I've shared it before, as a proud momma, I'm very happy that our daughter managed to work her way through the struggles and hurdles she faced when she was starting the Spanish public school in 2022. I wish we could have offered her the tutoring from day one, but sadly this opportunity I saw only appeared until a few months later. Thankfully for her this meant that from the second trimester, she started to understand things much better and with the one on one guidance of her amazing tutor, who totally understands what our daughter needs, she has been booking great results.
I know for a fact that plenty of children ended the first year with not so great results, while our non-Spanish girl already upped her grades a lot. She probably faced more struggles than most of the others and therefore we're extremely proud of her pushing through. She's a true rockstar.
This is her second year in primary school and this means new assignments will be introduced. The first challenge this year was a presentation for an animal project. The project was divided into different types of animals and each child was assigned a category and date to do the presentation.
Our daughter was assigned to the reptile category and we soon decided together that she was going to speak about chameleons because this was the one she liked the most as there are some fun facts to share about chameleons and as they were allowed to make a drawing or something nice, we thought this was a good choice too.
There was some delay in her presentation as she missed some days of school and had to catch up on the exams first because the teacher had some other kids that weren't prepared and had to do it over once or twice. She was probably hoping that this wouldn't happen to our daughter.
Before her dad went to Holland for work, he spent the whole evening with her to find facts about chameleons online and write that out in Dutch and translate it to English so she could get familiar with the info first and practice it a bit like she had an exam..
Surprisingly she remembered the facts quite well and faster than we thought so it was soon time to decide on the order and write out the presentation for her to memorize as well as make a little note with keywords only to keep with her during the presentation.
When this went smooth, I used ChatGTP to translate it to Spanish and asked her tutor to read it and correct what was not logical or a bit off. We forgot one thing in the presentation as it was part of the chapter in the book and something that they needed to mention for their chosen animal so we included it and printed the whole thing again for her to start practicing.
While working on this, three more exams were suddenly added to that week and this was making me a bit nervous because how was she going to prep this if she had to focus on the exams as well. In the end, the tutor made sure everything was written out correctly so we had something to check while she'd practice it in Spanish for us, and it was super cool to see how much fun she had doing this presentation!
I never felt comfortable doing this type of thing during my school years, I hated it. Her dad loves this stuff though so she definitely has that from him and that's probably best too! I remember how confident she was at the final show at summer school as well, shining her way through the whole thing, lol.
We chose the images that suited the presentation and she glued them on the cardboard, I wrote the keywords there but made a few errors which I just corrected by adding a white paper, lol. That's what happens if you don't have any spare parts of the cardboard...
She did the presentation many times during the weekend, while the presentation itself would be on Monday and it went so smooth that I knew she'd nail it. At some point she didn't even check the keywords at all anymore. The only thing we had to say a few times was not to rush it and take the time for it because otherwise she'd end up finishing too early..
She said she nailed it, now we wait for the results as the teacher hasn't given the grades for the presentations yet. Either way, it's really cool to see your 7 year old nail a presentation in Spanish, super confident while doing it, while 1,5 years ago she didn't understand a damn thing about the language.
We are proud!
