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WHY NOW AND NOT EARLIER?

I must admit that Polish reading cards were not on my mind at all when I was buying maths and English reading cards. It just happened that maths cards came with the Polish reading cards. This was my incentive to introduce Doman’s reading programme also in Polish – my native language.

Before that, I focused only on the English language. I have always been aware of the fact that Polish will dominate sooner or later because we live in Poland and everybody else except me and my students speaks Polish. That is why I have decided to give Maja as much exposure to English as possible. I assumed she would learn Polish by herself. However, when I saw the Polish reading set I changed my mind and I decided it would be a great idea to teach her to read in both languages. I think the more brain stimulation she gets the better. 

The Polish and English reading sets are completely different. As you remember we started with large red words in English and then, gradually, they became smaller and smaller and their colour gradually changed from red to black. The Polish reading set is less complex, maybe because the publisher is different. 

At the beginning, I compared the size of red words from my husband’s set to my red words. I decided we had to wait a while before introducing the Polish cards. Only now the first Polish reading red cards are the same size as my reading cards in English. Because of this, it seems that now it is a great moment to introduce them because our baby won’t be confused too much. If we had introduced Polish word cards before I think Maja would have had problems due to word size difference: “my” words were much larger at the beginning than the largest Polish ones. 

COMPLETELY CHILLED OUT AND NOT STICKING TO THE RULES

The heading above describes my husband’s approach perfectly. I don’t imply here that I am stressed or that I push Maja too much because this is not the case. But I am different: if I like doing something, I do my best to do it and if the idea of doing something is mine I don’t have any problems with sticking to the rules. This refers not only to our approach in raising our child bilingually (so-called intentional or non-native bilingualism) or the Doman method. 

My husband has only one set of five cards which he is supposed to show 3 times daily. On the first day I reminded him about it every time and he really did it three times. After that, I decided to trust him with this and he often forgot about it. 

For comparison: at the moment, I have 4 sets of word cards, 3 sets of maths cards and 1 set of picture flashcards. There are five cards in each set. As you can see I am much more motivated and organized than my husband who can hardly manage 3 sessions of reading per day. I usually manage to have 18 sessions. Of course, there are days when I can’t do as many but usually everything goes according to my plan. 

 I instructed my husband, of course, that he has to take away one word and replace it with a new one after 5 days and that he has to do this every day. However, I try not to interfere too much. I believe my role is to teach English and everything I can in English only. 

Have you found my experience useful? If yes, share with others.  How are you doing with Doman? Have you tried doing it in two languages at the same time? I would be delighted if you leave a comment and share your experience. 

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I have created a Facebook group for parents doing Doman as I haven’t found any. This is just the beginning but I hope there will be more and more of us soon and that we will share our experience with one another.

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