Challenge #14: Pursue a Creative Project

While it's vital to provide ample language exposure to our children through continuous efforts like talking to them a lot and reading to them a lot, another productive option for language input involves short-term projects. Over the years I've shared a variety of ideas for creative projects--projects pursued by myself or other parents--that can give a significant boost to your bilingual journey by engaging your kids in fun, effective activities that make use of the target language. These projects with kids have included...

This year, because local schools were closed for several months as a result of the coronavirus outbreak, my 13-year-old son and I took up a new project together. And in fact, our pet was involved, too. She's a bearded dragon and her name is Fifa. Here she is sitting on the kitchen table...



In a way, Fifa actually played the most important role in this project because she inspired the whole thing. You see, as bearded dragons tend to do, Fifa spends quite a lot of time just sitting quietly and staring off into space. So Roy and I were wondering: Just what is Fifa daydreaming about all the time? And from that question came the idea of creating a coloring book of imaginative daydream scenes. With the support of an illustrator friend, we then developed the book, day by day and page by page, over the course of about 3 months--and all this interaction was in English, our minority language.

The final result is Bearded Dragon Daydreams, a fun-filled coloring book for all ages that consists of 30 illustrations plus two "challenge pages" for creating your own bearded dragon daydreams.

Along with coloring and drawing fun, this book can be used in various ways to promote language development in children. (Any language!) It includes a page of useful ideas to help parents make the most of the book as a productive language tool.

If you like, you can download free sample pages from the book for your kids.

So here's your challenge: Carry out a creative project with your kids! Short-term projects can be a really fun and productive way to strengthen your bilingual journey with additional language exposure and engagement while also enhancing your children's creativity and deepening the bond that you share.