4.5 hours on a Sunday - too much

[mixedmamameansbusiness]

I have always intended to enrol DS1 at an extra school for learning my home language and culture etc. I havent done very well in teaching him myself mostly as I come from a mixed heritage background so my dad is the only other person who could speak to the children using it but he uses English as everyone around us speaks English.... my own relationship is another mixed one so havent exclusively used the language much.

DS1 has shown interest and will watch films and look at books in Turkish.

The problem is that the school is run as a proper school and he would need to be there at 9.45am on a Sunday and school finishes at 2pm plus there are extra-curricullar activities he can take part in (art, folk dance and instruments I believe).

They have homework like a normal school and assemblies etc.

It just seems like an awfully long time on top of normal school although it will provide him and us if I am honest with a community which we lack at the moment.

My dd and ds go to German Saturday School and love it. It is a great help to us in not only raising them bilingually but also giving them access to German culture, celebrations, friends etc.

If your ds is interested, I would definately let him go - what a great opportunity .

Thx. I guess we can always stop if it gets too much.

I think you should try it. If it is too much, you can stop and what will you have lost? At the most, the yearly fees I suppose. If he just had Turkish lessons once or twice a week, he would probably never become fluent, unless you go to Turkey on holiday every year but even then it would probably not be sufficient to be truly bilingual.

What could work quite well would be to go and spend a gap year there, after which I think he would speak quite well. That sort of thing would do it if this Saturday school is too much.