How to set up your own minority language homeschool
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How do you introduce your own minority language homeschool and maintain it playfully?
So, you would like to foster your minority language or languages at home outside of any daycare, playgroup, traditional school setups. Fantastic! Now what? How do you do that?
Let me share our experience and how we maintain an interesting language homeschool here in our house.
In our setup, our son is visiting a forest kindergarten in English for a few hours per day. He loves the access to nature and his speech development in English is fantastic. At home, we are speaking Portuguese and German, so we are keeping our homeschool activities in these two languages.
Every afternoon, we have one prepared homeschool session in either Portuguese or German, about a preset topic. It may be as simple as arts and craft, focussed on fine motor skills, on sensory play, or some maths and literacy work. The time is open - and it varies according to interest. Sometimes the activity takes us a few minutes, while sometimes it captures us for 1 hour. Mostly anything in between. The main objective at this age for us is practicing language in general, and getting exposed to rich vocabulary while exploring how the world works.
There are three main elements that we are being mindful of for our afternoon homeschooling sessions:
We play towards our son’s interests - any activity that can be combined with what he loves to do anyways will be a million times more fun.
We introduce specific topics and explore them through play and activities. Be it puzzles, activity worksheets, board games, crafts, experiments, books, stickers, or sensory play.
We incorporate free play into any session. Even if the activities have a clear end, we try to offer one path of additional free play, so that the activity naturally “blends” into play time.
The beauty of these language homeschool sessions is that they don’t look like school at all - it’s just mum or dad and son engaging in a topic together. Learning almost happens naturally. I also believe that it sets the tone beautifully for interest-based inquiry and self-motivated exploration.
Additionally, most of our activities can be “replayed” in the other language of the house. So, one parent does the first introduction and the play session. While the other parent can recap with our son and inquire (in the other language) on what they did. This way, topics can be covered with vocabulary from both languages. Naturally, there are exceptions to it. We are still working on literacy skills in each respective language.
These sessions are not the only time when we speak our minority languages at home. This does happen all the time. So, you cannot really take the homeschool sessions in isolation for pure language teaching. But they are a way for us to model rich and diverse language in context while combining teaching, playing, and bonding at the same time.
If you are interested in some material we use, you can check out our shop section. You can also read about one of our song-based sessions we did lately here. More to come :)
How are you setting up your homeschooling activities for your minority language(s)? What are your regular practices? Let us know in the comments!
