English

We've had really good moments studying English. Especially Luana is enjoying it a lot and Lucas is picking up a few words as well. We've been going over the colours to start with. This is something they've also covered at school last year so they remembered some colours already. They both have their notebooks and I prepare some simple tasks for them. I try to speak as much English as I can and I give them all instructions (like "look", "listen", "draw") in English and use gestures as well.

This British Council's website has been great with lots of resources for teaching English to kids. We've already listened to a song about colours as well as a story in English. I have to say I'm amazed at how kids can cope with a new language. Before we listened to the story I told the kids something about it in English. "Billy and Splodge visit different planets that have different colours." Luana nodded. I asked her if she had actually understood and she said yes. What?! She doesn't speak any English so how on earth was she able to understand that? Then I thought how the same scentence would be in Portuguese and there are so many similar words: "Billy e Splodge visitam diferentes planetas que têm diferentes cores." So that explains. You can't do that with Finnish at all though, the same scentence in Finnish would be: "Billy ja Splodge vierailevat eri planeetoilla, jotka ovat eri värisiä." :D

Luana just had her English lesson at school today and she came home all excited about having finally learned a nursery rhyme they'd been practicing. It took me a while to understand but I finally got it: "Five fat sausages frying in a pan..." I had to look it up on the internet as I'm not that familiar with nursery rhymes in English :)

We have a small bag with nursery rhymes in Finnish that we use at home. There's a song that goes with it and after the song the child whose name was mentioned in the song gets to pick one card from the bag and that rhyme is read out loud. I'm thinking about having a bag like that in English too.