A New Craft for Me!

Tuomo writes: Last night, i.e. Tuesday night, was again Finnish kids' night at the Scandinavian Centre. These are kids between the ages of three and seven (pre-K to Grade 1), and their parents are both Finnish, so instead of teaching Finnish just as a language, our goal is to teach them academic skills in a Finnish-speaking environment: crafts, singing, playing, and language arts tasks, etc in Finnish as it would take place in Finland. It's amazing to observe how these kids are starting to "lose" certain skills in Finnish or their linguistic skills in Finnish are not developing at the same rate as in English.

In other words, the kids are seemingly fluent in Finnish when interacting with themon an everyday basis. Linguistic gaps don't appear until they are asked to discuss topics that relate to their school life or culture; then they run out of words and resort to code switching, or "filling in the gaps" with items of the dominant language takes place. For instance, topics like their favourite toys or what happened at school can be surprisingly challenging. And these kids get to speak Finnish with both of their parents! One can only imagine the challenges of a kid who has only one parent who speaks Finnish...

A fascinating example of gaps and code-switching took place a couple of weeks ago. One of the boys was trying to explain why he thought the girl in the story we were reading was not having a pleasant dream (there was a picture of beautiful butterfly, and all the others thought that the girl was having a pleasant dream) :

"Se on... blood-sucking... perhonen!"
It's a [blood-sucking] butterfly!"

In my opinion, this suggests that the boy had developed a concept, i.e. talking about scary things that boys of his age are fascinated by. It is highly likely that this had occured independently of the mother-father home environment and with a lot of support from the surrounding English-speaking culture (cartoons, classmates, etc.). This is a quite common phonomenon among bilingual children, and unless some form of intervention such as bilingual education, language immersions, etc. is available, the home language (in this case Finnish) atrophies to a language that can only be used to cover a limited range of domestic issues.

Related to the episode of the blood sucking butterfly, I asked him:

"Kuinka sä tiedät että se perhonen imee verta?"
How can you tell that that butterfly sucks blood?

I was trying to see if by wording my question this way (rather than give him the participial phrase vertaimevä "blood-sucking") the boy would be able to create the missing participial phrase in Finnish. And lo and behold, a moment later he did - and all by himself!

So just beware, I have plenty of cute anecdotal stories to bore you with to support my point of view that even limited bilingual education is essential to raise fully functional bilingual kids.. :-)

Anywayyy, what I really wanted to gush about was how - thanks to teaching Finnish to kids - I have also discovered a new hobby: feltwork (Finnish: huovitus). The teacher Satu had brought coloured wool from which made these cute bright-red felt apples. I had never done this myself, so there I was with a bunch of pre-K and first grades making felt Christmas apples! We made red apples and a green leaf to be sewn onto the red apple, after which a string of golden floss was also sewn on so that the apple could be hung in a Christmas tree.

I'm so proud of my red felt apple; hopefully I'll be able to post a picture soon! And I'm so glad that I've discovered yet another craft to keep myself entertained - and people on their toes! Nobody can be sure any longer of what I will be making them for their birthdays, etc. :-)