It’s a Saturday morning in the Whangārei Library. In the Children’s Library there are kids sitting on cushions giving rapt attention to a story that’s being read. But wait a minute – this story is not in English, it’s in Ukrainian, and the person who is reading it is Lida Badran, one of our ELP learners.
Tahi Mapp-Boren is there too to read an English translation, and the kids are getting involved. They are making frog noises and counting in Ukrainian, they’re channelling the winter setting of the story, wrapping themselves in blankets and cutting out snowflakes. Chris O’Connor is providing beautiful music and windy sound effects. Everyone is engaged.
A couple of hours later, and now it’s Mei Wang, reading ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’ in Chinese. The kids have written the characters for the title and now they are cheering the tortoise on to the finish line.
This vibrant event was part of the Whangārei Fringe Festival which lit up the city for a couple of weeks in October 2024. Tahi and Chris of Sweetbeats set up an interactive engaging story reading process, Early Birds and Bookworms, over a few mornings in our wonderful library… but they knew that stories are not just in English.
They decided they wanted to have some other languages being heard in our community, so they invited some speakers of those other languages to choose a story, translate it and be a central part of the process.
Mei and Lida loved it. Lida said, “It was a very nice experience, and I was happy because New Zealand children knew something new, and I could see that they enjoyed it.” For Lida, too, it was a timely opportunity to bring her grandmotherly warmth and voice into a lively community space – a year ago, she said, she would not have been able to do it, but classes have given her new confidence to speak – in both Ukrainian and English – in public.
Mei said, “It’s not just reading a story, it’s an activity involved with kids. They learned how to say hello in Chinese and acted when I said ‘Run’ and ‘Stop’ in Chinese. Kids also like to write Chinese characters for fun. That was a great time for me and kids, also their parents.”
Our learners were very grateful to Tahi for having this idea and bringing it to fruition. Let’s hope we can find many new ways to bring other languages to our children’s ears.
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Story by Gillian Skyrme
