Being the only person my son hears speaking Swedish every day, of course it comes upon me to be the Swedish “teacher-in-charge” in his life. I have taken the task to my heart and every day I continue trying to make us work on different aspects of the Swedish language, but in a way that feels like a fun activity and not a chore. We do crossword puzzles, read fun books, write lists, play memory and other games featuring Swedish words. My son is slowly getting comfortable reading shorter texts and he has learned to write the different letters. I think I have manage quite well at making Swedish a fun part of life, but of course sometimes I come up short.
Lately we have been practicing the alphabet. I have made small cards that my son and I laminated and cut out to help with our studies. We made one set with capital letters and one with lowercase ones, and they turned out really well so I have been looking forward to using them a lot. We brought them to play memory when we went on a trip, and at home we are using them to practice learning the proper order of the alphabet by arranging them. But this, it has turned out, is not the most fun of activities – quite the opposite if my son has his say. He makes it seem like sorting through the letters, placing them in the right order in the table, is the most painful of experiences and has resorted to spread them around the room instead. Looking back I probably should have at least made the cards a little less sterile and included some interesting graphic elements, to add a little playfulness to the alphabetic studies. But I tell myself and my son that as a stepping stone, some smaller moments of un-fun are not such a bad thing in the greater scheme of learning after all. One might even say they are quite essential, and I am sure I will have plenty of reasons to discuss that with my son when he starts school.