English after five months in Australia

Leaving our seven and nine year old children behind on the first school days back in July felt like a horrible thing to do, since they did not speak nor understand much English. How is that feeling now, almost five months later?

Just a warning: if you do not like ‘proud parents’ posts, then you might just as well skip the rest of this post.

We went against school advise

When we signed our kids up for the local primary school and told that our children did not speak English yet, we were strongly advised to let them go to an English Language School. There they would learn the language for six months before going to a regular school. We did visit the Blackburn English Language School, but our intuition (and maybe the fact that all the signs on campus were written in several languages that we did not even recognize the letters of) made us decide that that was not the best solution for our children. The quickest way to learn a language is to be among children who speak it. So we took a bit of a risk going against school advise.

School evaluation after five months

Since our children have a hearing disability and are wearing hearing aids the teacher had to fill out a form for the hearing center. When we looked at it we could hardly believe the communication part of it:

So I guess we do not have to regret our decision to go against the school advise, do we?

Listen to them now

After five months in Australia our children are using English while playing and it seems to come natural to them. Have a listen:

Just for the record, English is not their native language. Amazing isn’t it? So I guess this qualifies for our 38 things we want to do in Australia list– Kai and Luka learning English.

Kai is already getting enthusiastic about writing the next Blog post himself. I wonder what language he is going to use for it….