Articles for parents

SIMPLE steps in learning a foreign language

1. Give your children the opportunity to be in an environment, where they can often hear the foreign language. The sooner, the better!
2. Keep using your native language at home.
3. Create opportunities for your child to be in the company of and play with children that speak a foreign language.
4. Bring your child into contact with other children of the same age in a place that is especially designed, where learning a foreign language is interactive: music, dancing, film-watching etc.
5. Read and narrate a story to your child in a foreign language.
6. The more assertive you feel about learning a foreign language and culture, the more assertively your children will feel about this language!

“The hundred are there…” Loris Malaguzzi

The child is made of one hundred.
The child has a hundred languages
a hundred hands, a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking, of playing, of speaking.
A hundred, always a hundred ways
of listening, of marveling, of loving.
A hundred joys for singing and understanding,
a hundred worlds to discover,
a hundred worlds to invent,
a hundred worlds to dream.
The child has a hundred languages
(and a hundred, a hundred, a hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.

The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands,
to do without the head,
to listen and not to speak,
to understand without joy,
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover a world that’s already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child:
that work and play,
reality and fantasy,
science and imagination,
sky and earth,
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.
 And thus they tell the child
that the hundred languages are not there.
The child says:
No way!!! The hundred are there.