Author: nonnativemommy

Catching Up

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It’s been three years since I last wrote on this blog, and the new year feels like the perfect time to restart. I’m back with updates and plans to share more help, activities, and practical tips for raising bilingual children in challenging circumstances.

Everything Has Changed

Life has taken many turns over the past three years:

  • The girls are deeply immersed in Hungarian public education. While it has its ups and downs, the impact on our bilingual journey has been significant—and unfortunately, not positive, as you might have guessed from our bilingual upbringing point of view.
  • Our time together has decreased. Weekdays are packed, and weekends are a blur, leaving little opportunity to immerse ourselves in English.
  • E. (12) and L. (9) are growing up fast. They have their own circles of friends, interests, and activities. It’s wonderful to see their independence bloom, but it’s also bittersweet to lose those playful moments we used to share.
  • I’ve lost a sense of community. The absence of a support network has made the challenging days even harder.
  • Finding engaging activities is trickier than ever. It’s not easy to keep pre-teens entertained while ensuring language learning remains fun.
  • We moved out of Budapest. While the move has brought new opportunities, and was the best choice we had made, it also meant losing regular interactions with native English speakers. And let’s face it: weekday playdates aren’t realistic with after-school activities filling the calendar.

And Yet, Some Things Haven’t Changed

Despite the challenges, there are constants in our bilingual journey that do not let us leave our path:

  • E. is back in an English drama class. She’s thriving in this environment, which includes many native English-speaking children.
  • Both girls read and write in English. E. is more advanced, while L. is still mastering the basics. I’ll share more about their reading and writing journey in upcoming posts.
  • Bedtime stories are still an English tradition. The books we’re reading now are more advanced than before, and I’m excited to share our favourites with you. Reading has been the cornerstone of our bilingual success.
  • English summer camps – a new chapter. Both E. and L. participate in the camps I organize, and they excel every year.
  • A love of languages and cultures. E. is learning Greek and Chinese, while L. is exploring Korean. Their openness to new languages is inspiring! Not to mention the fact they also excel in German at school.
  • Confidence in communication. They have no difficulty switching to English whenever the situation calls for it.
reading

Looking Ahead

Here we are, three years later. I have so many ideas for the blog this year, and I hope to find the time, energy, and resilience to continue on this incredible journey of raising bilingual children. Thank you for being part of this adventure—I’m excited to share what’s ahead! Come back for more.

Thanksgiving Turkey Craft

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Big Life Journal is a site I regularly follow and also signed up for ttheir newsletters. It promotes mindfulness and growth mindset for kids and teens but there are a great deal of wonderful advice for parents to parent more consciously and more positively.

I found this cute turkey printable in my inbox the other day and immediately printed the black and white version. (Little L. is into colouring now.) Unfortunately, I cannot link the printable as it’s available only for those who are signed up for the newsletter. In the picture below your can see what parts it has.

So we started with the colouring, checking a real turkey picture for the body but then the girls just used their imagination and their favourite autumn colours to make the feathers. On the feathers we wrote what we love having in our lives, what we are grateful for. (In the meantime we talked about the body parts of a turkey, and colours, special colours like maroon.)

Then came the cutting and sticking together. It took quite a while because of the colouring, but there is a coloured version of it too – we do not have a colour printer, unfortunately.) Here are the final results:

While putting our turkeys together we chatted/thought a lot about what we are thankful for, what lovely things and great people are in our lives. For a long time we haven’t had any fun, creative, holiday-related activities in English with the girls, just everyday conversations. However, now it was a great time to spend together in English in a productive way.

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

Outschool

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Outschool.com is an educational site for children. Kids can take part in interactive and informative lessons online via Zoom. It’s free to join but one-time class fees ranges from 5 USD but weekly courses can cost up to 100-600 USD.

As E. is into Chemistry and the Periodic Table, we picked a one-time class: A Visual Tour of the Periodic Table with Dr. Steve Silbaugh.

Atom, the Periodic Table, gas changing colour due to electricity

Apart from E. there were 7 other kids taking part mainly from th US. There was one girl from Pris, France. E. and another girl were only 9 years old. The others were over 12.

The class was on a Friday at 5 pm and cost 10 USD, which I found reasonable. Prof. Silbaugh was a research scientist and is an element collector. They went through the Periodic Table and he showed the elements and talked about them. Interesting facts, magnetism and even radioactivity. E. was amazed and really enjoyed every moment of this class.


I guess this was not the last time we signed up for a class on Outschool.com.

E.’s first email

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Due to the online education during the lockdown we made a gmail account for E. She is 9 now so it’s time for her to start corresponding with her friends, teachers and family members.

In the end, she didn’t use it, but now the time has come to write her first email.

She’s into the chemical elements… again. You can read about her interest in chemistry on the link.

Nowadays she’s been re-reading the Usborne Lift-the-flap Periodic Table book. It is a fantastic book with great illustrations about the elements understandable for kids or even adults without much chemisrty background.

In the morning she mentioned she’d found some mistakes in the book. I raised my eyebrows but she showed me all the inaccuracies. And she was right. I suggested informing Usborne about these errors so in the afternoon she was sitting in front of the computer to write them an email (her very first) from her own email account.

First, there was a little fooling around and whining that I should do it instead of her, but I disappeared in the kitchen to finish the blueberry cake and 10 minutes later she came and aksed me to check what she’d written.

Here it is:

I only helped her with some missing spaces and at the closing section as she had never writen one before so she didn’t really know how to do it.

She was pretty pleased with herself when she hit the send button. And I am so proud of her. We’re looking forward to their reply.

Don’t eat Santa!

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This game is a great way to avoid that the kids eat all the chocolate and sweets up they get from Saint Nicolas at once. We played this game a little every day and kept the sweet-eating at bay.

You can find this game at skillo.hu in Hungarian. The Angels brought us a version which can be played in any languages (there’s nothing written on the board).

The idea of the game is that you put a piece of chololate or sweet on each picture of St Nicolas. One person doesn’t look and the others pick a Santa. The closed-eyed person looks at the board and starts eating the sweets one by one.

When she/he wants to eat the sweet on the chosen Santa you shout: Don’t eat Santa! The remaining sweets are put into a little bowl in front of the player. Then it’s the next player’s turn. We had 4 rounds. At the end the winner was who had the fewest sweets left in their bowl.

E. was the lucky one, but we were all winners as we could eat up our remaining marshmellows. Yum!