...with
the sound of my family. Or they will be in a few days anyway.
My kids
are addicted to The Sound of Music. I encourage this
addiction – at least they're watching TV in English.
Living
in Germany, my children's first language is German. I speak English
to them, but they know I can understand their German perfectly well.
Our conversations go something like this.
Me:
How was school today?
Daughter:
Langweilig. Wir hatten zu viele Arbeitsblaetter.
Me:
How do you say that in English?
Daughter
walks away muttering that if she has to speak English, she won't talk
to me at all.
So this
is my current plan for cementing English in their lives:
I keep
speaking to them in English.
If I
want to know something from them, they can answer in German.
If they
want something from me, they have to ask in English.
"Could
I please have dessert?" and "Can I turn on the TV?"
are currently my daughter's two most popular English sentences.
So why
all this talk about The Sound of Music? Although we try to
limit the amount of TV they watch, if the program is in English,
there is a certain amount of education involved. I prefer DVDs,
because this evil mother has convinced her children that most DVDs
only have an English soundtrack.
Next
week, we have a few days off. Since the kids have seen The Sound
of Music four times in the last month, we've decided on Salzburg,
where the movie was filmed. It's only a few hours away, and we can
sing My Favorite Things and Do-Re-Mi the entire time
we're there. In English.
I might have run thru the meadows in the Salzburg area when we were on a class trip in highschool circa 1986...now i'm dating MYself :)
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