Articles

The summer season had a grand opening at Metaphor Academic Center. The kids started their two-week interplanetary journey. Have fun learning, find great adventures and have a soft landing, young travellers! Every child wants to become an astronaut at least once in their life. Or nearly every child, that’s no doubt. And no wonder, because everything about space sounds so fascinating -- spaceships, the Milky Way, the delicate light of...

How do children learn the language? The speech complexity chain is usually built the classic way: sounds, syllables, words, word collocations, sentences, text. As we build and reinforce such a chain, we need a break from the monotonous routine of traditional textbooks. Away with memorizing dull and boring rules! A child’s speech develops through memorizing already existing phrases and expressions, which gradually teaches them to build their own words and...

It might be challenging to teach Russian in a balanced way to a child isolated from the Russian-speaking world, but it’s certainly not impossible. It requires a combination of efforts from tireless parents, innovative teachers, and responsive students. Metaphor’s teachers are in constant search of new teaching techniques, trying to brighten up and infuse with emotion every language structure perceived by a bilingual child. More and more often, modern methods...

Metaphor Academic Center is actively preparing for the new school year. As the imminent school year is approaching, caring moms’ and dads’ hearts fill up with worry. They worry not so much about their one-of-a-kind child’s intellectual development level, but rather about them being independent and organised enough, responsive and open to new knowledge, as well as flexible enough to adapt to a new environment. All these factors will inevitably...

Case endings are hard to memorize, tricky to use and often used unexpectedly in a bilingual’s speech! How do we get our undoubtedly gifted and hard-working children to enter this amazing, multifaceted world of case endings, inflections and verb forms easily and light-heartedly? What’s the first step and what’s to follow? When developing academic programs, Metaphor Academic Center always takes into account numerous psychological researches that prove fundamental differences in...

Metaphor holds amazing music lessons for preschool and school age children. Our music teacher is Galina Tarasova, who graduated from the Gnessin Russian Academy of Music and authored unique methodologies for working with preschool children. Every class taught by Galina is not just comprehensive work on singing, rhythm and musical hearing development, but rather a unique chance for creative music collaboration. Children’s orchestra is a search, a discovery, and a...

As parents, we often rack our brains over raising a bilingual. Using Russian with our child only in everyday life is not enough to turn them into a well-balanced bilingual. How do you teach your child proper Russian in an English-speaking environment? How do you get them to speak and to be carried away with something interesting? I’d like to add one more recipe to all those you probably already...

Metaphor Academic Center opened an applied arts workshop in the new new school year. Ceramics lessons made a great addition to the academic program aimed at the young talents’ harmonious development. Ceramics, just like any other artistic activity, boosts the development or your child’s imagination and creative thinking. Through the images brought to life in clay children convey what they cannot yet put in words. Clay modeling, among other activities,...