Childcare provision and a trip to Bury

I have far too much I want to blog about right now and although it might seem wise to keep some of it back for later posts I am sure I will forget about them or just never get around to it. Therefore this post is going to be two rolled into one - hope you don't mind!

Part 1 - Childcare Provision or more appropriately how languages are approached in childcare

This past week I have been working in pre-school. I have worked in pre-school before and have to say I really quite enjoy this age group (although saying that I'm quite happy to work with any age from baby up to about 7 or 8). We presently have 2 German speaking children, a Polish speaking child and a Chinese speaking child. The latter two both started at the nursery with no prior knowledge of English - how scary for them!! I remember being at the nursery when the Chinese little boy started and he would hardly interact with any of the children and would cry so much - hardly surprising I think I would cry too. In fact I have cried when in another country and unable to understand what people are saying to me and being unable to express what I felt and that was as a teenager and adult not a 4 year old child!! But what shocked me the most was the lack of compassion, tolerance and patience some of the nursery staff had for this child. Seriously, because it made their lives more difficult they would moan and sometimes just ignore his cries - and if I didn't already have a soft spot for this child (which I did) I would have developed one there and then. As it works out I bumped into this child and his mum once in the supermarket and his mum stopped to tell me that he'd told her I was his teacher!! Bless him.

Anyway, this week I was lucky enough to see how far this little boy has come. Although he barely speaks more than a few words he does understand what is being said to him most of the time. It always amazes me how incredibly good children of this age are at learning new languages. But what made my heart sing was when he came up to me with a set of flashcards his parents had made. On one side of the card were English words like "home" and "play" and on the other were the Chinese characters. And guess what? He started reading the Chinese characters for me and teaching me what they said. He's 4 years old for crying out loud - most kids of his age can only just manage their names not Chinese characters!!! And his face, when I began to copy what he was saying was enough to fill my heart for the rest of the week!! He was overjoyed that someone would take the time to listen to his language and I like to think the reason he brought them to me was because at some level he knew that I would do so.

I'm sure most of you are aware that I studied languages at University - next to children and arts and crafts my other passion is languages and communication. I adore being able to communicate with others and I cannot tell you what a thrill I get from listening to and reproducing foreign sounds *sigh*. So when another little girl started at the nursery this week with absolutely no understanding of the English language I wanted to do all I could to help her. She speak Polish and although Polish has similarities to Russian it is different enough for me not to be able to understand what she was saying. After she calmed down and stopped crying enough for us to try and play with her, and after the other Polish child had spoken to her, I took the time to try and listen to what she was saying. All I could work out were the words for "mum" and "home" and I just could not comfort her by telling her that he mum would take her home soon. And although we had a Polish speaking child there to speak to her, he just isn't old enough to understand the concept of translation. Eventually she calmed down enough to sit on my lap and listen to a story but it broke my heart not to be able to do more for this child.

This is why this weekend I am looking up key Polish vocabulary we can use with her this coming week and why I feel more strongly than ever that the childcare and education system needs to put much more emphasis on foreign languages. Personally I think that there should be a system whereby each council has several native language contacts they can call into nurseries to help integrate foreign children into the system and I definately think foreign languages should be taught at an earlier age than it already is, not just to the children but to the childcare providers as well. This is one of the main reasons why, however much I'd like not to take on the extra work, I am going back to the nursery in the New Year to begin teaching German to the pre-school. We curently teach all staff and children sign language, why not another spoken language?

One of my plans when I left university was to set up my own business going round schools and nurseries, teaching staff and children German in fun and exciting ways that they can actually use. Although this has not been a possibility I do hope that one day, perhaps when I have children of my own (if I have the option of becoming a SAHM) I'll be able to take this idea further. But for now I am reduced to hoping that the system changes somehow. It is particularly of interest here where I live because at my nursery alone (bearing in mind there are only around 70 children registered) we have 3 Polish children, 2 German children, 3 Italian children, 1 Spanish child, 2 Arabic children, 1 Chinese child, 1 deaf child and 2 American children, who I know do not speak another language but come from another culture which would be great to introduce to the other children. One of my other ideas I had was of a bus that was specifically changed to be a playbus but with different areas to cover the world - toys and games and books and music in different areas to enable children to "explore" the world in their own playground. A great dream - most likely not a reality and certainly not one I can pursue - but wouldn't it be great if we had such things as that?!

Part 2 - A trip to Bury

And now on to part 2 - T and I made a day trip to Bury St Edmunds yesterday. We are hoping to go to the coast one day during the week I am off between finishing at the nursery and starting at the council. But this would be a far longer journey than I have tried since having this ear infection. So we thought we'd try a shorter journey, especially as Bury has a lovely crystal shop and as T has just started a distance Crystal Therapy course he wanted to check out what was available.

Thigns didn't go exactly to plan when I got home Friday so exhausted I could barely stay awake. I had felt brilliant all week long and I thought I was finally over the effects of the infection but then suddenly I had a setback and even though I slept for about 10 hours Friday night I still woke up feeling hungover. This was not how I wanted to attempt our first long journey in the car but I didn't want to miss out so we tried. We had to stop once on the way because I felt sick but then I got so panicked by all the cars speeding by us I decided I'd rather feel sick!! I never thought I'd be panicked by cars - it was so weird and very unpleasant. But eventually we arrived and it was well worth the journey!

I was desperate for the toilet when we got there so we began looking for a nice cafe to have a drink and use their facilities. We came across a fantastic place called Coffee 'n' Kids where you can stop to have a lovely cup of fresh herbal tea, homemade cakes and even buy some craft materials to enjoy either alone or with your kids. The people there were incredibly friendly and T and I came out with smiles on our faces and hope in our hearts for a perfect day.

We then visited the crystal shop and spent far more than maybe we should have but we've been SO careful with our money of late and now T is starting his new job and I am due to move to a bigger wage we decided it was ok to splash out this once. This was about the same time we realised we were very hungry, so we went in search of food. Finding food is quite difficult for me because I cannot currently eat wheat. This is a new thing that developed after an operation in 2005 and I am hoping to try reintroducing wheat into my diet again sometime in 2009. But until then we are left with trying to find non-wheat products. Usually this means soup or salads but we found this amazing store on the market square where a lady was selling butter beans in tomato and herby sauce and potato and chorizo sausage with peppers and onions all packaged up in biodegradable boxes with wooden forks and all including organically grown food. The portions were HUGE and we thoroughly enjoyed our meal - I only wish every town had this kind of market stall!

After that we popped into Woolworths - a shop neither of us has visited in years because they seem to be becoming quite extinct these days, much to our disappointment. There we bought a lovely cake tin for putting homemade cakes in (which reminds me I must post about T's birthday). After that we visited a nice "bargain store" where I bought a sketch pad and some new graded pencils as I have lost most of mine and am hoping to try my hand at drawing again. I can draw pretty well and did a fairly good sketch of T watching tv last night (although he kept moving a bit too much for my liking hehe) but I do not draw as well as I'd like to.

After all of this we headed back to the car, through the abbey which won the Britain in Bloom Award in 2007 - it has beautiful garden and I wish so much that we'd had a camera to take pictures. We're hoping to head back there to do some Christmas shopping later in the year so I promise to take photos then!

I think that's it for now - this is certainly a long enough post so well done if you've made it this far!!

Have a lovely week
Amanda xx