In 2018 my colleague, Gerrit Jan Kootstra, and I developed a series of three short animations in Dutch about what it’s like to grow up as a bilingual child. The clips are designed for primary-school-aged children aged 6 to 12 and their teachers with the intention of making bilingualism a topic of conversation in the classroom. We know from the feedback that we’ve received over the past 18 months that the animations are also used by teachers and health professionals when it comes to informing parents about bilingual language development. Not all parents speak Dutch, however. To this end, we’ve created an English-language version of each. The focus is still on the Dutch context but the content is general enough for it to be relevant and useful for other contexts, too. We’re planning on creating versions in other languages, too, in the course of this year (corona-restrictions, permitting).

This is the first of the three:

You can find the other two via our website here.