Our experience with bilingual education
My parents in law from Italy are staying with us for a couple of weeks. Today, my daughter was telling her grandmother what she had eaten in school: Mi sono mangiata un panino col formaggio e un panino col… come si dice ‘hagelslag’? [I ate a sandwich with cheese and a sandwich with… how do […]
Lees meer Italian sprinklesThis weekend, I used Italian as a ‘secret’ language with my daughter for the first time. We were on our way to celebrate Sinterklaas in Rotterdam, so we took train. After a while, I smelled something familiar. In order not to involve the other travellers in my conversation, I asked my son about his diaper: […]
Lees meer Italian secrets in the trainMy daughter was making a book. I heard her spelling B-A-L (ball) and saw her writing it down in her book. She decided she would like her book to be really funny, so she started writing a new word. She asked me to come read the word and I could hear the excitement in her […]
Lees meer Learning how to write in Dut-CHIn an earlier blog, I wrote about the differences between the Dutch and Italian alphabet and how we deal with them now that our 4-and-a-half year old daughter is learning how to write. About six moths ago, my daughter started to write more and more, for instance when she liked to write al the names […]
Lees meer The letter ‘K’Follow up on my earlier blogs about #codeswitching and some examples from my #bilingual children
Lees meer Codeswitching Part 2One of the things you need in order to be able to learn a language is confidence. Confidence to just try and make mistakes while doing so. In the end, we learn a lot from our mistakes! Another thing that helps to acquire a language, is to go to an environment where it’s the majority […]
Lees meer Speaking with confidenceIn this post, my mother in law asked herself how her grandchildren would communicate with eachother. As they’re starting to have real conversations, time has come to give her a first answer… A while ago, my son and daughter were playing in my son’s bed. They were so cute! I waited just a while to […]
Lees meer Bilingual brother and sister: this is how they chatEvery night, we read to our children We use all kinds of books, both in Dutch and Italian. They grow up with the concept of books, images, words and letters to tell stories. Both of them are very interested! My son (21 months) knows that some letters go with a certain sound (he knows ‘E’, […]
Lees meer Playing with the alphabetLast weekend, we were playing hide and seek. It was my turn to count, so I went “acht (8), nine (9) …” and my 20 month old son added: “tien (10)!” I didn’t really pay much attention to it, as I thought it had been a coincidence, so we continued playing. As we walked up […]
Lees meer The first numbersThis is what reading a book with my #bilingual #toddler is like!
Lees meer Reading with my bilingual toddler
Speaking more languages 