Blog: Free, Multilingual Activity Pack to Support Bilingual Pupils in your Classroom
A set of free resources developed by Sheffield City of Languages co-founder Prof Sabine Little in partnership with Twinkl is available now for anyone to access. NCLE’s Home, Heritage and Community Languages (HHCL) Officer Clare Allison tells us more about this wonderful set of resources and how it dovetails with NCLE’s approach to supporting HHCL across the country.
Wonderful resources to celebrate all languages – available now and free
As part of Sheffield City of Languages in 2025, Prof Sabine Little and I collaborated with Twinkl to create resources especially for Sheffield. Originally developed to celebrate the European Day of (all) Languages, these resources are now free and available to all, and we are very excited to share them with everyone. The resources provide meaningful opportunities to recognise and celebrate the rich linguistic diversity within our schools and communities at key moments on the calendar such as International Mother Language Day (21 February 2026).
A series of PowerPoints, worksheets, and a board game are all dedicated to making children feel that languages matter – regardless of whether they are learning them at school or bringing them from home! These resources were developed for Sheffield and can be used in your classroom directly or as inspiration for creating your own resources. While they work brilliantly for special events (like European Day of (all) Languages or International Mother Language Day), the resources are equally valuable at any point during the academic year, promoting the understanding that any language a child brings with them is a valuable asset.
To give you a taster, the multilingual activity pack includes:
- An interesting Fact File about the various animal sculptures that can be found around Sheffield, plus an accompanying Activity Sheet to help pupils tell their own multilingual story
- A Scavenger Hunt that can be completed virtually or by exploring Sheffield on foot
- A set of Challenge Cards that could be completed during the Scavenger Hunt or separately over the course of the learning sequence
- A brilliant Board Game where the players guide Ursa Lingua through multilingual Sheffield landmarks
- A multilingual Knowledge Organiser for children to collect vocabulary that they learn throughout the learning sequence, with room for them to add in their own language
I would like to thank Professor Sabine Little as co-founder of Sheffield City of Languages and who led on much of the work on this project, and Bethan McHugh at Twinkl who approached us for the collaboration and facilitated Twinkl making these resources for free.
About Sheffield City of Languages
Sheffield’s City of Languages status comes not just through migration, but also through a long-standing commitment to language learning in general. The vibrant South Yorkshire branch of the Association for Language Learning has been going for over 30 years, supporting language teaching in schools (and turning into the “Yorkshire” branch in the process).
The Home Language Accreditation Project (HoLA) supports plurilingual children to gain accreditation in their home or heritage language and has been supporting young people for over 15 years. Meanwhile, researchers at both universities within the city (Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Sheffield) dedicate their work to supporting language learning and multilingualism, and a host of international and plurilingual students make Sheffield their home each year.
Elsewhere in the city, the Showroom Cinema has been dedicated to showing a wide range of films, in a variety of languages, since 1993. Sheffield’s multilingual children’s library won the International Brenda Eastwood Award for Diversity and Inclusion in 2019. A wide range of heritage language schools operate from classrooms, community centres, and living rooms throughout the city.
The Sheffield City of Languages website aims to bring together the initiatives going on in the city, celebrating events and efforts taking place in schools and communities.
It’s time to recognise all our languages as the asset they are
What’s important is that a space is created for multilingual approaches in schools and that all languages are recognised as the asset that they are.
We recognise there is still a lot of work to do around the ‘why’, but we are also keen to help with the ‘how’ — developing resources such as these can make a big difference for teachers and their plurilingual learners.
Whether you are a learner exploring a new language, a teacher seeking engaging classroom materials, or a family proud to share your home language, we hope that this Sheffield City of Languages collaboration will help to spark curiosity, build connections and celebrate multilingualism, nurturing a lifelong appreciation for all languages.
How NCLE supports HHCLs
NCLE’s free, CPD platform Language Educators Online (LEO) includes Home, Heritage and Community Language (HHCL) research, strategies and examples of practice embedded throughout all its CPD modules.
These are useful for all teachers and school leaders interested in helping plurilingual pupils develop their full potential, both in mainstream schools and community/heritage (Saturday) schools. Sign up to LEO (see recommended courses below) to access all of these insights and more.
Bilingual? Multilingual? Plurilingual? What’s the difference?
While ‘bilingual’ is often used as shorthand to describe pupils who speak more than one language, the reality is that many pupils have a repertoire of three or even more languages through their home, heritage or community. Research also shows that people’s different languages operate in an overlapping way.
Experts usually prefer to use ‘multilingual’ to refer to the presence of two or more distinct languages – thinking of languages as separate entities. For example, a ‘multilingual school’ is a school where several languages can be counted among the pupils and staff.
However, ‘plurilingual’ describes the pupils themselves, who each have a repertoire of languages, which they can draw on at the same time in an interconnected and holistic manner. This is important to understand the psychology and cognitive role of languages for individuals and in education.
In this article, we have used the word ‘plurilingual’ to describe pupils speaking more than one language.
Find out more on NCLE’s LEO CPD platform here.
Go to: ‘Principled Practice’ > ‘Explain: Principled teaching and valorising all our languages’ > Section 6 ‘Home Heritage Community Languages – Key Concepts’.
Three easy steps to explore supporting plurilingual pupils with NCLE:
- Sign up to LEO and explore our free CPD modules. Support for languages teachers with regard to plurilingual children, and teaching and supporting HHCL is embedded throughout the LEO modules. We particularly recommend the course under ‘Principled Practice’ entitled: ‘Explain: Principled teaching and valorising all our languages’, and section 6 ‘Home Heritage Community Languages – Key Concepts’.
- Access the Twinkl/Sheffield City of Languages free resources here. They can be adapted to your own school or classroom.
- Connect with the Express Yourself: North East Festival of Languages – open to everyone across the country – who have worked with Twinkl to develop specific resources.
- You can contact Clare Allison directly as NCLE builds its network of HHCL teachers, advisers and supporters. Email clare.allison@ucl.ac.uk