Babysitting 6

We've been on a steady diet of Magic English over the past several months. Disney has created a series of EFL DVD's that uses clips from theie extensive library of animated films. These DVD's are 30 minutes in length, and primarily targeted at children. However, I imagine that just about anyone who enjoys Disney's films will find these DVD's an entertaining alternative to studying the latest TOEIC manual.

Miyu and I watch one of the DVD's almost every day. There are a few of them that she particularly enjoys, so we've watched them a whole bunch of times. I like the Magic English series because each DVD includes plenty of speaking practice, and a theme that is backed up by a custom-made song (involving the target language for each specific DVD). Some of the songs are semi-catchy (from my point of view), and very easy for Miyu to remember.

The Magic English series has helped to get Miyu talking a little bit more. However, we're still dealing with some pretty big obstacles. The lessons are still taking place in a Japanese-first environment, and that has been a problem that we haven't found a way to avoid.

Another problem is that Miyu is incredibly shy and dainty. She loves to play, and pretend she's a princess, but she doesn't always want people to be focusing on her. Many times she'll muff her pronunciation of short English phrases on purpose so as to deflect attention from herself.

However, she also has an increasing tendency to come up with startlingly clean, simple English at times. I don't know why, but it's usually when her grandmother isn't in the room. It usually happens when she's forgotten to be guarded about what's going on, or when she's mentally engaged in something else. Sometimes it just pops out! I don't make a big deal out of it so as not to embarrass or patronize her.

Miyu will be starting Kindergarten this spring. That will likely mean a schedule change for us; maybe no more morning lessons. I'm worried about how much energy she will have at the end of the day after she comes home from school.

Babysitting 6

Babysitting 5

Ruka has been joining us quite regularly as of late. She usually shows up during the final 30 - 45 minutes of the lesson. Miyu likes having her around, but she acts like a typical older sibling most of the time. She doesn't like to share, and she loves to annoy Ruka at every chance she gets. I guess it's only natural. I'm sure that I was the same way (sorry, Scott and Kate!)

Miyu still doesn't see any need to use English when we're spending time together. She knows that I speak some Japanese. Her parents always speak to me in Japanese, so it rarely works when I pretend like I can't understand what she's saying. I wonder if it's ever going to get any better. Is she ever going to make an effort to produce some English? We need to create some kind of an environment where it's understood that it's an English-0nly area. I would love it if we could take a trip to America once a year. It seems like that would be a good opportunity to make her aware of how useful the language CAN be. It's definitely of little use at home. Having the lesson up here in our apartment would also be good.

I think that Yasu and Michiko (Ruka's parents) are smart to drop her off about halfway through the lesson. Two hours a day definitely didn't do much to get Miyu talking.

Babysitting 5

Babysitting 4

Ruka, Yasu and Michiko's daughter, has been spending time with us recently. She's about the same age that Miyu was when we first started hanging out. She's adorable, and she seems to be quite a bit different from Miyu in a number of areas. She seems a little tougher, and she eats a ton!

I hope to get Miyu to take some responsibility for Ruka's English education. It might be a good way to get Miyu to use English a bit more--if I can figure out how to do it. Ruka and Miyu get along really well. Ruka doesn't totally trust me yet, but that will come.

Miyu just turned three! She also graduated from diapers to big-girl underwear. I don't remember how long I wore diapers for, but I don't think it was three years. Yukiko says that children these days don't feel any rush to abandon them due to the fact that they're so comfortable. I guess most materials would probably be easier to deal with than the cloth diapers that many of us were subjected to.

As for her English, she is able to produce full sentences quite comfortably. She doesn't do it without prompting, but she is more confident than she used to be. Her listening comprehension is also quite strong now. She can handle most situations, although expressions involving 'probability' are sometimes a bit much for her to handle. We recently had an argument when I suggested that it 'might' rain soon. She went on and on about how it wasn't raining right then... I think she finally got the picture when I took her outside and she saw how dark the sky looked.

Babysitting 4

Lake Sai. Summer, 2003. Miyu and her father, Masaki. This house was designed by Uncle Yasu. It's beautiful!

Babysitting 3

One of the main problems that we've had with Miyu is that she's just so young. Her attention span is about 4 seconds long--if that--and it is therefore difficult to keep her going on any one game or task for a long time. That is not to say that my approach to 'teaching' her resembles my approach in the classroom. We mostly just hang out. We take walks and play in the yard. We read books and eat donuts together. Sometimes we just run around like crazy inside her grandparents' house and drive everyone nuts. The name of the game is 'exposure' to English. And she's getting it.

She can now understand long, multi-clause sentences. Mixing past, present and future doesn't throw her off that much anymore. She enjoys playing the role of mother, so she usually responds correctly to any requests that I make. I often ask her to cook me some food, read me a book, sing me a song, get something for me, put my possessions on the table, etc. She doesn't mind doing things like that.

However, a lot of the time she'll simply ignore me. I've always heard about the "terrible two's", and maybe it's not all that bad of a generalization in this case. As I've mentioned before, Miyu's mood is like a tsunami much of the time. She comes riding in nice and high, and then all of a sudden she crashes--destroying everything in her path in the process. On days when she's in a bad mood (ie. she didn't take a nap that afternoon), a two hour lesson can easily be whittled down to just 30 or 40 minutes of play. I don't help matters much, because I tend to just wait her tantrums out. I guess I could be a little bit more proactive and try to cheer her up. She throws a fit quite frequently, although anytime we go for a walk on our own she's fine.

It is still early in the process, and we may have started a bit young with Miyu. I started working with her about 18 months ago, and in retrospect we probably could have begun six months later than we did. She has a lot of the language that she needs for communicating with me, but she just doesn't use it. It's like the English in her mind is very small, and the Japanese is very big. If her mind were like a toy chest, it's the Japanese that she sees first when she's looking for something. The fact that she's also had the English for a long time doesn't seem to matter at this point.

The only time she uses English is when she really wants something. "Give it to me" and "Pick me up" are two phrases that she will often produce without prompting. She knows that I will respond favorably, and immediately, to these phrases, so she often grabs them first when she's searching through the toy bin in her mind. In effect, they've been enlarged, and are perhaps almost the same size as their Japanese equivalents. Most of our conversations involve her speaking in Japanese, and me speaking in English. We both understand each other, and I think this probably makes things slower in terms of progress. I wonder if she would produce more English if she had a teacher who couldn't speak any Japanese...

I suspect that we'll be able to enlarge more and more phrases as she gets older. She only sees me for two hours each day, and that amount of time is easily trumped by the dozen hours that she spends speaking Japanese with her family. My hope is that by the time she's four, she'll be able to converse with me in short, stock English sentences. I imagine that she will start using a lot of the high-repetition phrases that I repeat every day.

I have noticed definite progress, but I guess Yukiko and Masumi were hoping for more at this stage in the game. I definitely don't blame them, but I hope they don't put to much pressure on Miyu to perform. We could run into a world of trouble if Miyu starts to resent English, my presence, or both.

Babysitting 3

Babysitting 2

Aunt Michiko and her daughter, Ruka, were downstairs this evening. Michiko is Yasu's wife, and they live on the second floor of the building--right next door to me. Michiko is probably getting to the point where she's trying to decide when to let me into Ruka's life. I started taking care of Miyu when she was a bit over a year old, and Ruka just had her first birthday this month. The good thing is that Ruka isn't scared of me. Miyu never was either, come to think of it. But Ruka has gone through a few periods where, if she hasn't seen me for a while, she totally forgets that she's met me before and that she liked me last time. Her short-term memory seems to be holding up a bit better these days, and I could tell that Michiko was relieved to see that Ruka was smiling at me (rather than bawling because of me).
Miyu didn't take a nap today, so she fizzled a couple of times while we were playing. By fizzled I mean that she threw a fit. She doesn't always like having to say something in two languages in order to have her requests met. Japanese, naturally, is her first response to any situation, stimulus or provocation. If I pretend like I don't understand what she's trying to say, or don't give her what she wants, she's prone to hitting the floor wailing. When she's well rested, she'll opt for the 'cute' approach and pretend that she doesn't understand what I'm asking for either. Tonight, however, her energy reserves were low. Consequently, she got rather pissed when I didn't give her the pink flashcard simply because she was demanding it in something other than English.
She rarely fizzles when it's just the two of us. We often go for long walks to the playground, and we never have any problems. She has her grandmother and mother wrapped around her little finger, so the bulk of her tirades are when they're around. Tonight was just fatigue. We spent about an hour, in between bawling sessions, shopping out near the side door. We bought groceries at the supermarket (shoe cupboard) and toiletries at the pharmacy (slipper rack). She drove us down there, and she always leaves her money in the glove compartment of her little car. I've tried to tell her that it's not safe to leave money in there, but she never listens. She loves to be busy, so I always ask her to do lots of things for me. She cooks pizza for me in the living room, and makes fantastic messes in the process (which grandma gets to pick up.) She runs up and down the hall in a huff anytime she remembers that she's forgotten something out in the dining room.

Babysitting 2

Babysitting 1

I play with Miyu (pronounced Me-you) for two hours, five days a week. She is the grandchild of a wonderful woman who invited us into her building and family. Yukiko, the grandmother, sort of just hangs out while Miyu jabbers away, and I try to keep up. Yukiko makes great coffee.
The purpose of the ten hours a week is to try to raise Miyu in a bilingual environment without ever leaving the comforts of her own home. We watch English cartoons together, sing songs, play house and go for walks to one of the playgrounds that are between here and the train station. We live 25 minutes west of downtown Tokyo by express train, so we've got a decent mix of man made and natural surroundings. The bike path that starts in Tanashi runs past the back of our building. If you follow it you'll end up near Tama lake, or so I'm told. I haven't tried it myself. It's close to 20 kilometers from here.
Sometimes Miyu is up for the challenge of playing with me, and sometimes she isn't. This morning, from 10 to 12, she was pretty good. She's two years and eight months old, so she's enjoying a very firm grip on Japanese, and so she mostly speaks to me in that language. I was invited to live at MY Kopo back when Miyu was only 15 months old, so we've witnessed quite a change, Yukiko and I. Miyu can understand nearly everything that I say, but most of what comes back is in Japanese. She has a few stock phrases that she uses, her favorite being, "I don't kno-oow", which she sings out whenever she doesn't care to answer a question. Her mother, Masumi, and Yukiko are a little bit dismayed that Miyu hasn't starting producing lots of English as of yet. I guess I am as well, but I'm not really worried because she's still so young and doesn't truly understand the difference between Japanese and English. What she does know is that Chris doesn't always understand what mommy and daddy say, and only grandma really gets what Chris is talking about.
She calls me Ki-chu or Ki-chi. Never Chris. My name gains two syllables when pronounced in Japanese. It's Ku-ri-su over here. Miyu combines the first two, and modifies the third since "S's" are difficult for her to pronounce. So I'm Ki-chu. I'm like her fourth uncle now. Uncle Yasu is the least popular of the four of us, but he's moving up the ranks. I've never met her father's brother, so I'm not so sure where he fits in. He doesn't live in the Watanabe hotel like the rest of us.
She is a very lucky girl, and not because I'm hanging around. She has a wonderful family, and she is surrounded by relatives 24 hours a day. We live in a nice area, and our apartment building even has it's own back yard and garden. It's a space that's big enough to build one more modern, sardined, earthquake-flexible house. With the notoriously sky-high property prices here in Tokyo, you know that it's no small investment to keep it open. Grandpa, also known as Jiji, tends a crescent-shaped garden of Ume (pron. oo-may) trees, Magnolias and flowers of every shape and shade. He's mostly out there on the weekend. He owns a construction equipment business, so that keeps him busy most of the time. He works very hard to keep the grass as green as possible. Miyu loves to kick the soccer ball around in the yard. Volcanic-black stones, pourous like baked sponges, line the garden and keep the ball from meeting the roses.

Babysitting 1