Our little Portuguesa

It has been no surprise to Briant and I, that our very verbal daughter Rhea, is now expressing herself verbally in Portuguese.  Or should I say, her version of Portuguese. :)  She's got a great accent though as she uses her made up words, mingled with real words that she has heard.

Here are two videos of her singing and reading in "Portuguese."  The songs she has learned from Portuguese class at school, and the reading is her own translation of a book in English called "Over the Meadow."  She has been picking up books and reading them to the wall or her dolls as she's played teacher for years, so it is no surprise that she does it in Portuguese now.  On this particular day, she offered to read to me in Portuguese, an offer which I took her up on, and in the middle of it, decided I had better capture some of this memory on video.

And for fun, because I'm feeling like walking down memory lane a little, here are two videos of Rhea singing a song she made up and another of her reading a library book back in August of last year after we moved to Virginia.  These help to illustrate this ongoing desire she has to talk, teach, read, and sing.  She of course is making up the words in both videos.  I love these because they show her newly turned six year old brain trying to combine vocabulary she had heard from books read to her and words from church and even some family conversations.  During the year of homeschooling that had just ended when I took these videos, I always tried to get her to read the real words to a book, but gave up when she kept saying, "I don't want to read your way.  I want to read my way," and she would go on to surprise me with the stories she made up based off of the pictures in the book.  I realized that I would rather have her using her creativity to express herself through her own storymaking and telling, than learning how to read and robotically read the words already written for her (which is obviously the easier of the two choices and I knew would come eventually.  Which it has).  Nothing has changed with Rhea since this video 9 months ago.  Whenever we can't find her, we stop and listen, and sure enough we can hear her in her room or another corner of the house singing a song or reading a book outloud to the dustmites or whoever wants to listen.  We love this girl, even when we have to tell her to stop talking.  ;)