Toddler Arabic Week 7: Family — العيلة (il-'ayleh)

Part of the Toddler Arabic series — one toddler-sized topic each week, taught realistically in the cracks of a busy schedule.

The focus this week is family words — the names for the people he loves most, which makes them the words with the biggest built-in payoff. I'm planning to use photos and video calls all week; teta and jiddo are very willing participants.

This week's words

• ماما (mama) — mom
• بابا (baba) — dad
• تيتا (teta) — grandma
• جدو (jiddo) — grandpa
• عمو ('ammo) — uncle
• خالتو (khalto) — auntie
• أخ (akh) — brother
• أخت (ukht) — sister

How we practiced

• Photo album tour: flipping through family photos and naming everyone in Arabic.
• Video call warm-up: practicing the name right before the call, then letting him show off.
• Family drawing: he scribbles, I label each blob out loud in Arabic. Everyone wins.
• "Who loves you?" game: listing everyone who loves him with their Arabic titles at bedtime.
• Real photos beat drawings: we have flashcards with a family section, but at this age a real picture of the actual teta or jiddo lands so much better than a generic drawing.

He’s basically lived in this shirt all week, which turned into its own little vocab lesson — the graffiti-style Arabic across the front reads العيلة, “the family,” which felt just right for this week. I honestly have no idea where my sister-in-law keeps finding these, but they are hands-down my favorite. We’re already on our second one, because I washed the first straight into oblivion.

Free printables & activities

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Prefer a coloring page? Two nice free ones: Belaraby’s Arabic coloring pages and this Arabic coloring page.

From our playlist

From our playlist: Jeddo (Grandpa) by Lila TV — short and sweet — and 3idik Ya Mama for the mama fan club. Both get sent to the grandparents, obviously. A couple more from our playlist he loves: Mabrouk Ya Baba (baba’s song) and Aklet El Teta (teta gets her own).

How it actually went

Honest version: this one didn’t have a lot of big wins and didn’t really seem to stick. I think I need to make peace with that — stay flexible, not force it, and trust that we can circle back to family words when he’s a bit older and they mean more to him.

Stuck / flopped

Real flop: teaching him to ask to call people came back to bite me — now he requests it constantly, and I do wonder if we leaned on a little too much screen time to get there. We call both grandmas every single day now. The drawing activity also didn’t land, mostly because he just isn’t into coloring right now.