We are presently having our house renovated, so the corner of the sofa that serves as my office and thinking space is no longer available to me… thus the short and shallow post from today.

Firstly, an update on TinyEYE online speech therapy. A few months ago I posted about this fantastic effort to provide online, multilingual speech services to children who live outside their community of practice. At the time, they had Dutch and English speech therapists and platforms available, and were working on French. They’ve now let me know that they have introduced therapy in French and in Italian as well. They can do speech therapy online with children at home, anywhere in the world. They also work with schools, to offer speech therapy in these languages where it might not otherwise be available. You can find out more information on their website TinyEYE. At the moment, the website is only in Dutch, but they are working on multilingual information brochures for parents. You can also email them for more information, their English is fantastic.

A great article to share: I follow a very interesting site called InCultureParent, which is broadly focused on parenting Third-Culture Kids (TCKs). Today they have a great article about personality type and bilingualism, based on her experience with her two daughters. I know I have mentioned here before that no two bilingual children are alike, even in the same family, and personality and learning style impact bilingual success as well. Here is the article, read and enjoy:

8 Tips for Encouraging Bilingualism in Different Personality Types

On language and politics: The very nice team of builders working on our apartment are Polish. The boss speaks very good English, but spent the first part of his school career learning Russian… after the fall of the Iron Curtain, he estimates it took about three weeks for the school to switch from teaching Russian to teaching English. How closely language and politics are related, and how quickly one language can go from favoured status to pariah.

And on that note, I’m signing off for today to go think about plinths…