How Daisykins Nursery promotes children's home langauge.

Promoting Children’s Home Languages

At Daisykins Day Nursery in Rugby, we believe that bilingualism is an asset. Children's first language has a continuing and significant role in their identity. It also supports their learning and development and their acquisition of additional languages. Practitioners play a key role in reassuring parents/carers that maintaining and developing their child’s home language will benefit them and support their developing skills in English. Learning a second language can be extremely challenging and we are keen to help all children that have English as an additional to make this as natural as possible. Second language learners acquire a lot of their language incidentally by interacting with other children and adults in meaningful contexts. Our fantastic practitioners strive to provide learning opportunities that will spark purposeful discussions.[ngg src="galleries" ids="261" display="basic_slideshow"]Supporting children’s continued development of their home language and promoting the use of their first language enables them to access a range of learning opportunities. Our brilliant EAL Coordinator, Simona, is keen to support the children in learning about their home cultures, traditions and festivals, as well as supporting them in learning and gaining an understanding of English.Prompting the home cultures of the children in our setting is important and we strive to celebrate a range of festivals, supporting the learning of traditions around the world. Simona supports this through planning a variety of activities, international focused days and parent/carer mornings celebrating festivals from around the world.At Daisykins, we celebrated ‘Easter Around The World’, holding a parent/carer morning with a range of activities that included Easter traditions of the home countries of children within the setting. We were delighted with the support of the parents/carers who attended with traditional items and foods and discussed how their home country celebrates Easter. The children had a fantastic morning, enjoying tasting a variety of foods, engaging in a range of activities and learning all about how different countries celebrate Easter, with several children asking questions and returning home to tell their families what they had learnt.Amongst many of the international-themed days that Daisykins have held were the children’s home countries of Poland, Spain, Italy, China and Africa.