In Finland learning languages is self-clear and almost taken for granted. We start studying English at the age of 9 and Swedish at the age of 13, and many students study more than that as voluntary subjects. It's no more exotic or glamorous that you know other languages than your own.
But with the South Range's 3rd graders it was different. Right away when we arrived to class there was questions flying in the air: "What is dog in Finnish? How do you say thank you? What's "backbag?" Some of students knew some Finnish words because of their heritage; makkara, pannukakku and sisu are familiar for them. And when me and Eeva had a quiet conversation in Finnish in the class when we thought no-one's listening, the children just stared at us enchanted. That was one of the times we had to change our plans - we realized we have to fulfil their expectations and teach some Finnish. And we could've done more of that, just for future student's to know.
Teaching Finnish is not easy though, the pronunciation is almost impossible first for other than Finnish people. We heard approximately 5000 versions of saying the Finnish "R" and even easier words were hardly understandable. But most important thing was that the students actually wanted to learn, they practiced Finnish and enjoyed it.
We are not Finnish language teachers, so we tried to do our best to motivate the students in learning new languages. One thing that was fun to all of us was to give everyone a Finnish name! Hunter turned into Heikki, Molly became Maija and the classe's teacher Mr. Aho changed smoothly from Steve to Teuvo.
Body parts were learned through familiar song to American and Finnish children, check the link from here:
