My child attends a lovely preschool, with an extremely high proportion of absolutely non English speaking children, owing to the local demographic. The staff speak about 20 languages between them, and also use sign language as needed.
They currently have a new child with a language that is totally unknown to any of them. As an example, I was playing a 'please give me the ball, thankyou, would you like it, here you are' type game with this child and a couple of others, but didn't even have the few words to let them know I was saying 'please', or to say 'can you say', to show them the sounds to make at the right times, or even 'my name is'.
After a year, the children emerge speaking quite good English, and ready for school, but from the little I've seen I think it puts a lot of pressure on the staff if they don't have any words of a language at all to help new children settle.
So, does anyone know of either a really simple 'lots of languages' (and phonetic) phrase book - please, thankyou, good girl, would you like, toilet, etc. Or a good web resource for this type of thing, which could be used to print a sheet for each language in the setting? I'd really like to get the staff a present - they are some of the most wonderful people I know!
Any suggestions gratefully received, thanks!