Aisha Ansari, a principal who collaborated in one of the Zoom masterminds I recently hosted, took the lead with an exciting project I want to share with you: a video with a comforting message to families in sixteen languages!

Aisha had been an English Learner as a student, and knew that in a stressful time she would have wanted a message in her home language. Leveraging her linguistic and cultural assets, she brought together many collaborators to make this happen. Thank you, Aisha — 100% of the credit for this goes to you and your collaborators. I appreciate this opportunity to share the love in this blog post.

Please share this freely to celebrate multilingualism, and communicate across language barriers.

In this video, you’ll hear educators share the same message in all of the following languages:

• English
• Urdu
• Portuguese
• Mandarin
• Chinese
• Arabic
• Russian
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Italian
• French
• Spanish
• Vietnamese
• Tagalog
• Tamil
• Romanian

Message Transcript

Greetings in all languages (e.g., hello, ciao, assalamualaikum, shalom).

All of us teachers and educators want to let you know that you are in our thoughts and prayers! We miss seeing your beautiful faces in the classroom and hallways. We miss your smiles. We miss the noise in the hallways.

We hope to see you soon back in our schools. We know these are challenging times right now. Learning is different right now for you, but we are here for you and we will find solutions for you.

Let’s take this one day at a time, and we are better together! We are your teachers and we love you.

Do You Want to Add Your Language?

If you speak a language not included in this video, and want to record yourself sharing this message, please contact me and I’ll put you in touch with Aisha Ansari.