Teaching Swedish

15:08 Leila Gunn 0 Comments

A few weeks ago, our language teacher approached us with the idea of teaching a new language to students at a community special school. It was decided that the theme for the day would be Swedish. This sounded like good fun, even though the majority of us knew no Swedish whatsoever, so were slightly apprehensive about teaching it! Nevertheless, we all got into small groups, ours being an all-singing, all-dancing Pippi Longstocking group (the protagonist who features in the series of books by Astrid Lindgren.) We all dressed up as Pippi, with our pigtails and pinafores... (Not to forget the freckles!) and even brought along our own 'Mr Nilsson' the monkey.

My attempt at a Pippi Longstocking costume

We began by telling a short story about Pippi, and followed this by teaching a few of the words featured in the story in Swedish (in good old parrot fashion of course - is there really any better way to learn a new language?!) We then performed a slightly underrehearsed (but altogether jolly) routine to the Pippi Longstocking theme tune, which got everybody dancing. There were other activities going on too, with some of the linguists from our school teaching the students about Swedish foods, colours, numbers and basic phrases.




I didn't feel too well this morning, so I was debating whether or not to go today, but I'm so glad I did. It was a fantastic experience, and I met some very funny, friendly people. So if you get the opportunity to do any volunteering like this, I really recommend it - it truly was a morning well spent. 

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