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About me

ABOUT ME

Welcome to my blog!  
My name is Agnieszka Basta and I live in Tarnów, Poland. First of all, I am a mum who invests in early education of her baby knowing that a brain develops the fastest and is like a sponge until we are 6 years old.
 
 
As for my professional profile, I am a passionate English teacher. I love teaching others and learning foreign languages. At present I am learning Italian and I am really proud of being at C1 level confirmed by CELI4 exam. I am still improving my linguistic skills by reading only in foreign languages (English or Italian) and having conversations with a native speaker of Italian. I believe that speaking foreign languages is really important. The more languages we know, the better. The more languages we know, the easier it will be to learn a new language. 

 

I participated in several EU founded courses abroad (Comenius, Erasmus + and PO WER SE). I was or have been coordinating 6 KA1 Erasmus + or PO WER SE projects. During my stay abroad I met people speaking even more than 4 languages fluently. Some of them were motivated to learn to learn even more. Based on my experience, if you know one foreign language, it is easier to learn the second one. I suspect that gets even easier with the third one.

I learnt about the Doman method for the first time in a Finnish kindergarten during the course focused on the Finnish system of education. The course included study visits in schools, kindergartens and other institutions in Finland. Now I remember I came across the author’s name when writing my BA thesis about the Helen Doron method of teaching English to kids.

Erasmus +
Erasmus + – the EU programme supporting education

My baby was 10,5-month-old when I decided to document everything we do together although we started doing maths with dot cards a few months earlier. Actually, this blog is about her. At present, she is 19 months old and the fun is still going on. I know I wasn’t wasting my time doing Doman as we have the first results: whole-word reading astonishingly accelerates speech development, early maths teaching makes a baby interested in all sorts of numerals, early reading makes a baby love books. 

My husband and I live in Poland and we are both Polish. However, I have decided to raise our little one bilingually. Our strategy is that I speak only English and my husband speaks only Polish to her. Maybe in the future we will add the Italian language, but, most probably, not as the main language. The Doman method, with a few modifications, supports the bilingual upbringing (intentional bilingualism). Actually, we have completed most of reading and maths programmes in the English language. My husband started the reading cards in Polish a few months ago. We learn both reading and maths using the materials that he recommended in his books which I mentioned in Must-have.  

What about the results? We need some time to see….I guess, you are as curious as I am to know if the Doman method which is so diffused worldwide really works. Maybe you have even tried presenting word cards to your child but you quit for some reason and you wish to give it another try. Or maybe you are interested to know if it is possible to raise a child bilingually if you are not a native and you don’t live abroad but in your country (in our case it is Poland and both I and my husband are Polish but my goal is that my baby will speak English as well).  If one of the above-mentioned interests is yours, this blog is for you. 

We had started a few months before I created this blog so I decided to sum up our beginning here. I think the content is getting more and more interesting. To my surprise, I manage to write more regularly as a working mum as if I had had less time on maternity leave. 

Please excuse me the simplicity of this blog but I am not an ICT engineer and I do my best at everything I do but I am limited by lack of my ICT skills. I am not a photographer, either. However, I do not see a point in making the reality different because I would like to show everything as it is. That is why I do not edit my pictures and insert them as they are and I almost never prepare the setting. I do not really care if there is some mess in the background. That is life. The only exception is my profile picture because I was fully prepared for it. 

I invite those who afford to take their time to read my blog entries here: HOME. For those who have less time I have prepared BLOG-SITEMAP which is like the contents page. I hope everyone will find something interesting.

Enjoy reading! 

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I would be really pleased if you leave a comment from time to time.