One of the reasons that I use the Twinkl website as much as I do is because they have so many editable versions of their resources. So maybe you are wondering – what is so special about have editable versions of resources ? – Well the allow you to customise the resources to your exact needs. When you are helping your children learn another language, especially a language that might not be that widely spoken in the country that you live in it becomes very useful. Both my kids speak Afrikaans (my husband’s home language) and living in the UK you can not just walk into a local bookstore and buy Afrikaans goodies. So we have found the best way around that is to convert existing resources into Afrikaans. I have created a few of my own resources for the kids but it honestly takes me AGES and I get frustrated with the formatting and frustrated with the time I am spending trying to find the images that I want. So taking an existing English resource with the images already nicely set in the correct place and the formatting completed is just much easier for me and really doing the translating is quick and then I am ready to print.
As both the kids are now happily speaking Afrikaans and can switch between the two languages without an issue we thought it was time to try and get them reading Afrikaans (both kids are already reading English).
When my daughter was learning to read English I used the Twinkl match the sentences to the picture cards with her. She liked this as it was a simple sentence on a piece of paper and she did not get distracted by everything else on a page. So I thought it might be a good place to start with Afrikaans reading. It was really easy to translate the sentences and then she was off. (The sentences in the photos are from the Phase 3 Sentence and Picture Matching Activity).
We were not sure how she would manage as we have not done any formal Afrikaans reading with her as such (just basic words). But she sounded out the words and with a little help from her dad she read all of the sentences. She was actually really surprised and very proud that she could read so many of the words and has asked if we can create more sentences for her.
We also download and translated a very simple sentence writing activity where the kids are given a picture together with three words and then they try to create a sentence.
And because my animal-mad youngest also wanted some Afrikaans pages I translated a the Trace The Words Worksheet – the one in the picture is the Farmyard Hullabaloo
But I must be admit I was amazed to see my youngest was also able to read some of the Afrikaans words in the sentences that we created for his sister and he has now asked for some Afrikaans sentence and picture cards.
For me those three activities would have taken ages to set up if I was creating them myself but by just translating an editable version of an existing document I saved lots of time and now I have that extra time to translate more for the kids. I am a huge fan of the editable resources on Twinkl for that simple reason they save me time.
Please note the 2nd langauge is an ongoing part of our family life, it is not something we are suddenly introducing – We have been following the one parent one language rule in our house since both kids were born and my husband does also read Afrikaans books to the kids.
ofamily learning together 