Special considerations for bilingual kids starting school?

[whenhenshaveteeth]

Morning,

My son will soon start school, he speaks French and English and I was wondering if I needed to watch out for some things when he starts school.

Are there any pitfalls? Is there anything I can do to help with with his minority language?

Where do you live? What is the main language at home? OPOL?

He will be quite young still - they start early in France, am I right? I suppose a lot depends on how well developed the minority language (i.e. the one not to be spoken at school, correct?) is. My dd's English (minority lang, we do OPOL) was barely impacted by starting school, but we live in a country where children start quite late, so she was already well developed English-wise.

I have carried on reading to her lots in English, taught her English phonics/reading alongside her school reading work and she listens to a lot of English audiobooks. That all helps.

(sorry, last post is assuming you live in France!)

My bilingual dd started school in the UK & the school could not have been less interested that she was bilingual. Thankfully English was her stronger language at that time so dh just continued to work on the other language at home.

Sorry, I should have said: we live in the UK and he'll just be 4 when he starts -August baby...

His English is stronger but his French is good.

I obviously speak both French and English and sometimes I feel like my brain gets a bit scrambled with all the info and I sometimes "freeze", not really knowing what language I'm hearing (if that makes sense!). I wonder if he's likely to get that too and if you need to have a chat with the teacher at the beginning of the year.

On the other hand I also wonder if making the kid "special" could actually backfire and make him reject his minority language.

I have 3 bilingual dc & its amazing how they can be in school & completely forget the other language while they are there but pick it up again when they come home.

I think its fine to speak to the dc to make sure he/she is aware but it wont single him out from the other dc (unless he's really showy offy about it which is not how any of my dc are about their bilingualism).

It might depend on where you live in the UK and what the ethnic make-up of the children at school is, but don't schools ask parents what languages are spoken at home?

If you're in London, schools in many areas will be so used to having children with 2 or more languages, you'd hope the school would be quite used to it. If you're in a place where 99 out of 100 children are monolingual English, well then I'd probably check the teacher is aware and hopefully my child would be made "special" in a a positive way some time during their school life.

There is also the possibility that by telling the school what other languages your child speaks, they might find another French teacher in the school you were not previously aware of, so some good could come out of it.

DD is German/English and we live in the UK. English is the stronger language by far and if you hear her nobody would even guess she is bi-lingual.

While the children hear me speaking German they were actually very surprised when DD was teaching them German words as they represented Germany in the school Olympics.

When she started Reception last year German got a bit behind in our household as schoolbooks and homework are in English obvious. We haven't started teaching her reading/writing in German yet, we want to have the school language settled first.

DD's school classed her officially as an EAL (English as additional language) child but as she doesn't need any help there is nothing else going on. We have at least 2 other children whose parent are not English-mother tongue speaker but in one case English is the language the parents speak to each other so the minority languages are even less there.

Schools around us have at least 50% with EAL and their policy is to ignore other languages as far as I can see - there is a 'English only' rule in the playground and the classrooms.