Bilingualising: Compiling information

Back again! Although this time, I’m finding it a bit harder to explain in another language, all about what we’ve been up to over the last few weeks. It can be quite difficult sometimes to find the required inspiration to write in English when all your thoughts and feelings flow so quickly in your own language. You don’t always know how to express things or how to make yourself understood on a blog post but once you finally start to put pen to paper, words usually begin to flow like verbal diarrhea, allowing you to type at the speed of thought, which normally only happens when you’re writing in your mother tongue.

Anyway, the thing is, during these past few weeks I’ve been basically compiling information and useful activities from websites, Instagram, Facebook and other online sources, where I found the inspiration I needed to shape up this mad process of ‘bilingualising’ my family.

All of us, parents and teachers, like doing things our way. We all have a particular method we like to use but in saying that, there’s no doubt we can all make good use out of online resources to customise our own particular style.

Here are some of the links I usually take advantage of:

https://www.youtube.com/user/SuperSimpleSongs?gl=ES&hl=es

http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/

http://supersimplelearning.com

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/teaching-kids/resources

I’ve also put together recently a list of topics I’d like to cover at home with my kids. I have sorted them by level of importance according to my point of view and my kids’ needs. What I mean is there’s no point in starting with numbers if my toddler can’t count, but starting with the parts of the body would make more sense, since it’s a topic of conversation my three kids can follow.

Other crazy things we’ve done over the past few weeks in my small apartment were crafts and projects on national festivities and celebrations, which helped me ‘bilingualise’ my kids without feeling like I was doing any work.

Here are some examples:

· St. Patrick’s cards: I got the kids to cut and colour some paper shamrocks and we talked about how this festival is celebrated in Ireland.

· Seasonal mail boxes: we had some fun making a Spring mail box out of cardboard and left it in our hallway so we can post each other surprise letters and notes. This will help reinforce their writing skills in both languages (they write in Spanish and I reply in English) We dedicated this mail box to Spring and we got to talk about all the different seasons and dealt with specific vocabulary and talked about the things that take place during that time of the year.

·

Family trees: taking advantage of the topic one of my kids was covering at school, we designed a ‘rabbit family tree’. I printed three types of bunnies whose age gap was pretty clear. They were rabbit families with different colour paws for each family. The kids got to sort them all by colour into small families.