Imagine yourself abandoned in a foreign country, surrounded by strangers whose language and customs are incomprehensible to you. For a three-year-old whose mother tongue differs from the predominant language in the nursery, starting nursery may be just as traumatic.
Our first instinct was to involve parents to help such children, inviting them to work alongside staff to help their children learn the nursery routines. However, this tends to offer only a short-term solution. Inevitably, the time comes when the parents must leave.
Luckily, one of our nursery nurses is fluent in Punjabi and she is also able to help children who speak Urdu. But although these languages are spoken by most of our current second-language learners, the range of languages in the nursery has included Malay, French, German, Japanese, Canton-ese, Italian and Dutch, and we needed some way to support all of these children.
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