Our World Map Colouring Activity Kit is currently available over in our Freebies Club. You can also find other fun and personalisable World Maps here.

Here are 10 ideas for games you can play to help your children travel the world:

1. Secret location: Close your eyes and stick a sticker on the map. Open them and investigate the country or sea where your sticker has landed. Look at pictures on the internet and even go on a pretend journey there! You can find our map with stickers here.

2. Where are your family, neighbours, friends from? Do you have family roots from around the world? Or maybe neighbours or friends who were born in another country? How about finding out about some of these countries and languages? You can plot them on your map. You can find a personalized family map here.

3. Sea creatures: 71% of the earth is covered by water, and our oceans are very important. There are some sea creatures on your Lil’ollo map, but how about finding out about some more? Sharks are very popular in our house!

4. Pretend to be pilots: Build a ‘plane’ (this can be a chair, or a box, you get the idea) and plan your journey round the world. Which countries are you going to visit? What languages do they speak there? Pack your plane with plenty of fuel and food for the journey!

5. Where do the animals live? Where would you find a lion? Or a giraffe? Where do dogs live? Or Kangaroos? Or giant spiders? (I’m dreading on of these being on Marco’s Christmas list!)

6. Food detectives. So much of our food now comes in from overseas, it can be a fun game and helpful conversation to start by looking in the kitchen and finding on the map how far your food has travelled. The same game can be played with clothing

7. Language Explorers: Pick a country and learn how to say ‘hello’ You can use a map of the world to talk about different languages with your children, pick a country and find out how to say hello! Some countries have a number of different official languages, South Africa has 11!

8. Boats, planes and submarines… if you had to travel all the way around the world, how would you do it? Can you draw some of your methods of transport? Do you know where the fuel comes from?

9. 2D – 3D: How about looking at pictures of the earth from space, and also a globe if you have one. We are very lucky to be near to the International Space Centre in the UK, and regularly visit. Marco is starting to make the connection between the flat map, globe, journeying into space and the solar system.

10. What time is it? The time changes when we visit family in Italy, and we have some time zone clocks on our wall. We also recently had friends visit from Australia and this prompted a discussion about time zones. It’s a complicated subject for younger children but, if your kids are interested, one to start conversations about.

We would love to hear about how you get on with these games. Don’t forget to visit the freebies club to download your world map activity kit!

Alex is a designer, writer, entrepreneur, problem solver and mother to two multilingual children. She is passionate about using design to improve people’s lives and has worked on projects around the world. Alex is a champion for languages and creative arts in early education and the creator of Lil’ollo.

The post 10 Games to Help Children Travel The World appeared first on Lil'ollo.

This morning I thought it would be a good idea if he tried writing a letter to Father Christmas himself, rather than watching me scribe for him. I merrily printed off some Lil’ollo penguin note paper and typed in faintly dotted letters – ‘Caro Babbo Natale and Dear Father Christmas’. My plan was to see how he managed to trace over the letters, and then we would work out how to write the rest of the letter together. I know some pre-schoolers are really confident with writing and others prefer to do other things. M sits in the latter camp and he would much rather be building or drawing.

As we speak English and Italian at home we try to make many of our activities bilingual . Subsequently I wasn’t quite sure how our letter writing would pan out. Tracing over the letters turned out to be heavy going and writing a whole letter like this, in two languages, would have resulted in a melt-down – probably by both of us. I am a firm believer in working with your child’s interests and abilities, so we created five alternative ways to make M’s letter as fun as we could.

    
    

For this activity we used:

• Paper
• Pens
• Child-safe scissors
• A glue stick
• Craft pieces to stick on
• Stencils
• A colouring in sheet
• A sheet of printed out individual letters
• Letter stamps

1. Selecting and sticking down cut out letters

I printed out individual letters and used different colours for the two languages. We selected the words together and then M stuck the letters to the page.

2. Stamping letters

We both love these letter stamps! They are called alpha bêtes (bête is beast in French) and they are little monsters shaped like letters.

3. Using a stencil

We have a giant chalkboard in our kitchen that I made a few years ago and we used stencils to write the days of the week. After we had stamped out the next sentence, I remembered we still had those stencils in the art box. M hadn’t used them before and he was so excited that he wanted to draw in every single character – this part of the letter took some time…

4. Colouring in a picture and sticking it in the letter

You may have guessed from the photos above that there is a spider theme to this particular letter. Next, we used a Spider-Man colouring in sheet, cut it out and placed it in the letter. M clearly thinks Father Christmas shares his enthusiasm for arachnids and superheroes…

5. Drawing a picture

Finally, M drew a picture of Spider-Man and we cut it out. A ‘giant real spider’ was also on the Christmas list that we discussed today – let’s just hope Father Christmas doesn’t bring one! Sorry, M.

There are many other ways you can help your pre-schooler write to Father Christmas and we would love to hear about your letters. How have you been creating them together?

Alex is a designer, writer, entrepreneur, problem solver and mother to two multilingual children. She is passionate about using design to improve people’s lives and has worked on projects around the world. Alex is a champion for languages and creative arts in early education and the creator of Lil’ollo.

The post 6 Easy Ways to Help Your Pre-Schooler Write to Father Christmas appeared first on Lil'ollo.

Advent is here and there is A LOT of festive excitement in our house. We are yet to put the tree up so goodness knows how M (almost four) and N (18 months) will contain themselves once it is here! My mum bought us a beautiful kids advent calendar a few weeks ago, and I had been pondering what to put in it. Advent is all about celebration and the lead up to a big greeting. This gave me the idea to create a fun advent calendar where the word ‘hello’ or ‘hi’, in a different language, greets you every day.

For the first nine days, I created nine different speech bubbles saying ‘hello’ or ‘hi’ in the languages we currently have available here at Lil’ollo. These are Spanish, Italian, French, German, Welsh, Mandarin Chinese, Dutch, Polish and English.

I put one speech bubble in the relevant door along with some little treats. The children love opening the doors to find out what is inside. M is really on board with the ‘hello’ part but N is a little bit young. However she still enjoys going to the computer and finding out how the word sounds when I’m unsure. Of course, everyone enjoys the chocolate!

At the end of last week, after those first nine days of advent, I posted a photo with the languages we began with. We had some brilliant suggestions over social media and so I have created the speech bubbles for days 10-18 of advent. Our new languages include Guaraní, Basque, Portuguese, Greek, Luxembourgish,

Romanian, Vietnamese, Irish and Tahitian.

However, we still need six more!

Can you help us? How do you say hello in your language(s)? Do you have a great DIY kids advent calendar idea to share? Please leave a comment below, we would love to hear from you.

Happy Advent!

Alex and Team Lil’ollo x

Alex is a designer, writer, entrepreneur, problem solver and mother to two multilingual children. She is passionate about using design to improve people’s lives and has worked on projects around the world. Alex is a champion for languages and creative arts in early education and the creator of Lil’ollo.

The post How to Explore the World with an Easy DIY Kids Advent Calendar appeared first on Lil'ollo.