I recently read a post by Bonne Mama at Our Non-Native Bilingual Adventure that really got me thinking! Her idea is to create language themes to focus on language learning with her toddler and baby. I’ve been so inspired by the idea. I can’t stop thinking about it! So I’ve started collecting my own ideas, based largely on the things we already have in the house. I wrote a post on it recently, but I thought I would use this page to collect the ideas as I continue to expand them.
THEMES:
- alphabet
- outings / travel
- bathtime
- on the farm
- by day and night (I really wanted to focus on lullabies here, so I did books/songs about waking up & going to sleep)
- jungle
- Eric Carle
- food
- vehicles
- colors
- airplane
- shapes
- friends
- at home
- helping hands (this comes from books where the theme is helping each other)
- insects
- body parts
- nature
- playground
- in town / in the city
- at the beach
- days of the week
- animals
- birds
- water
- Winnie the Pooh
- at the zoo
- trains
- Valentines’ Day
- Fasching / Karnival
- Easter
- Mother’s & Father’s Day
- Halloween
- Martinstag (St Martin’s Day)
- Nikolaus
- Weihnacht
- seasons
- winter / snow
- spring
- weather
MATERIALS:
- books
- songs
- fingerplays & knee bouncers
- games, puzzles, toys
- crafts
- coloring pages
- nursery rhymes
- food, recipes
- YouTube, DVDs, audio books, podcasts
- pictures & photos
- flashcards for looking at pictures (such as these from Usborne)
- field trips
- “I spy” books (in German these are called Wimmelbücher)
- Vocabulary lists (I’ll be creating a list of words that come up for each theme – these are really for me!)
RESOURCES:
- German Picture Word Book by Hayward Cirker & Barbara Steadman (Dover, 1993) – Coloring Book with labeled images – Book also comes in numerous other languages
- First Thousand Words in German by Heather Amery (Usborne, 2002) – Thematic pictures with labeled images – Book also comes in numerous other languages
- Toddler Activity Book (PDF download) – 51 ideas of things to do with toddlers, some of which might fit well into any number of themes!
- Mein schönstes Wimmel-Bilderbuch illustrated by Ali Mitgutsch (Ravensburger, 2011) – This is the only Wimmelbuch we have, but I really like it for this project, because it has so many thematic scenes such as farmyard, playground, at the beach, as well as scenes from different seasons.
Here’s an example of the page from the farm:
[...] Themes [...]
[...] Themes [...]