Is it possible to follow Charlotte's advices with any "first language"?

Since you describe yourself as a french speaking family in a french speaking environment, I would follow Charlotte’s methods, and use copywork as the main method of teaching french spelling and grammar for your young children. Since you use English language living books so often and you are able to converse in English, I would think that would be enough for English at this time. Your children seem to understand quite a bit of English from books and conversation. I would suggest narrations be done more often in french, even if the reading is in english, and have them narrate in english once or twice a week, as well as your daily english conversation.

I don’t know who sent me the message anymore since everything got deleted.

I would be curious to know where you are in Quebec, I don’t know if we will be able to do private messages anytime soon!? There is someone I met through this forum doing CM in Quebec, she lives near my mom’s so we met when I went to visit. Pretty cool!

Anyways, no I don’t think it would be enough, they need to hear and speak it on a regular basis to learn it but I am assuming they are already doing this.

Other than that I think narrations, copywork and dictations should be enough for now. They are learning grammar as they read and write. You can point out their mistake, they will learn grammar this way also.  You could always start more grammar if you feel anxious but I would not over do it. Probably starting in 5th grade would be enough.

I don’t think I would be teaching all of the verbs tenses, some of them are really useless IMHO. But I do not know what is required in Quebec and what you need to do as far as testing.

Hi Annie,

We’ve been able to apply Charlotte Mason’s methods in Russian and I’ll bet you’ll do a great job of it in French.  Charlotte Mason considered the French way ahead of the Brits at the time in having living books for science.  In fact, we use a Russian translation of Jean-Henri Fabre’s “Life of the Insects” and an English translation of his “Storybook of Science” for natural history and science.  Fabre’s written many wonderful books for science and I wonder if those aren’t easily found in French.

As said, your living books in French, along with copy work and dictation will take care of grammar.  Other subjects that we apply Miss Mason’s methods to in Russian which seem easily applicable in any language are composer study, picture study, poetry study, and folksongs.  If I am teaching math, I teach in English and if my husband is drilling with them, it is in Russian – since the rules are the same they just had to learn the terms in each language.  We have our subjects in both languages depending on the book/artist and the kids don’t have a problem with switching back and forth.  They also haven’t picked up my accent 🙂 If we read in English, we narrate in English and if we are reading in Russian, we narrate in Russian.

History is also the area where I have not been able to find “living books” in Russian until we reach high school. I hope you can find them in French for the younger years.  A commonplace book and a book of centuries could both be kept in French.

All my best,

Richele

Hi Annie,

I think Fabre’s book, “Storybook of Science” is “La Science de l’ Oncle Paul” in French if that helps at all.   I was thinking that “Les Fables de la Fontaine” might be a good place to find dictation (when you start it) and copy work.  We had an English translation in Year 1 that my kids really enjoyed.

Russian is my husband’s first language and my second.  We live in western Massachusetts and made the conscious decision that I would speak Russian with the children as well since I am with them the greatest amount of time.  Please don’t be scared that you are not a good enough English teacher for your children.  In some areas, my children have a wider Russian vocabulary than I do (for example, they taught me the names of many insects as well as naval commands such as “starboard” and “port”).  Other than a handwriting book (Russian uses the cyrillic alphabet) we don’t use a formal Russian language curriculum.  Russian has six cases and a pretty complex verb conjugation system but our kids speak grammatically correct without a formal study of grammar.

They are both fluent in Russian and English.  The 12-year-old doesn’t care which language he uses while the 10-year-old prefers English. My older son reads more quickly in English and his younger brother would prefer playing to reading 😉 so it pretty much follows their personalities. I have my younger son read aloud to me from a Russian primer of traditional fables.  Neither of my boys love to write but they do love to talk.  We continue on using CM’s methods and they are progressing well in writing (if you’ve seen SCM’s subject-by-subject blog series, it gives Charlotte’s methods in each subject in a nutshell).

English is the primary language spoken where we live while Russian is the primary language of our home.  Our history, math and science is in English as we haven’t had an easy time of it finding living books in these languages. We are rich in Russian nature books, poetry, fairytales, folktales, fables and music.  We hope to be able to add in Russian living books in high school (Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, etc.) and we will see how we do with science books in Russian.  My husband does things like woodworking projects and model-building with them.  They are currently restoring a motorcycle in the basement so they get a pretty varied vocabulary.  When my husband gets home he asks them about their school day so they are narrating in Russian what they’ve already narrated to me in English.  My husband usually corrects any grammatical errors they make when they are speaking with him in general conversation and has them repeat the sentence back correctly. They Skype with their grandparents in Russia as well.

I don’t think our school days are any longer with two languages.  If we have a subject in Russian then we don’t have another in English on the same day. I hope this is helpful to you, Annie.  I definitely have an accent in Russian but my boys don’t have my accent.  I’ve never been able to roll my R’s the way a Russian does but both my boys do so beautifully.

All my best,

Richele