International pre-school 2 days a week (for 3 year old)

5 comments

1. Every situation is different, but I looked into two in my area and they were total scams. Very strict learning routines that push little kids. The international teachers were all from countries where English wasn’t their native language. School on Saturdays. Homework for 3 year olds…

   My daughter is now 5 and entered kindergarten when she was 1. English is still her main language. I can’t say i have done anything special other than spend as much time as I can with her.

   Reading tons of books, watch English shows together, signed up for readingeggs.

2. I put my kid in a regular kindergarten and his Japanese is great and his English is also great. He’ll flip flop between the two at home sometimes but for the most part he keeps them pretty separate

3. There are good international schools and there are bad international schools. It’s up to you, as a parent, to figure it out. The one next to my apartment building has one native speaker that teaches the kids an hour a couple of days a week, and that’s it. The rest is Japanese teachers speaking to the kids in mostly Japanese with a few English words mixed in. On the other hand, an acquaintance of mine sends her daughter to international preschool and she is really good with English. Not at the level of my son to whom we speak in English at home, but for a two and a half she’s suprisingly good. Mind you, they are very well off, so the kindergarten they send her too is probably on the pricey end of things.

   edit: I was brought up as a bilingual kid. at home we only spoke english (my mother’s native tongue) and outside, at school and so on, in my other language. I never atended an international kindergarten in my life and I’m completely fluent in both languages.

4. If the schools seem all right, may be worth it. Definitely needs to be mostly about playing in English at 3, I have heard about some developmentally inappropriate terrible places. I didn’t have any good options offline (impossible to coordinate logistically with my/so’s jobs and all J kids anyway) so we just did online English lessons with Japanese hoikuen at that age. I say lessons but it was just doing stuff in English with a teacher and other kids and gradually changed to more age appropriate academic stuff as she got older. Now that my kid is older there are other options.

5. I worked at a very small private “international pre-school” for 4 years. The classes were 09:30 – 14:30 Tues-Fri. Max 10 kids in each class. One native, one Japanese teacher. Most kids only came once or twice a week and often attended a Japanese preschool on the other days 🙂

   The place was alright. Not super strict. Native teachers (like me) spoke 100% in English and the Japanese support staff spoke some English but also used Japanese quite a lot. We also had only Japanese kids, so when the kids are playing amongst themselves there is a lot of Japanese being spoken.

   I would interject and translate and get the kids to repeat English during free play but I obviously couldn’t do that all the time for every kid so yeah. The kids didn’t speak much English to each other in free play outside of a few words and phrases. The class would be a system of play an organised game in English with flash cards focusing on the monthly vocab etc. and then free play, then another English game, then free play type thing.

   I think it’s a good supplementary resource, but tbh I wasn’t on the parent side I can’t really vouch for the ROI! But the parents who tried to incorporate English into the kids lives in general had the best results with coming to my class once a week. Other parents who didn’t care at all and just stuck their kid once a week saw very little progress (but I’m sure they didn’t really mind, they probably just wanted a nice preschool with small classes).

   I don’t know what kind of place you were looking at, and my experience is only with one small school, but feel free to ask me if you want to know anything else! 🙂