twolittleajs: European Day of Languages

Thursday, 26 September 2013

European Day of Languages

Today has a very European theme to it for European Day of Languages, I have always loved languages, and always been the kind of person to attempt to speak the native language if (big IF) we ever travel. I also find it interesting how many words we use every day without realising we are speaking a foreign word, I found some wonderful examples including pyjama which is Indian from English leap.

As I am a food lover, this obviously is a key part of the day! So what better way to start than Pain Perdu for breakfast. (AKA French toast, gypsy toast, eggy bread!) We then continued the French theme by me introducing the song Frere Jaques to the two Aj's, I also sang it in English a few time as well, Arthur's favourite part is the bells at the end and he soon started joining in with the ding dang dong! I then tried some other languages including Dutch, German and Spanish from these translations, I can't say my pronunciation was good, but it was fun trying and exposing them to different languages!

We then moved our culinary adventure to Germany where we made Pretzels to go with lunch, these are a child friendly recipe so are not traditional, but they were still lovely, and Arthur enjoyed shaping them, whilst Alyssa enjoyed eating them!

After dinner I let them play with an Italian themed tricolour spagghetti, I used food dye to colour it red and green for the Italian flag using a technique from the blog One perfect day. Arthur had great fun mixing it from bowl to bowl and using his motor skills to work the tongs. We also managed to create a lovely spaghetti print as it was still wet, similar to string painting. I mixed blue and yellow together to get green, which is why it printed more yellowy.

Our evening meal will continue the Italian theme with Pappa al pomodoro using the wonderful tomatoes we picked from the tunnel house on Tuesday, Arthur will be chief bread ripper!