But we don't speak Italian!...
When
we arrived in Italy, we put our children into Italian public schools.
(Which is sort of like learning to swim by being thrown into the deep
end of the pool.) We had one or more of our children in each school (i.e., scuola
materna, scuola elementare, scuola media, and liceo). We also had two
at the università (below in the picture).Each child (youngest to oldest) progressed differently with this new language. On Savannah’s first day of Italian school (a Catholic preschool) she didn’t care that the other kids only spoke Italian, she just ran off to play. Paige (who had attended this school the prior year) became Savannah's teacher. One day Anne-Marie said, "I just heard Paige explaining something to Savannah in Italian!" Hannah had a real facility for the language but Andrew struggled (due to his hearing). Trevor didn't speak much Italian at home but his friends said that his language skills were very good (he was the family translator of all Latin phrases we found while traveling in Italy). After a few short months, Craig was sometimes mistaken for being from another part of Italy and Rebecca was able to keep her Spanish and learn Italian (which is something her father couldn't do and I lived in South America for several years).
The bottom line is that kids are truly sponges when it comes to learning languages (and anything else for that matter).
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