March Goals Review

In my last post on raising a bilingual child, I mentioned that we need to set goals to be more strategic in our bilingual journey. Then I showed our ultimate goals and 2017 goals. To make these yearly goals more manageable, I have decided to set each month a couple of smaller goals and share how it went with you all here on my blog. 

March Goals
For the month of March, the following were our goals:

• Do activities in my son's minority language for 10-15 minutes everyday on the weekdays

• Practice writing 2 letters a week

For the most part, I wanted to make this month a month to make habits, or to establish our routines. I figured once he gets used to our routines and expects to perform tasks in his minority language during certain times of the day, it'd be easier to incorporate other tasks and strategies later. It didn't matter so much what activities we did (working on printouts, reading a book, watching a tv show, etc.) but as a guide, I tried to have him work on one worksheet and 2 letters everyday.

How we did

As you can imagine, the first couple of days were the hardest, meeting my son's resistance. But things started to change at around the 5th day. He stopped refusing to sit down at his table and actually seemed to enjoy working on our workbook. And on a better day, he wanted to do more. I learned that he could practice 3 letters a week if the letters don't have complicated strokes, so for some weeks we practiced three. Overall, we missed only one day during the early days.

It's said, though, that it'll take 66 days to create a habit so our routines have not completely set at the time of this writing. But I have to say it's a lot easier now for him to sit down at his table and do activities together. Of course we have bad days like he's being too silly, tired, or just not in the mood but overall we're making a great progress in incorporating his minority language in our days.

April Goals:

• Keep working on our minority language activities for at least 10-15 minutes everyday on the weekdays
• Learn some word games in his minority language (called "siritori" しりとり)
• Learn to count with an appropriate classifier
• Practice writing 2-3 letters a week