#Top5 tips for Storytelling in a Multilingual family

Today I wanted to approach the subject of bilingual and multilingual challenges and some of my favourite tips to help your child keep those languages in check in a fun way.

First, let's take a quick look at what Bilingual and multilingual actually means, in short.

-Being Bilingual literally means that you are fluent in two languages and use them on regular/semi-regular bases. This is normal if your parents speak two different languages or if you speak one language at home and another in the country you live in. (for example)

-Multilingual means you are fluent in more than two languages and speak them on a semi-regular/ full-time basis.

There are many challenges when parenting/teaching to uphold multiple languages within a family, but hopefully, these fun tips will make it a little easier for you. These are all tried and tested and still in use in my own household!

Enjoy!

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Top 5 Multilingual tips

#1 Around your house there are objects, such as chairs and table etc. A good visual tip is to create cards representing the object. For example, on the back of the kitchen chair, I would have a label that said: "Chair, Stol, Cadeira" and if you have toddlers in the house too you could always add a small image of a chair, just to drive home the point. You can make these labels for the entire house. Warning: Your house may start to look like a school classroom, but the kids will enjoy the daily reminders. Especially if you randomly quiz them!

#2 When storytelling I like to grab hold of the important or prominent words in the story and repeat them in our 3 different languages. So, for example, if I am reading "Sam took the ball" I would say "Ball, ballen, bola". The reason for doing this is so that (especially the younger your child is!) gets used to the different sounds for the same object.

#3 This is one of my favourite methods to help teach and keep the languages up to date. ART! Getting sticky, glittery and paint under the fingernails is such an expressive way to teach. Art therapy takes a small role in this method at number 3. Using whatever media you like, start to either talk about colours or patterns, numbers of forms (all depends on what you are creating together) and basically translate each word. For example, the girl in the image is colouring in an angel using the colour pink. So you could say "I like the colour pink/rosa. Do you?" It is endless what you can talk about, but the child will remember because they are not only listening to the word but seeing it in front of them as they interact with the word.

#4 Movie night! For the older kids, they enjoy watching movies in different languages and putting subtitles in English. My eldest daughter says that she feels she gets to hear authentic pronounciations and learns new words this way.

#5 Music. This works especially well when your baby is just learning nursery rhymes. Take the time to learn ' Itsby bitsy spider' in all the languages your family share. Your child will enjoy singing with you, and they enjoy repetition. They will quickly pick up on the fact that its the same song being sung but the words sound different, and soon enough they will sing along with you. For the older child chart popping songs could be listedn too and words learnt in many different languages, a tip to help them learn a song is to print out the lyrics. Have fun with the songs, don't worry if you get it wrong!

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