A kid has to know his musical clocks and automata: Museum Speelklok in Utrecht

A few years ago, I was in Utrecht for a project meeting, and I’ve seen signs of a “Museum Speelklok” (see its official web site in English). Even though I was curious about it, I didn’t have much time and had to head back to Belgium. Fast forward a few years: few weeks ago, April, 2016, we planned a short trip to the Netherlands, and Utrecht was part of the plan. So I said to my 4-year-old: Time to explore kiddo!

Multilingual children: when worlds and words collide

It is one thing reading academic papers and books about multilingual children, and a very different thing experiencing it yourself when having a conversation with your 4-year-old son.

For example, after a few years of exposure to Turkish and Dutch, he comes up with a sentence such as

Dinozor is nog büyüker dan kamyon.

Thinking about how he combines Dutch and Turkish grammar, it is not difficult at all to see how he arrives at such a funny-sounding but constrained-by-both-languages-therefore-predictable result:

How to describe the concept of zero to a 4-year-old?

Two days ago, I and my 4-year-old son were having a great time together when he suddenly asked: “Daddy, what is zero?” Right in the middle of heavy physical play activity, I took a deep breath, and started to think about how I can describe the number zero to my son. The conversation went like the following: