I'm about to make the jump in to being the parent of a kindergartner. Gulp.
My partner and I are trying to decide what school will be best for her. Our local district-assigned school teaches all the kids Spanish, starting in kindergarten, through 5th grade. There is a nearby school, that we could try to petition to get our daughter, T, in to, that has a similar program that teaches all the kids Mandarin.
Part of me would really like to send T to the neighborhood school - where most of the kids will live closeby and there is a tight-knit school-based community. But, another part of me thinks that it's an amazing opportunity to have T learn Mandarin in school, with all of her classmates. Unfortunately, Mandarin isn't really her mother-tongue. It's closer than Spanish, but my grandparents speak Cantonese, and her dad's parents speak Korean.
I don't really know how to weigh this all. There's no way to guarentee that T could go to the school with the Mandarin program. Would she benefit from this? More than Spanish? Would it be more beneficial overall to go to the neighborhood school? There are a bunch of other complicating factors... so I feel a little overwhelmed. I know that at the end of the day, T will have a good education. But, still, I worry about these kinds of decisions, and what it will mean for T in the big picture.
How are you going about exposing your kids to other languages?
~ eliaday, who is more fluent in French than Chinese and oddly enough gets them confused in her head.
