Celebrating the Bilingual Child Month – Raising Bilingual Kids

Celebrating the Bilingual Child Month

October is celebrating the Bilingual Child Month!  Let’s take this opportunity to celebrate with your child and their peers.  Let your child be proud of the effort she is making to learn her heritage language or a new language.  It is a chance for her to see other children who are also on the same journey.

And, as a parent, you can be the facilitator for the Bilingual Child Month celebration!  Here are the events you can set up.  The celebration should be all year round.

Storytime

Stories create imagination and connection.  Storytime can be reading a book about the target language culture.  You can expand it to storytime with a craft project and a game.  Books that you can consider for the program are:

• The Little Monkey King’s Journey -(English-Chinese bilingual) for pre-K and up.

  
  

• Cang Jie: The Inventor of Chinese Characters -(English-Chinese bilingual) for ages 4 and up.  I have written an article about Chinese characters and about this book.

  
  

• Brandon Goes to Beijing -(English with Chinese words for Chinese culture and language) for Gr. 1 and up.  This is author, Eugenia Chu’s new book after Brendon Makes Jiǎo Zi.  We have a fun conversation in this interview about her debut book and she shows us her homemade Chinese dumplings!

  
  

• What Was It Like, Mr. Emperor: Life in China’s Forbidden City -(English) for ages 8 and up.

  
  

• In the Forbidden City -(English) for Grade 4 and up

  
  

Learning community

Plan a visit to a Chinese culture center, a local Chinese school, and an Asian Studies department in a university to experience what they have for you and your family.

Mandarin Language learning community in your city and online.  Seeing other children be a part of the learning opens up the horizon of your child’s perception of learning Mandarin.  She is now not the only one.  You are now in a group that all the parents in the community are working toward the same goal.  For parents who are new to Mandarin Chinese, you can consider Miss Panda’s Guided Learning community.

Adoptive Families

Organize a meet-up for adoptive families with children from Chinese-speaking locations.

Adoptive families with children from China make a great effort to share their children’s heritage culture to them.  I’ve found this important and precious.  And, I have had the opportunity to interview Allison Branscombe, the author of All About China: Stories, Songs, Crafts and More for Kids.   Allison is an adoptive parent.  She has two adult children from China.  Her story is beautiful in many ways.  You can watch the interview and see how she has kept the Chinese heritage culture alive at home and in the community that she created.

You can include a book in the program.  Here is a pick for you.  Mei Mei’s Lucky Birthday Noodles: A Loving Story of Adoption, Chinese Culture and a Special Birthday Treat (English).  This is a story about Mei Mei.  Mei Mei is Chinese, but not her parents.  Mom and Dad adopted her when she was a baby.  They wanted Mei Mei to learn about her heritage Chinese culture so every year on her birthday Mom always makes her a special Chinese dish.  You can follow this special day with Mei Mei and see the adoptive experience.

Bilingual Kids and English learners

Initiate an event with the English learners’ program in your child’s school!

All the children in the ESL and ELL program have a language that they speak at home.  How do you say  “Hello, ” “How are you?” “I am hungry.” in their home languages?  Let the English learners be the world language teacher and have your child shares the target language she is learning as one of the languages at the event.

This is an event that parents, teachers, and schools can work together.   You can go with World Language Day for the grade level and the whole school.

Bilingual and Cultural Books 

Bring bilingual and cultural books to your child’s library!

Visit your local public library and explore their collection of bilingual and world culture children’s books collection.  Provide them book titles that you are interested in for your family and your community.  Share Multicultural Children’s Book Day with the school library and the public library so they can receive resources about diverse books for children.  Celebrating bilingual children is to celebrate the cultures!

Celebrate YOU, the parent who is making being bilingual possible for your child

Share your story with us even if you just started introducing Mandarin Chinese to your child.  What is it like when you look back before you started?  What do you feel now?  Every child who is learning a new language needs to have family support.

And, the biggest support is from you.  You, the parent with the superpower who decide to begin this journey and keep it up.

If you are reading this I want to say, “Congratulations!”  I want to celebrate with you on what you have done and for every baby step, you are going to take!

Photo by ben o’bro

Celebrating the Bilingual Child Month