Bilingual fairy tales

I would like to share with you why to use bilingual books for children. In my opinion bilingual fairy tales helps children to improve their ability to read, while enjoying some of their favorite stories. It is a peaceful way how to start with English. What more, reading aloud is a great way to practice pronunciation. And both reading and hearing it in the two languages, helps children acquire an ear for the language and be able to understand conversation better.

Because my mother tongue is Czech, I´m going to show you some Czech-English bilingual fairy tales book, which I remember from my childhood. But of course you can find many bilingual books in other languages. 

The book is called Fairy Tales in Czech and English and it contains eight classic fairy tales (The Snow Queen, The Little Mermaid, Hansel and Gretel, Thumbelina, The Ugly Duckling, Little Red Riding Hood, The Bremen Town Musicians, The Little Match-Seller) in Czech and English. The book is designed for teaching EAL children at home, in kindergartens and schools. On each page there are four separate words with pictures underneath the text with a phonetic transcription and translation.

Describe your trip

Students like when they can speak/write about themselves. So "describe your trip" is an interesting activity. Children don´t need to learn any facts, because they just describe their own experiences. Through this activity children learn new words which are connected with travel, packing, booking and also dialogs, which are important for communication. To make this writing activity more enjoyable, we can also suggest to include photos/ drawing pictures from their trips. Then children can read aloud their stories and share their experiences with other classmates, which also helps to get know more about other people in the class. 

Before children start write, it´s appropriate to show them some example. This example can looks like that. It´s based on my own experience. I also write some words in bold - these words are connected with the topic of travel, packing, booking. These are just a few examples, there are much more.

Trip to Albufera lake

Albufera lake is one of the most important nature areas in the Land of Valencia. And I really like nature, so it was one of my favourite trips here in Spain. I went there with my three good friends. Because the lake is situated near Valencia, we could travel there by bus without booking any tickets in advance. The journey took about 40 minutes and we arrived to the destination at about 12am. Normally we have a lunch at this time so firstly we sat on the bench and ate our snacks, The place was really nice and quiet. I liked being in the nature away from the city.

Then we saw a turtle, which was walking across the street in the park. The turtle was so beautiful, so I took some pictures of it.

In the information centre we picked up a brochure with the map and all important things to see near the Albufera lake. So we could plan our day. There are things which we wanted to see/do: go for a walk through the park, float on boat on the Albufera lake, eat paella in one of the popular restaurat in Palmer, go to the beach and see sunset.

We did almost everything according our plan. We just didn´t eat paella, because we found it very expensive in this touristic place. But never mind, we went to cafe and had something different. We went almost everywhere by foot but because it was just a one-day trip and we had small backpacks and appropriate clothing it wasn´t so difficult to walk for a long time. But at the end of the day we were pretty exhausted.

I really enjoyed the whole day. What I liked the most was floating on boat and seeing the sunset. The sunset was so exciting and fascinating. I also liked the park, because it was calm and silent place, not crowded and busy as in the city.