[Diane765]

We will be hosting a boy and girl sib pair from Russia this summer (just 7 weeks from now!) and would appreciate some ideas on conversing. Our translator will be available some, but not all the time. We are frantically trying to learn some Russian, but finding it quite a task. The boy is 10, the girl is 8--any chance we can use written translations at this age? We have 5 bio-children (ages 5, 6, 14, 15, 18) and are hoping that they will help as well.

We are hoping that these children will want to and be able to join our family permanently in the near future, but the summer program is a mere 2 weeks--certainly not enough time to teach much English! Any thoughts, ideas, experiences will be greatly appreciated!

[Lindsie]

I'm not sure how well this would work, i guess it would depend on your kids, but anyway.... when i was in about 7th grade or so, my german class had a "german night" as we had a german kid visiting. Everyone had to only speak in german, we ate german food, watched a video of a german movie etc. Everyone had their own dictionary and would have a notepad on which they wrote down the pronunciation of the words that they were going to say (from the dictionary) and then to work out what people had said to you you had to look it up if you couldn't figure it out.

Some of your kids are definately old enough for this and the others can be helped by you and the bigger kids. Just an idea to make the russian kids know that you really were trying and that you wanted to communicate/interact with them. Obviously the russian kids would only have to speak russian and help you look up the words if you couldn't figure it out. Plus the russian kids will probably find it hilarious to listen to you all trying to speak russian.

make sure you have loads of english/russian dictionaries around when you try to do this.

[MaryHM]

You can read my experiences with hosting here:

http://www.reefsource.com/Hosting2004/hosting2004.htm

There's a page that has all of the Russian translation sites I'm using. They're working wonderfully for us!