What I learned from El Raton Pablito

Recently, I purchased some little books in Spanish, and some in French, from TPRS Books. The past year and a half, we’ve used apps, workbooks, and videos that have given Gemma exposure to vocabulary (fruit, colors, etc.), as well as listening to Spanish songs and French songs (and learning to sing parts, if not all, of them). But I felt like Gemma needed something more. 

So I ordered the TPRS books. (I had been thinking about them for about a year.) I let Gemma choose some she wanted, and I chose some I wanted her to want. One of the books she chose is called El Raton Pablito (Pablito the Mouse). It has illustrations and is silly, and she wants to read it. She reads it aloud, trying to pronounce the words, wanting to try. And then she giggles. Because el raton has opened puerta numero tres and discovered a tomato en el baño. Que verguenza! (How embarrassing!)

I thought reading the TPRS books would become our new foreign language lessons, but Gemma told me she wanted to continue using her language apps. She proposed that we alternate book-app-book-app. I hadn’t considered that she might view my choice to replace the apps with fun books as me taking something away from her. But then I did.

When we set little goals for ourselves, and meet those goals, we feel happy. Gemma had gotten used to looking forward to using her language apps to meet little learning goals, and here I was telling her that she was all done with that. 

One of the things that I don’t like about Charlotte Mason group-think is the way the phrase “children are born persons” is repeated like the first rule of Fight Club, but when a homeschooler brings up the idea of CMing and giving a child a choice in what they study, she’s told all of the reasons why doing that would be anti-Mason.

I’m so glad Gemma wants to keep using her apps, and wants to set educational goals for herself, and understands how good it feels to reach a goal she’s set for herself. I’m also glad she feels comfortable telling me what she wants, and feels capable of presenting a solution to a problem. 

And to think I thought all we were going to learn from El Raton Pablito was some Spanish. Que verguenza!