And finally, after much work and hype and some exceedingly large number of emails…. the DRONGO festival is here. Saturday, September 28, in the main public library in Amsterdam, a whole-day festival dedicated to language.
For adults, there are a wide variety of interesting seminars and workshops, including speed language lessons in some very interesting languages.
For my part, working with many enthusiastic and supportive partners, we have put together a fantastic program for children, as part of the “Multilingual Children’s Lab” being held in the Children’s Library (basement). The full schedule can be found here: Children’s Lab but just to whet your appetite, we have Lego Lingua (multilingual games) arts and crafts (Make and create Drongos, Hands around the world), interactive theatre, Chinese writing, and One Globe Kids multicultural, multilingual interactive experience! These workshops all have a limited number of participants, so please come early and sign up!
Finally, from 15:00-16:00, in the Annie G. Schmidt Theatre, we are hosting a multilungual, interactive reading of Eric Carle’s famous “A Very Hungry Caterpillar”. Come along, with your children (or without!) to hear and experience this classic story in Azeri, Turkish, Filipino, Hungarian and many other languages.
In addition to these fun activities for children, there are two English-language seminars being held within the main program. I am doing a taster version of “Raising Bilingual Children: Six building blocks for success” along with an introduction to the basics of Family Language Planning (13:00-14:00).
The British School of Amsterdam is doing a presentation on “Becoming a Multilingual-friendly School”. This session covers a wide variety of topics dealing with school and language, and how one school has created an environment in which all learners feel at home and participate in learning. They will also show a variety of resources that they have created along the way. If you have a multilingual child in school, or heading towards school age, this seminar will show you some great ideas of best practice for teachers and administrators. (15:00-16:00).
Both of these sessions are limited seating and “first come, first served”.
Looking forward to seeing you there; if you are a blog reader please come and find me and introduce yourself!
on raising bilingual children 
Thanks for the really interesting workshop on saturday. I only came to the OBA to return some books and get some new ones for my daughter but then saw that the festival was on. Even though I have read about some aspects you discussed during the workshop, there was a lot of new information to take home. You definitely have a new blog reader in me.
Thanks very much Christian! Glad to hear that you enjoyed the session and learned something – I hope the blog also proves interesting and useful to you!