The very puzzling caterpillar

As I wrote before, I often read English books in Russian for Sasha. It is very interesting to see his reaction to certain books. There are sometimes pages that puzzle him, and he keeps returning to those again and again. For example in Tubby Time by Leslie Patricelli, Sasha always pauses on the page where the baby got soap in her eyes. He keeps pointing at it and asking something in his own language, and my only guess is that he thinks that the baby is crying and he wants to know why. And I cannot find the right way to explain to him that the baby got soap in her eyes.

And so is the case for The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. Sasha keeps turning to the page where the caterpillar is extra fat, right before it turns into a cocoon.

I keep going through the book and explaining that the caterpillar ate through everything and turned into a cocoon to eventually become a butterfly, but Sasha seems confused... Until one day he just pats on the brown cocoon and says: "Kaka, kaka i pakaka", which sounds exactly like my expression: "Какал, какал и покакал!" (Pooped, pooped, and pooped it all out!).

It may be funny to you, but this is the most logical explanation to the child who is often constipated after his parents feed him all kinds of stuff. It definitely makes more sense than some cocoon. And hey, at least, Sasha does not think that the caterpillar is a "wasteful capitalist"!

Hi stands for Hawaii

It was only expected that the trip to Grannie and Gramps would help Sasha acquire more English words. While still in the air, Sasha had already somehow picked up the word "Hi!", and he was using that consistently for 15 minutes on the lady in the seat behind us. Once we arrived to Hawaii, that Hi! grew stronger and stronger each day. Coming down the stairs for breakfast, he would start saying Hi! before we turn around the corner into the living room.

Among other things that Sasha has mastered in Hawaii (such as pulling himself up to standing in the crib or showing with his finger how the blades of a fan rotate) was also the ability to throw objects on the floor and say: "Uh-oh!", as well as communicating with fingers and expression "Gak!" to get whatever he desired at that very moment. He also was heard to say: "Ducks!", when the viewing of such was suggested.

Interestingly enough, his American Gramps is known to Sasha under Russian word дедушка (he doesn't say it, but he turns to Gramps when he hears it). Why - nobody knows. There were plenty of opportunities for Sasha to learn the English word, but it just didn't happen, so far.

Another oddity: Upon arrival back to Denver, Sasha doesn't say Hi! as enthusiastically and as often as he did in Hawaii, but he did start waiving Goodbye!, except that he squeezes his hand instead of waiving.

As I have previously read in "Raising a bilingual child" by Barbara Zurer-Pearson, the progress in one language can potentially drive the progress in the second language. And I think, it is really the case for Sasha: his comprehension of Russian has improved drastically since the trip to Hawaii. He understands more words and more sentence types. I can ask him a question, and he responds with yes or no. Here is a a couple of our typical conversations, as translated from Russian:

- Do you want more?
- No-no!
- Do you want water?
- No-no!
- Do you want to nurse?
- Yes-yes-yes!

- Do you want to go for a walk?
- No-no!
- Do you want to play with your trucks?
- No-no!
- Do you want to read some books?
- Yes-yes-yes!
(after reading books for 30 minutes and playing with trucks for 15 minutes)
- Do you want to go for a walk?
- Yes-yes-yes!

So, the next step would be to introduce him to questions that require the answer other than yes or no. Something like multiple choice questions. So far, I was unsuccessful communicating with him that way. I think he focuses more on the end of the sentence and says yes or no to whatever is the last choice. That's something to work on.

Compliments of the Season

We are leaving for Hawaii tomorrow. I am not sure how many blogging opportunities I will get, but I just wanted to congratulate everyone on their holidays. Whether it's Christmas, or Hannukah, or Al Eidha, or Kwanza, or New Years, or Russian Christmas, or Russian Old New Years - I am celebrating with you! The great thing about winter is that everyone has something to celebrate.


To me, one thing that really sums up my holiday spirit is a tangerine: bright, sweet, with a tangy surprise that you need to unwrap. When I was growing up in Soviet Union, we didn't have that many fruits in winter, as there are available now. For New Year's - our only winter holiday - we used to get подарок (literally - a gift), a bag filled with goodies: 1 apple, 1 orange, 3-5 tangerines, suckers, Lemon Drops, fudge, some chocolates, and walnuts. This was a classic present that every Soviet child received throughout their kindergarten and grade school years. Of course, our parents bought us other gifts, but this was a highlight of celebration, because the entire class would chip in on those goodies, and parents would sort them in individual bags. 


Every year, I would get a photograph of myself in a carnival costume holding my podarok, with tangerines in it. Knowing that this would be one of the few opportunities to eat them, I would prioritize all the stuff in my goodie bag to ensure the continuity of my tangerine indulgence. The last thing in the bag would be a tangerine.


Then, the year when my aunt left the Soviet Union, my parents traveled to Moscow and to Lithuania for her stuff and brought home ... a huge case of tangerines! Right in time for New Year's! They spread them on a blanket in the corner of our living room in order to prevent rotting, and for the first time we could eat all the tangerines we wanted. The continuity of indulgence was guaranteed by a pile remaining on the blanket. I was sick that winter and had to be quarantined (or maybe it was just an excuse for more tangerines?). I remember picking out just 3 to 5 tangerines at a time, placing them on a brass tray and eating them slowly, enjoying every segment. I don't think I ever got to the point where I couldn't eat them anymore. I just kept going back to the pile with my brass tray, until only bad ones were left...


A couple of years ago, here in Denver, I was walking home from work. It was just a couple of days before Christmas, lots of snow, and pretty chilly. On the 14th & Grant, a homeless man asked me if I had any change to spare. I didn't. "But", I said. "I have some tangerines. Would you like some?" He enthusiastically replied yes. I reached in my purse and pulled out 3 bright tangerines and placed them in his hands which he held like a bowl. "Thank you", he said, and from his voice I could really tell that he would enjoy them. I don't remember his face or what he was wearing. Just those tangerines in his bowl shaped hands. Bright orange surrounded by white, cold snow.

What strikes me is that we really enjoy things if we don't have that many of them. In other words, we cherish things when they aren't overly abundant. We remember those moments of abundance as happy moments, if the abundance is not all the time. I am not saying that we should all become homeless, but I probably wouldn't appreciate tangerines today as much as I do, if I had them year around growing up. Maybe the key to happiness is to find a tangerine moment in everything we do.


Happy Holidays!

Tune in

So, here is a new idea for exposing your child to even more foreign language media - online radio stations for kids. It took me literally 5 seconds to find a Russian radio station, which streams directly from Moscow (there is a down part about this - the shows run on Moscow time, ceasing all children programming around 9 pm) and offers variety of shows for children and parents, including story times, music hour, educational shows and shows on parenting and pediatrics for parents - all in Russian! Obviously, Sasha is a little bit too young to follow what they say on the radio, but this will be a great tool to promote more Russian around the house.

Another great thing about those radio stations is that their websites usually have archives of previous shows, as well as games, resource links, and coloring pages. A couple of quick searches - and I found a some stations in other languages, too. Here are all my finds:

Russian - www.deti.fm

German - www.radioteddy.de

Italian - www.laradiolina.it

French - www.radiojunior.com

I couldn't find anything in Spanish, tough. Maybe Google translator messed up my translation of "online radio for children" into Spanish?

In my opinion, listening to online radio is better than listening to audio classes in the same language, because a bilingual kid does not need a language instruction, he just needs more exposure to various media and people who speak that language. Of course, it wouldn't be right to just stick your child in front of the computer (since this is internet radio) and walk away. Parents should be listening, too, and singing along, playing along, and following up after a story or a show to make sure that the child understood what was going on. It helps to read the programming schedule and show description in advance, so that you are prepared to guide your child through the new information he will be getting from the radio.

Funny words

Sasha finds шпатель (Russian for spatula) funny. I don't know why, but every time he pulls out the spatula out of his treasure basket and I name it, he giggles or at least smiles. He also tries to repeat the word. There must be something about how this word sounds that makes him giggle, I suppose.

He also really enjoys when I mimic cats, tigers, and lions. Cats purr and meow, and Sasha loves my meow sounds and tries to repeat. And tigers and lions roar, which in Russian is just a rolled R, and that makes Sasha very eager about rolling his Rs, although he has been unsuccessful in that, as of yet.

And, of course, Sasha himself says some stuff that make me giggle: bookabooka, takalaka, gheegaleega, and many more. I am pretty sure that bookabooka is just another way to say book, or it might be even a combination if English word and Russian grammar (Russian word for book - книга - ends with a which marks feminine gender of the word).

As for the other funny words, it's hard to say what he means. In one situation recently, he said a very long undecipherable sequence while looking at me, like he was trying to communicate something to me, and when I asked him: "What did you say?", he giggled and said yet another long sequence that did not sound anything like the first one. This might be just another form of mature babble, where he just uses a lot of syllables without naming a specific object. (Maybe he wanted me to play him cartoons on DVD. Who knows... Recently, he has been showing a lot of interest in that DVD player.)

But as we know, no verbal utterance is just utter. If a child communicates, he does it for reason.

A friend of mine shared with me recently that she knows a mother that does not really "trust" my friend's opinion on communicating with young children. Basically, my friend was asked what was the point of talking to a 10 month old, if they just babble senselessly. A recent study from Cornell University showed that the way mothers respond to babble utterances impacts how fast infants learn all sounds of their language. So,  definitely, talking to a small child - even if you don't understand the word he says - makes a difference in their language acquisition. Of course, you cannot strike a conversation with your infant about the scandalous WikiLeaks publications or tell him a hilarious joke by Jon Stewart, but it makes all the difference if you just narrate their daily life and their moves through their environment, so that some day he can tell you about a bookabooka by Malcolm Gladwell that he recently read.

A new school with Russian immersion program

As I was writing previously, Global Village Academy was applying for a new charter school north of Denver. The school would feature four dual language immersion programs, including Russian-English. So, the great news that I received a couple of days ago is that their application has been approved. Here is the full email from them:

Global Village Academy Announcement

We are pleased to announce that the Adams 12 Five Star School Board unanimously approved the Global Village Academy charter!  GVA will open for the 2011-2012 school year. We are in final negotiations for a building in the Northglenn area and a final decision will be made by the end of January.  We know that many of you are anxious to start with volunteer work and more information on that will be coming by the end of the week.  Where you can help the most is with student recruitment.  Tell all your friends and neighbors about GVA! Thank you for your enthusiasm and support during this process.  This could not have happened without you.  We look forward to working with you in the coming months. Sincerely - Christina Burton Executive Principal John Kaufman Vice Principal Charmaine Nicolau Communications Coordinator

This is especially thrilling because there is a total of 2 or 3 other Russian immersion programs in the US. So, our options for Sasha's dual immersion education were very limited, but now there is this new school in  Denver Metro Area. Well, by 2015, we have to move to the suburbia in order for Sasha to attend that school. He is already on the waiting list with them for that year. I will let you know further details, as I get more messages from them.

Books, books, books...

I haven't written anything in a while, and I would like to blame it on Thanksgiving weekend. As everybody else, we had four days filled with turkey feasts, visits with friends and car trips. Car trips is something that we don't do often, because we don't own a car. And I noticed that car trips resulted in not just less movement, but, with mommy and daddy sitting in the front, also in less direct communication with Sasha. It was mostly him listening to mommy and daddy speaking English. So, I guess, long weekends and vacations will always mean more English, and I would just have to make up for Russian afterwards.

During the dinner at a friend's house, Greg was telling everybody how he reads "Great Day For Up!" by Dr. Seuss to Sasha every morning. As Greg was reciting two or three lines from the book, Sasha all of a sudden said very loud and clearly: "Up! Up!". I am not sure if he understands that he could use this word to tell us that he wants to be picked up, but he definitely remembers the book.

And as I previously wrote, he is becoming quite a book lover, spreading the night time books on our bed, when it's time for bed time stories.

His favorite Russian book is "Where did the sparrow eat his lunch?" by S.Marshak. It's about the sparrow eating lunch at the zoo with all these different animals. He ate carrots with the elephant, and grains with the rhino... And the crocodile almost ate him. Sasha really loves that book, anticipating every line. He also pulls it out from the shelve, when he is in that play area.

In the meantime, the holidays are rapidly approaching. So, I tried to find some nice winter time books at the library. Now, the problem will be that Sasha does not really want to read any new books. Instead, he prefers to read his favorite ones over and over again. So, I tried the counting book "One Snowy Day" with no success.

Any other suggestions for good winter time books?

Bilingual schools

You might think that it is too early to be thinking about Sasha's education when he is just a year old. In case of our family, just choosing a good school is not enough. It is critical that the school that we choose does not discourage bilingualism.

Why would I say "discourage bilingualism"? Well, the widespread ELA programs (English Language Acquisition) discourage the use of any language other than English in a school setting. Kids who speak some other language more fluently than English are called English Language Learners and are told to take ELA classes, as well as some of them are paired up with English native speakers for improving their English communication skills. Apparently, legally, public schools are supposed to provide everyone with equal access to education, and that is why those ELA programs started appearing everywhere. It may be a great program for newcomers to America, but at the same time it sends a message that kids should deny their identity and that all other languages are not acceptable.

Fortunately, there is also a movement for dual language immersion education. Dual language immersion schooling starts out at Kindergarten or 1st grade level with kids spending 50% of every school day in a language other than English. That means that half of their classes (including math, history, etc) are taught in a language other than English. And in many cases you need to have special educational materials, because you cannot just use English language math books when you are using Spanish as a medium. These programs slowly introduce more and more English, and generally immersion programs end in the 8th grade. The logic behind K-8 immersion programs is that there is a critical period for language learning which closes at approximately 14 years of age. After that, it takes more effort to learn new languages. (Which is true, if you think about all those youngsters that take in languages like a sponge, while their parents struggle to learn a few hundred words for years).

While there are many immersion school, public, charter and private ones, around the US, it is actually very difficult to find a Russian immersion program. There is not enough community need and not enough general interest in Russian. The most wide spread immersion programs are the ones in Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and French. There is also a new interest in Arabic. And there are some regional specifics, for example, Hawaii has several immersion programs for Hawaiian language.

In Denver, there is no Russian immersion program currently. However, Global Village Academy - a charter school in Aurora, CO - has applied for a new school in a suburb north of Denver. Their new school, if approved, will offer the Dual Russian-English Immersion program. We live quite far from that suburb, but we have already put Sasha on a waiting list with this new, not-yet-existent school. If it does not open, we will have no options for immersion education in Denver for him. So let's hope it will.

Language delay in bilinguals

So far, I have met two children who are being raised with multiple languages and have been diagnosed with a slight language delay at 18 months.

In Denver, there is a special free service from Denver Options, where a development specialist can come to your home for free, observe the child and diagnose any delay in speech or motor skills.

In two cases that I have heard of, children were diagnosed with a speech delay, and now their parents are being discouraged from using other language with their child. By other language I mean other than English. So, now these parents are confused: "Did my bilingual efforts cause this delay?".

This has been blogged about, and talked about: "Well, don't you think that your child will be confused about what language he should speak? Well, aren't you concerned how he will do in school?"

In my opinion, this is just how people discomfort with foreign culture and language manifests itself. "I am confused about this bilingual code switch, and so this child should be, too". In the reality, there are many places around the world where people live in a multilingual society - Switzerland, Ethiopia, India, and many more. And nobody in those societies questions whether their child should speak more than one language. In those societies, this is the only way to success in school, social life and business.

Coming back to those kids that I know. One is 3 years old, and another one is 19 months. They do seem to be more quiet in comparison to other kids. The 3 year old uses only English. She has been in English speech therapy, and her mom felt that using English with her would help. By now, she can still address her in her native language (I am omitting the information about what languages are being used with those kids, because I do not want those families to be identified), but the child only responds in English.

The second child has been diagnosed with a slight speech delay just a month or so ago. Originally, the father raised the concern about the child not saying any words. Denver Options diagnosed the child and offered speech therapy. Now, therapist comes about once per week and plays different games with the girl, games that would encourage communication. The therapy is in English. Sign language is also being introduced. The mom tries to copy the speech therapy techniques, and also switches more and more to English.

I have just seen the second girl again today on the playground. And at some point during play, she raised her hands to the sky and said something. We didn't really understand what she said and what language was used, but she does say stuff. I wonder if the therapy is working or if there was no delay. According to this article on Mommy Maestra, which is written by linguists who are working on a study of language delays in bilinguals, testing a bilingual child in one language guarantees lower scores than testing a monolingual child of the same age group. But if you combine vocabulary from both languages, you may get even a higher score. So, the question is if those programs available in our communities can properly diagnose language problems in bilinguals.

At the same time, I would like to say that Denver Options is probably a great service, because it is free, and they come to your house. I am just seeing two families that are convinced that their bilingualism caused speech delay in their child.

Sasha, Books & Kiki

I am a strong believer that you cannot just drill a vocabulary into a small child and expect him to know and use those words. Our environment sets up the stage for learning, and the first words that a child learns reflect his day-to-day living, his routines, his likes & dislikes.

And so, it is easily explainable why the new addition in Sasha's vocabulary is книжки / books. And I have to say that I have heard him saying book in English, and also trying to pronounce книжки in Russian. The Russian word for books is very difficult to pronounce, because it has the sound zh (there is no way to really spell it in English), but he just says kiki instead of knizhki.

Sasha is being read to by Greg in English every morning and every night. The repertoire includes Dr. Seuss and Sandra Boynton, as well as others. I read to Sasha in Russian, but I do it during the day when the mood strikes, and there is no routine around it. We keep cardboard books on the lowest shelve in the living room, and Sasha can pull them out if he wants to. That's usually when I read to him. I just read the books that he pulls from the shelve, and with advice from a friend, I am just translating the English ones as I go.

So, lately, when Sasha sees books and wants us to read to him, he says kiki a lot. Also, there were nursing sessions, from which Sasha just crawled away towards kiki. The episode when Sasha used the English word was also a nursing routine right before bed. Usually, I nurse him, and then Greg comes in and reads him some bedtime stories. So, on that particular occasion, Sasha was overly excited and did not nurse too well. He kept stopping looking at me and saying stuff that I don't understand yet. So, he looked up and said: "Papa?" And I responded in Russian: "Yes, Daddy is coming soon, let's eat some more". So, he nursed another second or two, looked up and said: "Book?" So, obviously, the English word is strongly associated with Dad, who reads to him in English.