the country, so it's coming, never fear.

That's why I feel it is so urgent that the kids are fluent - Spanish is the future in the U.S. I feel like I did a very bad job with the LSG - she has had a "Spanish class" in every school she's attended, but that's not enough. All she knows is low-level classroom Spanish and a little slang due to the Spanglishness of living here (I have a minor in Spanish and that's not enough). I always used to think I'd make up for it by sending her off for a month building latrines in some mission program to a poor area of Mexico or Central America in her early teen summers but now that she has deadly allergies, that isn't really a practical solution anymore. I have done so much better with the LSB, who is truly fluent, on a five-year-old level, but I fear she will lose it when she moves on in school (I have a cousin in Louisiana who went to a French immersion school all through elementary and lost her fluency almost immediately in junior high), since we do not really speak Spanish. I am hoping to get her into a local charter school that is dual-immersion and Montessori for elementary, but it's kind of a lottery thing.