How can international families find books in their home languages while living abroad?
I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot over the years and have developed strategies to find books in our family languages.
These days I’m preparing for our international move to Switzerland and have been trying to declutter and reduce our belongings before we go. We have a lot of books in Italian, Dutch and English and cannot possibly take them all.
I know that many families local to me, living here in Delft, struggle to find books for their children.
This led to an amazing idea: The English Voice Academy Book Swap!
So I organised the book swap event and invited my local school community. We all met last weekend in a beautiful Delft park. The weather was friendly and it was the last real warm day of the summer this year.
In all we were 11 families and could count at least 11 languages between us:
- English
- Dutch
- Italian
- Indonesian
- French
- Chinese
- Hungarian
- Lithuanian
- Tunisian
- Japanese
- Russian
It was such a pleasure to see everyone, play with the children and hear all those languages in use! Everyone took new books home and the few books that were left over will go to our local second hand shop which has a fabulous book room upstairs: https://www.kringloopdelft.nl/
I can’t wait to organise this event again next year in our new home city – Geneva.
How do you find books for your family in all your languages?
More about reading:
We have lots of posts about reading on the blog because it’s so important when it comes to learning a language. Check out these posts:
- How to help children to learn to read in multiple languages
- How can I help my child who is struggling with reading?
- 5 tips to help your child love reading
FREE gift pack for your family: Printable Reading Guide and Activity.
- Do you wonder how to really make the most of reading to your child?
- Do you have the Gruffalo book by Julia Donaldson at home?
- Did you answer yes to both questions? I have the perfect thing for you! Click on the button to download your free Gruffalo reading guide.
I’ll also include a copy of our wonderful community newspaper The Academy Press created by the English Voice Academy English students.
