Come And Meet The New Kids On The (Chopping) Block!
Say “Hi” or “Hola” to Cooking with Languages, a clever new way to help children – and grown ups – learn a language in a fun way.
Cooking with Languages is the brainchild of Lisa Sadleir who wanted to design an exciting and interactive way to learn languages. Not only do parents or teachers sow the seeds for bringing up bilingual children but they teach them to cook at the same time. A recipe for success, or what!
Many of you will remember endlessly reciting verbs in French, German or Spanish classes while trawling through text books full of dreary families. Well, your children do not have to be subjected to this. Their language-learning will be full of colour with interesting characters like Arthur Apple and Nerea Naranja, who will soon be joined by Olivier l’Oignon, Klaus Kartoffel and Paola Pomodoro. (During the campaign you can vote for who comes to life next!)
Cooking with Languages is all about hands-on fun as children make easy (and scrummy!) recipes which you can help them to eat; play games and other activities; and listen and repeat from audios recorded by Lisa’s son Joshua and daughter Francesca, both bilingual in English and Spanish, who are the voices of Arthur and Nerea.
Children learn by listening, watching and copying so the activity cookbook encourages them to listen to the audios, watch their teachers or parents, and get their hands dirty while cooking up tasty treats. Their minds are like sponges so they’ll be soaking up new words while playing at Junior Masterchef in the kitchen.
“I want to do for languages what Jamie Oliver has done for cooking,” says Lisa, trilingual herself and passionate about giving children the gift of languages.
“We’ve had a lot of fun creating the materials as a family – trying out new recipes in our own kitchen, recording the audios and thinking up new ways to make learning Spanish exciting. And we’ve had some great feedback on what we’ve produced so far!”
[bctt tweet=”Help @CookLangauge do for languages what @jamieoliver has done for cooking. #crowdfunding” via=”no”]
In the books you will find:
- content is in English and Spanish
- simple, scrummy recipes to make so children can get messy while learning languages
- fun assistants to help with the cooking
- games and activities to practise
- eye-catching illustrations to engage the children
You can also be at the cutting-edge of this innovative way to learn by joining Cooking with Languages in its quest to raise £5,000 (about €5,800) by January 31st.
Fundraisers can get a copy of the English/Spanish activity cookbook and other materials at reduced rates. There’ll be sneak peeks at new materials and the chance to have your own recipe printed in the book and dedicated to your own children.
But best of all, everyone who contributes will be helping to make language learning fun and give more children the gift of language.
[bctt tweet=”Help @CookLangauge do for languages what @jamieoliver has done for cooking. #crowdfunding” via=”no”]
Contributions start from just £5 (about €5.80) and can be made quickly, securely and easily via PayPal.
Basically, the more books ordered, the cheaper they are, which means more people or schools can afford them. With your support, Lisa and her family can produce more affordable materials and grow many more language-loving superheroes.
Research shows there’s a lack of materials for young Spanish learners so Lisa is working with a pre-school and primary teacher in the UK to create materials to be used in the classroom. The sooner children are exposed to foreign languages the better.
The dream is to produce all the materials in French, German and Italian in partnership with fellow collaborators and any other languages that people want.
THANK YOU for supporting this campaign!
Visit the Crowdfunder page for more information.
Help Cooking with Languages give more children the gift of language by supporting us in the Crowdfunder January Jumpstart 2017
Well, 2017 is starting with a bang.
We are excited to share that we have been selected as 1 of just 100 start-ups for the Crowdfunder January Jumpstart. Our month-long crowdfunding push starts on Thursday 12 January and we hope to raise £5,000 towards publishing costs to give more children the gift of language.
Crowdfunder has selected 100 projects be part of January Jumpstart, an exclusive four week crowdfunding program for the UK’s entrepreneurs of 2017.
Our project, Cooking with Languages is designed to make learning a language exciting and interactive. We wand to help create oodles of language-loving superheroes.
Gone is the tedious studying of verbs and complicated vocabulary from dull textbooks. Cooking with Languages is all about hands-on fun as children make easy (and scrummy!) recipes, take part in games and other activities, and listen and repeat from audios recorded by my son Joshua and daughter Francesca, both bilingual in English and Spanish.
“I want to do for languages what Jamie Oliver has done for cooking,” says Lisa, trilingual herself and passionate about giving children the gift of languages. Conscious that children often see learning as a chore, she decided to make languages fun.”
Our project started in English and Spanish kitchens, helped by language assistants Arthur Apple and Nerea Naranja. Further down the line we hope that Olivier l’Oignon, Klaus Kartoffel and Paola Pomodoro will be valuable language kitchen hands, but for now we are concentrating on materials in English and Spanish.
“These are my children’s languages so they’re closest to my heart,” Lisa says. “We’ve had a lot of fun creating the materials as a family – trying out new recipes in our own kitchen, recording the audios and thinking up new ways to make learning Spanish exciting. And we’ve had some great feedback on what we’ve produced so far!”
[bctt tweet=”Help @CookLangauge do for languages what @jamieoliver has done for cooking. #crowdfunding” via=”no”]
Funds raised via the January Jumpstart will help bring down costs.
“Publishing on an ad hoc basis is prohibitively expensive,” Lisa explains, “and I need funds to bulk-order and make the materials cheaper and therefore more accessible.”
We already have language teachers in both the UK and Spain keen to use our materials and bring that much-needed fun element into the classroom.
Those who join Cooking with Languages in their quest to raise £5,000 (about €5,800) by January 31st will be richly rewarded. Fundraisers will be able to obtain a copy of the activity cookbook and other materials at reduced rates. There’ll be sneak peeks at new materials and the chance to have your own recipe in the book and dedicated to your own children. But best of all, everyone who contributes will be helping to make language learning fun and give more children the gift of language.
A Sneak Peek At Just A Few Of The Crowdfunder Rewards:
Contributions start at as little as £5 (approximately €5.80!) and can be made quickly, securely and easily via PayPal.
Which Language Should We Launch Next? The Decision is YOURS!
Our newly released Arthur Apple Bilingual App: Let’s Make PANCAKES/Hacemos Crepes is now available for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
It is a fun, easy to use app for young language learners!
IMPORTANT: We are offering if for FREE for the first 100 downloads only!
Download Now!
Arthur Apple and Nerea Naranja:
- Our cute and fun loving language assistants, Arthur Apple and Nerea Naranja make language learning fun for children.
- Listen to them speaking in either English or Spanish and repeat what you hear. No more worrying about how to pronounce those new foreign words.
- With our help, you and your children will sound like natives in no time!
Simple and Scrummy Recipes:
- Our RECIPE apps are easy to follow recipes that you can listen to, in English or Spanish, as many times as you like.
- You will learn new words and hear the correct pronunciation.
- Listen. Repeat. Learn.
- Follow the simple instructions and make something simple and scrummy too!
All our apps complement our BILINGUAL ACTIVITY COOKBOOK that will be available very soon.
¡Vamos a la cocina!
Let’s go to the kitchen!
NOTE: Our bilingual materials will soon be available in other languages (including French, German and Italian)!
Join in the fun online:
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/CookingWithLanguages/
Twitter https://twitter.com/cooklanguage
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cookingwithlanguages/
We are a new, innovative, family start up, providing fun and interactive materials to help children enjoy language learning. We believe that speaking languages is like having superpowers.
We want to help you create lots of language-loving superheroes.
We live in an age of helicopter parenting. Long gone are the idyllic days where kids spent time playing outdoors with their friends until the street lights came on. This day in age, we keep busy with school, homework, and a whole load of extracurricular activities. We know that children have an amazing capacity for learning and we know that in a globalizing world, we must prepare our children to compete, so prepare them we do. All the while we are preparing our children with extra sports, and extra math, and extra technology, we are failing to prepare them on some of the most important skills that will lead to happy, healthy, and successful lives. Instead of all of that extra homework and full schedule of extracurricular activities (I mean, can’t we limit them to one or two days a week??), there is an entered host of fun activities that you can do with your children at home and one of our favorites is cooking. So, just what can your child learn from spending time with you in the kitchen?
They can learn about responsibility and healthy habits
Did you know that only 25% of parents report assigning chores to their children? As adults, over 80% of us recall having to do chores as we grew up, but these days, a very small number of us ask our children to help with cleaning up their toys, putting away their laundry, doing the dishes, and preparing meals. At a very young age, children love to help and actually want to do all of the things we adults do, but we often do not let them. By the time they are young adults, they have no sense of responsibility and often do not know how to take care of themselves. Asking them to help in the kitchen from the start will instill in them that sense of responsibility and will give them pride in knowing that they can not only help themselves, but help the rest of the family. Assigning them the chores they can handle and increasing the level of responsibility as it is developmentally appropriate in and out of the kitchen is crucial for the development of important life skills. So feel free to let them pour, stir, crack, slice, and wipe to their hearts content!
They can learn and practice language
Language, comprehension, and relating to others can be developed through making a meal together. How do children learn language? Well, by listening to it, imitating it, and experimenting with it. Therefore, in order to teach language, we must speak, model and listen to our children. Describing what you are doing in the kitchen (self-talk), narrating what they are doing in the kitchen (parallel-talk), asking questions (especially open-ended questions that involve asking “why?” and “what do you think?”) will help your child develop their language skills. In the same manner, is fantastic for teaching and practicing a child´s second or even third language, which is the premise behind Cooking with Languages.
They can even learn about math and science
Experience is a child´s best teacher. From the time of birth, it is through their experiences that they make sense of the world and learn from it. They will actually learn much better by doing than by hearing. The kitchen is a great laboratory for learning. Kids can learn about science and even math by simply experimenting with what they are cooking; measuring, fractioning, changes caused by heat, can all be learned through first-hand experiences in the kitchen. They can also refine their fine motor skills by scooping, pouring, and cutting. These are opportunities to discuss where food comes from and how it is distributed and what our relationships with our food sources are like. Without even really trying (or their noticing) you can conduct entire lessons in a fun and engaging ways.
They can learn the importance of spending time together and sharing a meal
We often hear about the importance of sitting down as a family and sharing a meal. This is not just sappy and idealistic talk! Families that share meals together have better relationships and healthier eating habits. Taking the time to sit down together and sharing plans for the day or talking about the day’s events can bring about closeness, and if it is sitting down to a meal that your child(ren) helped make, it is all the sweeter!
It can be so tough to make the time to spend together, because we are so busy. But maybe we can cut out a few things from our day and make it a point to share this bonding experience, at least a couple times a week.
What do you think? Do you ever enlist your child´s help to make a meal? How many times a week can you manage to eat together? What do you think is the most valuable part of this time? Share your thoughts and opinions with us. We would love to hear them!
About the Author:
Keli Garcia Allen is a certified Spanish teacher and works as a Preschool teacher in a bilingual classroom. She is the Head of Content for Learn Safari and is currently working on Spanish Safari, a Spanish Learning game for children 5-9 years old. You can follow her and the rest of the team on their Website, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
Support Learn Safari on IndieGoGo now!
Spanish Safari is a Spanish language learning application for children 5 to 9 years old. It uses gamification and spaced repetition to help kids learn and practice Spanish in a fun and intuitive way.
It can be used by children who do not speak any Spanish or by bilingual children who would like more practice and exposure to the language.
“How do you say “la huerta” in English?
No lo se.
You don’t know?
No. ¿No sabes tú?
No. I don’t know either.
Entonces, ven conmigo. Vamos a la huerta.
Good idea! Let’s go to La Huerta”
Our bilingual book … Coming soon!
This is an extract from a book that I am currently writing. It is a book that I am really excited about.
With our Cooking With Languages family project, not only are we helping children to learn languages, we will also be encouraging to learn about growing their own food and cooking it too.
Today, I want to give you a gentle reminder that, when learning a language, you do not need to try to learn and translate everything you hear or read. Aim for general comprehension and the rest will follow over time.
Admittedly, some expressions can easily be translated word for word and then reproduced in the target language, but it is often not the case. If you get into the habit of asking your children what every word means, you may inadvertently lead them to believe that this is important.
For example, a classic word for word translation in German:
Mein name ist Klaus = My name is Klaus.
However, a classic basic phrase in French, that is not as it literally translates:
Qu’est-ce que c’est? = What is is that it is? = What’s that?
When we are learning a language, we can gain ground by learning the meanings of expressions and phrases rather than breaking them down and translating them as individual words.
[bctt tweet=”Is La Huerta a non-translatable word? Or, is it simply a word with several translations?”]
Remember this when you are teaching your children. Encourage them to understand expressions and phrases as well as individual words.
Oh, and if you want to know what “la huerta” is, simply click here to … Keep updated with exciting developments and new ideas!
