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May 29 – June 6 sees National Children’s Gardening Week in the UK. If you haven’t already found fun ways to plant and sow with children in your life, it’s about time: soon it will be too late for most crops.

When we lose a language, we lose a part of our culture and history. A Day with Grandpa by Fiona Scott is a gentle way of talking about dementia with your children, especially if they have an affected grandparent. But the theme of forgetting, and losing who you are with that loss, runs through into the Irish that we have among our dual language versions of this book.

Dari might seem like an unlikely language to make it onto UNESCO’s list of Endangered Languages; about half of Afghanistan’s population understand Dari, and nearly a third speak it, meaning there are an estimated 8-9 million speakers of this Indo-Iranian language, sister to Persian and Farsi.

How do you explore languages and cultural differences in your classroom? It's often through looking at cultures we perceive as "different" that we discover things we all have in common. This week we look at the northern lights in mythology, but you can also take the time to talk about what causes the northern lights with your class from a scientific perspective. 

2019 was the International Year of Indigenous Languages. That didn’t escape us. We work, breathe, and dream language.

Are you a parent feeling under pressure to do everything ‘right’? Do you feel your children ‘should’ be more developed in certain areas? Do you think they are behind compared to other children?
You are not alone. These thoughts and feelings are more common than you may think.
 
While I totally understand where they come from, have you ever paused and asked yourself: ‘What really is the right thing to do?’ ‘Who determines what is right and what is wrong?’

Raising bilingual children can be challenging, especially if you want them to speak fluently in two (or more) languages.

If you live in an English-speaking country, the English language will always be dominant for your children, regardless of what language you speak to them at home.
 
It is easier when they are small, but once they start to go to school and be exposed to the English language for 6 hours a day, that is when things usually change. Even if they haven’t before, your children suddenly start to speak to you in English.
 

Today marks the 2021 beginning of Ramadan, an important celebration to Muslims across the world.