I am having the opportunity to watch my best friend's wee ELLs, who are 3 and 6 and native speakers of Russian, learn both English and science. They both speak with an accent and have made clear progress in English since we hung out over Christmas.
The elder, A., likes doing POE investigations and the little one, B., likes sharing his misconceptions. For instance, this time he kept insisting that plants are not alive, which is why he's allowed to touch my sister's plant's leaves. This is a common misconception, according to McGraw Hill (http://mcgraw-hill.co.uk/openup/chapters/9780335235889.pdf), and our conversation went something like this:
Me: Remember you're not supposed to touch the plant leaves.
B.: They're not alive!
Me: Yes, they are. They need the leaves to get energy from the sun.
B.: No! Not alive!
Since moving to the U.S. 9 months ago, B. actually has had a quantum leap with his English skills; he realized that language is a thing and that he needs to code-switch, depending on which adult he's talking to. He also self-corrects when he catches himself making a mistake, which means that he has some idea that there are rules and regulations governing English.
He is comprehensible 50% of the time (versus 0% of the time 9 months ago), and half of what he says that I can understand is parroted from something my sister or I just said. He doesn't seem interested in any cartoon in English with which he is not already familiar, which may indicate that he doesn't understand TV in English (or that he is just 3 years old and prefers jumping up and down to watching a new show). He is learning his letters in English and is already familiar with Cyrillic, and he is very proud of his growing book collection. He says he doesn't like science, and I don't want him to get burned out at age 3, so we hung up Christmas lights and played catch indoors.
The elder is in an elementary school that focuses on STEM education, and he says he loves science. He now is understandable 100% of the time (instead of sort of 50-50, with long pauses) and, instead of drawing his predictions, observations and explanations when we did a POE investigation (as he did over Christmas), he was able to write one-word responses, with help on the spelling. His hand-writing is more pain-staking than the Korean children's I used to teach, but American students generally have worse handwriting in English than Koreans do. He did ask why we had different languages in different countries (basically, he was trying to get out of learning English. "Why do I have to learn English? Why don't Americans speak Russian?"), which indicates that he knows language is a thing and is thinking critically about the differences of language use in different cultures.
The elder son's POE investigations this time were invisible ink (he added his own ingredients, using his own quantities, to see if it worked better or worse, and he had to tell me when something was dissolved or whatever else he was observing) and the Pringles-rocket demo (he had to predict which fuel would launch the ball the farthest and tell me when the fuel was evaporated--when it was time to launch).
A. was willing to make one prediction (he got it right, that the acetone would be a better fuel than the lidocaine) but was uncomfortable with making predictions after that. One thing that I liked about our investigation is that it came about because I ran out of isopropyl alcohol; I didn't actually have experience with using the other fuel sources and didn't know the right answer, either. A. made what I thought were thorough observations on looks, smell, and sound. His explanations are obviously not based on an understanding of the particulate nature of matter, and I was unwilling to press him to hazard an explanation for what he saw, which will be a summer project for us.
Another thing that I thought was awesome about both boys was that they were watching a dinosaur cartoon that had bad science in it. Although B. says he doesn't like science, he loves dinosaurs, so maybe there's hope for him yet. Also, A. caught that the stegosaurus in the cartoon didn't really look like a real stegosaurus--the head was too big and the body was not long enough. He said, "It's like a stegosaurus, but not really." Again, I should have pressed him to elaborate further, but I was impressed as it was that he was willing to challenge something a grown-up put together (even if it was a cartoon).
It is interesting blogging about them, since I've never reflected so much on their progress and where they still need to be pushed.
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