Heather….Boa tarde! Tudo bem?
We are a South African family living in São Paulo and have been here a year already….and my portuguese is still not up to full converstation level LOL!! If I wasn’t homeschooling, then I’d probably be fluent by now :0)
I decided to go with Rosetta Stone instead of getting a private tutor. I ordered it through Sonlight and got the homeschool version where you can keep track of your kid’s progress. It is based on natural immersion and I love it. It has taken a while for my son (6,5) to ‘catch on’ as it moved too fast for him a year ago. But, now he loves it and thinks it’s fun and picks up new vocab very quickly. They only make levels 1-3 in Brazilian portuguese, whereas other languages go up to level 5 but I’m finding it very helpful and it moves at a slow enough pace to really enforce the language. My husband has private lessons at work and he moves quicker through new ‘concepts’ but he forgets them and doesn’t pronounce as well as I do, LOL!, because with RS, you get so much more review and practice. You can also select the areas that you want each child to cover, for eg. I do the whole program which includes listening, reading, writing, speaking, grammer, vocab but for my son I’ve only selected listening and speaking for him. Part of the program involves repeating a sentence back to the computer and it will only move on if your pronounciation is good enough.
I know it’s expensive but Sonlight often have special offers on it and it’s been so great for us so far. It’s like a game for my son, when we go into the progam on the computer, a native-speaker says a sentence and he’s got to click on the right picture. If you go to http://www.sonlight.com you can see a sample of how Rosetta Stone works, it may not be the portuguese version but you’ll get a good idea of how it is done.
Otherwise, I would say just talk to your kids in portuguese as much as you can, but not in long sentences in the beginning, but exactly how you spoke to them when they were toddlers..starting off with one word at a time, naming things, then moving on to 2-3 word phrases, talking as you are doing things together etc. I think pretty much what Sonya has suggested above. The main thing is LOTS of repetition, just like you would have done when they were learning to speak english.
Good luck :0)
Noelene