Dear All,

Thank you so much to the multilingual parents who attended our third and fourth Welcome-Belong-Thrive coffee mornings at the nursery. It was great to see faces old and new, and to share multilingual skills. Below, we’ll tell you a little more about what we did and also about a Parent Questionnaire.

Creating Multilingual Stories & Rhymes for our Children

We had a fun session recording some bilingual stories and rhymes in these first languages:

Arabic, English, Kurdish Kurmanji, Somali and Turkish.

It’s so important that our children hear all our languages in nursery so that:

• they feel a sense of belonging – a sense of home
• they understand that all languages are valued by our community
• they see nursery and families celebrating multilingualism together.

Although some parents felt a little shy at first, we soon got into it. Click on the links below to enjoy these bilingual stories and rhymes at home. We’ll also be sharing them in the nursery and can’t wait to see the children’s responses when they hear their Mum or Dad reading in their first language!

Walking through the Jungle

Handa's Surprise

Errol's Garden

We’d love to record some more stories, poems and songs in first languages, so that all our children can hear their languages being used. Research shows this will help our children to learn English too.

Exploring Ways for Multilingual Families to Communicate with Nursery

We also want to understand the best ways to share information about the nursery and your child’s progress with you, as multilingual parents.

We’d also like to gather your ideas through our Better Bilingual Questionnaire for Parents & Carers. Please click here to participate.

If you’d like to translate this Questionnaire (or this Newsletter), simply hover your mouse over the text, right click, choose ‘Translate’ and select your language from the top right menu:

Thank you for reading and we look forward to seeing you at our next Welcome-Belong-Thrive coffee mornings everyone is welcome!

Best wishes,

Catherine, Farah & the Better Bilingual Team

Laura & Sam