Saturday, May 11, 2013

Russian School!

As I alluded to in my previous post, Nikki has started Russian school!

We finally found a school locally (all previous searching had found a 1.5 hour train into London was as near as we could get) and the only downside is that it clashes with the drama school I was going to enter him into this term. I'll have to book him in for private lessons with Auntie V instead!

Nikki has classes from 10 til 1 and I get to wander around the nearby shopping center without a bored preschooler - bliss! He has lessons in Reading, Writing, Russian Conversation, Music and Art in a class of six 3-5 year olds. We have finished our 3-week trial and today we are signing up for the rest of the term. So far his teacher has been really impressed at his reading ability - even though we have only been learning to read in English, the ideas of letters having sounds and blending sounds to make words give him a good foundation!

He has been a bit shy starting out, despite bubbling over with excitement the whole way there, but last week he finally started speaking unprompted and so I expect he will now start showing off what he knows and really getting confident in communicating in Russian.

At the moment, he understands spoken questions and commands but struggles to respond with more than one or two words. Or perhaps it is more like refuses to put in the effort of speaking more than a couple of phrases when he knows full well that I understand him if he replies in English. Hopefully having regular exposure to a completely Russian environment, with Russian speaking teacher and friends, his speaking skills will develop to the point that we can have Russian conversations at home without him whining "Speak in English!" at me all the time!

He also gets HOMEWORK so we can start getting used to studying Russian in a more structured way - in a few weeks I will want to set up some entirely Russian lesson packs to work through. Is it wrong that I am so excited?

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