5 + 1 tips to sneak in some English time

With a newborn in the house it's extremely difficult to spend time in English with E. It's challenging to spend time with her at all when L. needs me 7/11.

Here is a few tricks we sneak some English time in our weekdays:

1. E. goes to the nursery and comes home in the afternoon. Whenever she enters the door I greet her in English. Sometimes she doesn't want to speak English at all, at other times I tell her that Mommy has been in English with L. all day then she is more likely to give in and we spend the evening (playtime, video time, dinner, bath and bed/story time) or part of it in English.

Bedtime reading - Picture Atlas

2. I rely on her new interests., i.e. at the very moment wind types and the Beaufort scales. She got a book for Christmas from her Godparents (in Hungarian):

She loves the Beaufort scale in the book, so with Daddy's help we made our English version of it.

3. New nanny: Although our new nanny is only temporary (for max. 2 months as she's returning to the US) her visits have increased our English playtime.

Making snowdrops with or new native nanny, L.

4. Holidays: preparing for a birthday or St. Patrick's day for instance has also given us a chance to practice our in English

Heart garland for Valentine's Day

5. Helping around Baby Sister: E. helps a lot with bathing, dressing or entertaining Baby Sister. Every now and again I manage to convince her to use English in these situations.

Helping Baby Sis get undressed

+1 Cooking/baking together is always a hit with E. She is always happy to help me in the kitchen and it goes without saying we do things there in English most of the time.

String the mixture

Life seems bright again :)

Pin the heart

E. found a small box of thumb pins before Valentine's Day and went back to it time and time again. She was asking how we use them and what they are for. So I decided to put together an activity in which she can use thumb pins and also connected to the upcoming Valentine's Day.

I printed a do-a dot heart from the net and picked one our IKEA cork trivet. I coloured the dots so it would be more fun to use the right colour thumb pins.

While doing the pinning you can revise the colours and learn the word "cork" itself.

When finished she put more pins in the middle. The next day she pulled them all out and packed them away.

This activity helped her muscles strengthen in her hands as well. We'll do more of this kind of activity as E. loved it and it's a great pre-writing task. (We can revise shapes or have a shamrock to pin for St. Patrick's Day etc.)

Baking and reading (with recipe)

We've been cooking and baking with E. a lot ever since she could sit on the kitchen counter safely. (Check out my housework fun or Christmas gingerbread baking blog posts on our cokking adventures)

This week one day there was one of the rare occasions that L. (E.'s baby sister) was not sleeping in a sling on me so I managed to put her down and I could prepare a baking activity for E. while she was at the nursery.

As E. is familiar with the alphabet (check out this post on the alphabet activities and other ABC posts) and quite a lot of sight words (I haven't written about it separately but I should) and E. has been handling picture and story books since she was born, it is no problem for her to recognise/read certain words.

I wanted to expand her knowledge of recognising words in a fun way.

Here is our oat and pumpkin cookie baking and reading fun:

I prepared everything beforehand (maybe next time it'll be a measuring activity, when SHE can prepare all the ingredients).

Whoops... the R is missing from "butter" - sorry about the poor photo

Ingredients:

• 150 g oat flakes
• 100 g flour (I used oat and wholemeal flour mixed)
• 100 g sugar (I use Xylitol)
• 100 g butter or margarine
• 120 g pumpkin purée (pre-baked)
• 1 teaspoonful of baking powder
• 1 egg
  
  optional: 
• 5 g dried fruit of any kind (I use cranberries and raisins but you can add chocolate chips too)
• vanilla extract

I made little cards for her to read and I placed them in front of each bowl. The twist was I mixed them up before she started the activity. 

First, she needed to swap the cards around to place them in front of the right bowl.

After that she cracked the egg.

Then the mixing could start. She added everything in a big bowl. I asked her to report me what she was doing as in a cooking show.
- I'm putting the flour in.
- Now comes the butter.

After all this, I made little balls out of the mixture (she doesn't like to dirty her hands) and placed them on a tray covered with baking paper. Finally, I managed to convince her to flatten the balls with her fingers and palm.

It was a lovely treat after dinner time and we practised a lot of English. (Unfortunately the cookies were gone so quickly I couldn't take a photo of them)

Do you cook or bake with your little one(s)? Let me know what in the comments.