Counting Down for the First Word

Ines has been babbling for a couple of months now and it cannot be long before she starts to speak.

I am so looking forward to hearing what language that word will be from!

Will it be a more or less neutral word like "mama" or "papa"? Or will it clearly be from one of the languages she swims in day in day out? Will it be a word from her mother-tongue? Because she is around Souad more than she sees me? Or will it be an English word, maybe from a song Lilia sings?

I don't think it will be a German word, but who knows!

Objects, not Words

Souad was singing a song with Lilia today, an English song. The song goes like this:

Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes
Knees and Toes
Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes
Knees and Toes
Eyes and Ears and Mouth and Nose
Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes
Knees and Toes

You point to the body parts while you sing it, and you can replace one of the words with "hm" if you feel like it.

Souad & I both use the English word when we decide which word to replace, like "knees". Lilia, though, was using the French word ("genoux"), because she was speaking with Souad, of course.

I guess that means that for her, there is no difference between "knee", "genou" and "Knie". She is truly multi-lingual. English is as much her mother-tongue as German, Arabic and French.

Two and a Half Hours Later...

Today Lilia went back to pre-school for the first time since our holidays in Germany.

Alison, the woman who runs the group, said something like "Have you been in Germany for some time? ... Yeah, we can kind of tell", but later today, when Lilia was bouncing on the bed for half an hour or so (she loves it!), she started to speak English, like so:

"Jump over here... jump over here... can you jump over here? Can you jump over here and turn around?"

Then she started to sing the hokey cokey (the UK version, of course).

I guess we're back home in England. It only took two and a half hours of pre-school ;-)

Songs & Chansons

We have a book of French songs and rhymes for children. The book comes with a CD with 30 of those songs.

For some reason, the CD ended up in a CD player in the kitchen, and whenever we are in the kitchen, Lilia wants to listen to it. Of course she started to learn how to sing the songs herself.

When Souad & Lilia started to go to a local Mum's & Tot's group, Lilia was introduced to her first english song: "Hokey Cokey"

They also sang other songs in English, and Lilia also picked up some of the theme tunes of her favourite shows on CBeebies.

Essentially, she has been singing French chansons and English songs all her life.

The only thing missing? German songs, Lieder. That's mainly because I do not like singing to her for some strange reason that I do not understand ;-)