My daughter’s German teacher each year has a project for her grade 3 class: a big notebook in which each of the kids writes a short essay on a subject they know something about. Notebooks from previous years had essays about subjects such as Legolas (from Lord of the Rings), string instruments, or Star Wars. […]

Tonight, my daughter (almost 8½ now) was doing her daily reading in German from the first Harry Potter book. I try not to interrupt her all the time to correct, but occasionally I do. This time, apparently, it was too often, for she told me: “Mama, korrigiere mich, aber mach da nicht so einen Käse […]

The other day, my now 8-year-old daughter was perusing the German TV magazine we’d gotten in Germany, since we receive a number of German channels. She’d already asked for explanations of several film categories that she didn’t know, but when she came across “Das Geschäft mit dem Blut” (The business with the blood), she asked: […]

Near the place where we used to live is a park with a playground. On the way home, we came past a high school. For some reason, my daughter would make a speech on the steps of the high school entrance every time we came past. When she was almost three years old, I filmed […]

Last Friday, my daughter and I picked up an order at the German bookstore. The owner, whom we’ve known for a few months, recommended another book my daughter might like. Something with monsters. After reading the first sentence of the back cover blurb, my daughter was sold, and I could hardly refuse her a new […]

Now in grade 2, every week my daughter gets a few new sight words to learn in her minority language. When she didn’t seem to understand why she had to learn them, I came up with an idea. I scanned and printed the first page of our illustrated Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone edition […]

I’ve finally read my daughter the first Harry Potter book. I’d been holding back because she wasn’t interested, but I was increasingly worried about spoilers, especially since many of her classmates have older siblings, and they also watch movies in after-school care. But no the time had come at last. A few weeks after we […]

Two days ago, we unintentionally created a joke that you need 3 languages to understand. Here is what happened: My now 7-year-old daughter was practising looking up words in her new German elementary school dictionary. As she was looking for Fledermaus, she came across a word she didn’t know, and asked me: “Flattratte?” It’s a […]

On Saturday, we were coming back from one of the numerous birthday parties to which my daughter has been invited this year. It had started to rain, and we were waiting for our tram, commenting on the weather, and my daughter concluded with: Schietwedder!”, which is plattdüütsch (my grandma’s mother tongue, a regional language I […]

When I started introducing self-made work sheets for my daughter’s minority language homework (see them all