Daniel will be a two-years -old in a month time. The nursery has told me that they intended to move Daniel to the toddler room a month ago, but Daniel refused to move up the class as he's been very much attached to the staff in the baby room, they put him in the toddler room for couple of hours each day as trial. however, after a while, Daniel would rush back to the gate in front of the Baby Room shouting the staff's name 'Jade...Jade...get baby...'; '...don't like it...' ; 'I don't like it...'. Jade is the one who always look after him in the baby room. On the mornings of my working days, if I'd mentioned Jade's name , Daniel would quickly go to fetch his shoes and say 'shoe on... shoe on..., jacket on... car...', he would stop dawdling immediately and get ready to go, this is the way I used to speed up the process of getting out the house.
For some reason Daniel still calls himself 'baby', despite of the fact that I keep telling him that 'you are not a baby anymore, you are a big boy now...', he call himself Daniel sometime, but not as often as 'Baby', the other word he used to refer himself include '宝宝' (bao bao), less frequent one '丹丹' (Dan Dan), his Chinese name. Daniel's language development has been so good that he constantly amazed us. He has a very large vocabulary on English, he likes talking about his days, I really enjoy the moments when I come back home from work, Daniel rushes to me telling me all about his days. He would do the same when Terry comes home from work. He says words like 'bulldozer', 'aubergine' or 'elephant' very clearly, which, i think are quite hard for baby to pronounce. The most amazing thing Daniel likes to do is to show off his skill of finishing the sentences in the book. No matter which word we choose to leave blank, He can finish all the sentence in very long story, like Amanda, the Panda, I thought this maybe because he is too familiar with the story. Then, i noticed that some of the new books i have just read to him only for 2 or 3 days he can do the same trick, like the new book Godilock and the three Bears I bought for him last week. And Daniel's interest on Chinese is just picking up, now every night he would require to read Chinese books, his days normally finish in reading Chinese book, and now he demand to watch Winnie the Pooh in Chinese, he used to pretest if I dare to put his DVD in Chinese, and now he would say ' Winnie pooh Chinese... Winnie pooh Chinese...' he can say some Chinese nursery rhythm, like this one
胖胖敲鼓，敲乒乓; 乒乓鼓响，逗胖胖; 胖胖忙着挥动棒棒.
Looking back, it was so silly to worry about that he won't be talking, but I did have this sort of worry and have read a lot about autism, I remembered I've read a rather touching autobiography book about autism titled Daniel isn't talking.
2 comments:
Daniel is doing so well, amazing!
Isaac doesn't like "chinese". Every time if the DVD was in chinese, he would cry out "I don't like Chinese!! Change to English!!" Now that he knows how to use the chinese DVD player remote control, he just changes himself and saves me some work.
Well, as long as Isaac understands Chinese, I'm happy. I will try to make him speak more when he is older.
Daniel used to like that! every time if the DVD was in Chinese, he would cry to protest. But not anymore, since I started to let him know which language I am speaking each time i made the switch. I speak to him mainly in English but I would tell him the main word I just said in Chinese and then ask him 'how do you say this in Chinese?' and it worked and he's very keen to say them in chinese. The other day I start to try to swtich one of his biligual toy from English to French, he immediatly cried to protest ;)
It is said ONE PARENT ONE LANGUAGE is the best way for achieving bilingual, however, it didn't work on me as I didnt manage to speak Chinese exclusively in the home or in the public to Daniel. So i somehow worked it out that i have to let Daniel know the name of each language I speak. My approach is more like the method you would use to teach the child a freign language as a second language instead of native one. I sometimes feel a bit bad about this, Well, still better than nothing!
I learned that there are so many approaches to biligualism. we started to learn English when we past 10, didn't we?
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