Clever Learning: Incorporate Bilingual Fun into Your Summer!

Summer is here and the long days of relaxing at the pool or the beach have arrived. After two weeks or so with your children being home all day, you may be ready for some new adventures…. Even some educational ones!

As an educator of early language instruction, I am always looking for new opportunities and ways to expose my children to languages. Whether your child is learning a second language for the first time, or perhaps learning a third language, there are many ways to incorporate some bilingual fun into your summer.

Choose a fun summer destination that you will be ordinarily visiting (i.e. the park, the zoo, the beach, grandparent’s house). About a week before you make the trip, sit down with your children and draw a picture of what they think they will see there. Encourage them to include as many details as possible. Choose about 8-10 words from the picture, and look them up in the target language (www.wordreference.com has many different languages and is a great online bilingual dictionary). Together, you and your children will label the items in the target language on their drawing. You have just created the first page of your picture dictionary! If you will be teaching Spanish, and you drew a picture of the zoo, you may want to label the following: el tigre- tiger, la jirafa- giraffe, el elefante- elephant, la foca- seal, el oso- bear, el leopardo- leopard, el pinguino- penguin, la culebra- snake, el cocodrilo- crocodile, etc.

Be sure to post your labeled drawing on your refrigerator for the week leading up to the visit. Use every opportunity you have to discuss the picture and say the words together. Try www.spanicity.com and look up the appropriate vocabulary to listen to audio recordings to help with your pronunciation of Spanish. Allocate a special folder to your ‘language drawings’, so you that you may add pages to your picture dictionary as you visit new places this summer.
When the big day arrives when you will be taking the adventure, be sure to grab the folder with the drawing. Practice in the car on the way and try to say as many of the words as you remember. As your adventure begins, encourage your children to look for the items that they predicted in their drawing. When you see the item, reinforce the language by saying the words together. The children will be excited to see the actual words that they have been practicing come to life. Take this opportunity to teach others that may have joined you on the adventure.

For each adventure you take this summer, try to complete a language picture, so that your children can make their language learning relevant to their lives. Research continually shows the benefits of early language instruction and the facility that young children have with absorbing languages. Have fun this summer and be sure to include some bilingual fun into your adventures!

What do you think? Enter your comments below and feel free to visit www.bilingualfun.com