Written By Christina Cunningham

Products from Passionfruit Kids are intentionally versatile – we want to provide families and schools with flexible, effective tools to help all little learners pick up a new language. By adding our Chinese Clock or Bilingual Decals to your classroom walls or setting our Bilingual Magnetic Tiles out in your blocks center, you can use our toys to help make language learning an everyday part of your school routine. To make things even easier for you, we’ve created this guide to give you fresh ideas for how to add each of our products into your classroom! 

Bilingual Learning Magnetic Tiles

Working our Safari Animals Bilingual Magnetic Tiles into your centers is easy in any environment, whether you’re working in a bilingual classroom or just looking to meet the needs of a few specific students. The simplest way to begin is by adding them into your blocks center for free choice time. As children build, you can scaffold their bilingual vocabulary by asking for certain pieces, weaving keywords into dialogue, or even labeling their creations for  writing practice. Your students will also naturally incorporate the animal names into their play, even if you’re using the pieces to build skills in a different subject area, like making patterns as a math activity. The tiles also open up many opportunities to practice additional bilingual words, such as color names and shapes. For a deeper dive into the learning benefits of our Bilingual Learning Magnetic Tiles, check out our previous blog post here.

Chinese Clock

Butterflies, outer space and vehicles – the adorable designs for  our Chinese Wall Clock are sure to make it an eye catching addition to any room! Incorporating our clock into your classroom is a great way to expose your students to Chinese characters. You can also turn the addition of the clock into a class project that helps children understand routines and time. First, help your students integrate the idea of Chinese characters with the numbers that they are already familiar with. Have children share the pen and label the corresponding characters with those numbers. Then, encourage them to think about key elements of their daily schedule and where they fall on the hours of the clock. They can draw small pictures and label each event, helping their minds grasp this abstract concept of time. 

Bilingual Wall Decals

Our wall decals come in two varieties of vehicles – City Cars and Trucks and Emergency Cars and Trucks – that are perfect for any transportation theme. Hang them as a backdrop for your dramatic play center and watch as students naturally incorporate the vehicle names into their imaginative play. Since the vinyl stickers are reusable and repositionable, you can also let your students move them around on the walls or a classroom window to create new scenes, building spatial awareness and motor skills as they work on a vertical surface. If classroom wall space is lacking, you could allow students to place the stickers on an oil drip pan or existing train table, which provides a great surface for cars and trucks to drive upon. As your kids use the stickers to build worlds, they’re also building bilingual vocabulary and conversational skills in their second language. 

Placemats

While our placemats can easily serve their original purpose as an eating surface in Montessori classrooms, they can be so much more! Teachers can quiz children on vocabulary before or during their meals, saying things like, “Point to the apple.” or “Can you find the mail truck?” while switching between languages. Students can also use these placemats as a matching game, finding all of the items on the Fruits and Veggies placemats in their play kitchen toys or driving the corresponding vehicles onto the Cars and Trucks images. 

As you incorporate our products into your classrooms, share photos and stories about  the unique ways you and your students use them at hello@passionfruitkids.co. We’d love to hear from you!