I searched and found an old thread on this topic, but it was more about home educating kids and older kids learning Welsh so I started a new thread as I feel this is relevant to the Million Speakers Project.
My kids grew up in North Wales and started speaking Welsh at nursery aged three and half. They ended up pretty much bilingual, though my daughter was always more confident than my son. Jump forward many years, they are both now married and living in South Wales in non-Welsh speaking communities. As they havenāt used their Welsh for years, they are now rusty, though son is using SSiW for revision and practice.
But this is about their kidsā¦
None of them are in Welsh medium schools, though they do some Welsh lessons. Iām sure that Welsh teaching has moved on since people like Nicky left school unable to speak the language after supposedly learning it for some years, but I suspect it still lacks the focus on speaking the SSiW gives.
In terms of teaching methods, SSiW will work as well for kids as for adults, but my grandchildren are currently 10, 7 and 5 and the thought of my 5 year-old old grandchild wandering around saying, āI met your sister in the pub last night and she said to meā¦ā Or discussing going to work or wanting to work for the council.
As far as I can see SSiW just needs re-recording with the same patterns but different, child relevant vocabulary, e.g. āI met your sister at the park yesterday and she said to meā¦ā āThe teacher said we had to spend less time working as a group.ā The only other changes might be using younger voices for the recordings and perhaps making the lessons shorter but more of them.
Thoughts?
