Celebrating international literacy day

UNESCO international literacy day

It’s “International Literacy Day” on Monday 8 September- so what better way to put a marker in the sand and make those cross curricular first steps between target language learning and literacy."Literacy and sustainable development" is the strap line and when you reflect on what we hope to achieve for our young learners it's that they will become competent young linguists who can communicate for work and business in another language sometime in their futures. who knows what communication and language challenges in their work and personal lives they may have to face.

Languages and Literacy belong together so this is an ideal opportunity to investigate and celebrate links between languages  and the structure of languages. Here are a few ideas we can easily incorporate in to our language teaching and learning next week – even if it’s a day or two after the official international literacy day!!

Possibility One :Exploring the World family of languages 

Who has the book below on their shelves.....somewhere?

Take the children on an exploration of another language  - maybe one that is spoken by children in school or maybe one that is unfamiliar to all your learners.

I love the fact that the subtitle says "talk your way around the world"!

The  book has short histories of each language , simple and useful phrases, pronunciation guides and a structure focus e.g in Turkish it’s explained that there are two words for “you” …..now how easy is that to link to French , German…..??

Possibility Two: a international story read by the author is his/her original language

Does it matter is the children don’t understand each word? In this instance it’s about the children seeing that stories exist in other languages. We love using this Eric Carle clip of the Hungry Caterpillar read in German by the author himself.

 Possibility Three: Taking a thought for a walk in two languages!

A sentence is a device to take a thought for a walk blog

Why not explore some simple writing in the target language you teach in school. I love this cartoon and the blog I wrote last academic year is all about how we can encourage young language learners to take a thought for a walk in any language!

Possibility four  :Links between Literacy,target language grammar and drama

noun collectors

noun treasure chests

different sides of an adjective

the split personality of a sentence