Supporting parents

• Invite families to visit and share their language and culture. They could teach the children a song, cook food from their culture, wear traditional clothes, play a traditional instrument or tell traditional stories from their culture.
• Ask families to write greetings from their language to display at the entrance to the preschool room.
• Investigate festivals and celebrations from the relevant culture and those significant to your community.

The apps are not available to be downloaded at home as they are an educational tool designed to be used in a preschool program.

As an educator, you are skilled in ways to incorporate the apps into your overall program to provide the most benefit to children. You can also monitor children's usage of the apps and the learning outcomes achieved and use this information in reports to families.

Parents are often very interested in what their children are learning at preschool. If you are approached to explain the ELLA program to parents, there are a few ways you could introduce them to the apps.

The Polyglots apps can’t be downloaded at home, but you could invite families to view the apps with their child at drop-off or pick-up times. You could also allow parents to explore the apps in demo mode at an information night.

It is important to introduce parents to the language you have chosen. You could try one or more of the ideas below.

• Put greeting words from the language in the apps at your entrance to incorporate the language into your welcome routine and assist families to become familiar with words and phrases their child may be using.
• Provide information and language translations in your newsletter to help parents connect with their child through the language at home (copy and paste from support materials on the ELLA website).
• Make a display board to share and document the children’s engagement with the ELLA apps. Document their learning and understandings.
• Include photos and children’s insights into language learning and culture in portfolios, learning stories, parent/guardian interviews, documentation, newsletters and displays.
• Incorporate words around the room as appropriate for families (eg colour words near the painting easels).

• Make links with local schools that teach the language and arrange visits that provide opportunities to use the language in meaningful contexts.
• Visit local gardens, museums, art galleries and zoos, if culturally relevant to the language or to your families.