Portuguese

What a fabulous month June turned to be!

We have embraced Portuguese. We have succeeded in immersing ourselves in it and we have succeeded in taking pride in knowing, even if a little bit. Mission way under way!

I am going to use this platform to review Mar e Floresta, the Portuguese language immersion village, an experience made possible by Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota.

The family week was wonderful. The program started with three families. Ours had four members; a professor of Portuguese from the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis brought her husband and two young children (probably 1 and 3), and a MBA professor at the University of Iowa brought his 13-year old son.

The daily program was fixed, but the activities were all different. In the mornings there was breakfast, an hour language lesson, an hour activity followed by another hour of language lesson.
The afternoon consisted of an hour for lunch, a nap-time hour and a free time-hour, followed by an activity hour, a dinner hour, an activity hour, a telenovela hour and a fogueira.

The morning activities included football, quemada (a version of dodgeball), peteca, and cooking. The afternoon activities included archery and canoeing. During the bate-papo lessons, we reviewed
the Portuguese we already knew and some basic new vocabulary; we played games such as Spot-It in Portuguese to reinforce the new vocabulary. I enjoyed these activities. Mostly what I realized during these classes is that I didn't come here to have someone teach me the Portuguese I can easily and readily learn on my own from a language book; I benefited mostly from hearing proper speech and cleaning my own pronunciation, allowing myself to make mistakes, catch the mistakes, correct the mistakes and move on without care for grades or perfection. I think that for full benefit it helps to know a great deal and really soak up the immersive environment to smoothen out any misunderstandings and doubts. As an immersion program there was a lot of singing and dancing-a full hour dedicated to music. Perfection!

The food was fantastic. Three rich and fulfilling meals with nothing lacking and providing a great variety. Even if you are a very picky eater, you will not go hungry here.

The environment is very relaxed. I dare say that the week I spent at camp is the first true vacation I have taken. No stress, no rush, no deadlines; just beautiful nature and tranquility.

The housing. Yes, it is a camp. It is not a five start hotel, neither is it a three. As long as there is a bed to sleep on and not freeze over or die of heat exhaustion, I am quite happy. I was very happy with the accommodations. Bring your linens and you will be fine.

The evening activities included introduction to some literary characters, a scavenger hunt, Olympic games style competition; on-going telenovela which was great fun - acted by the counselors, the story could be rewound and fastforwarded for ease of understanding. It was interactive which pleased the audience.

The best was the counselors. The people make the experience. The interactions, the ideas, the attitude-this not only completes but defines the experience.

I highly recommend Mar e Floresta. The only inconvenience for me is the drive but hey, it is worth driving ten times more to have such an experience.

What did Mar e Floresta mean for the kids. First, my little man showed that he can understand and also speak. For my girl, it meant a glimpse of independence, a glimpse of confidence, of empowerment. She lost the shyness and led a class, sang songs, asked questions, participated in activities. This is priceless. They both learned about all the countries who officially admit Portuguese, something very important which I would have overlooked and had indeed overlooked!

So next year, we are not only going back for family week, the young lady is going back for two weeks of immersion. Hurray for this fabulous discovery, at the right moment of our lives!

Concordia villages offers youth immersion camps and family immersion camps for 15 languages! Aproveite! Bom acampamento!

Outsourcing

I have been teaching Ballet girl to read Bulgarian since she was three and a half. Now, three years later, she reads well. So yesterday, at my father’s request, I officially outsourced to my parents the week-days practices of reading Bulgarian. During the weekends I will continue to listen to Ballet Girl read. Prior to that I outsourced piano practice: during the week Ballet Girl practices under my mom's supervision, and during the weekends she and I work together. This strategy for piano has proven to work very well and I hope the reading is the next success. I plan to outsource English reading once school begins because Ballet Girl’s skills are solid in this realm as well.

Being able to outsource some of Ballet Girl's schooling activity is a tremendous relieve. In principle, I value play time and I am always reluctant to trade play for school work; in fact, I feel guilty whenever I need to pull the kids out of play time to do our homework activities, but I also strongly believe in persistence and consistency so the conflict will remain. The outcome has been that the kids are the last to leave the playground and the school work is left for the evenings when we all could be tired and moody. So, having some of the mechanical skill-practice tasks done during the day in my absence, followed by enough play time, leaves me feeling energized and confident to introduce new concepts, and to have longer discussions in the evenings through our read-alouds.

I also freed our weekends so that we can have more time to introduce and discuss new school concepts and spend the week exploring them closely.