2013 Winners & Shortlists

The Brief

48.1% of UAE expats are of Arab origin, and most speak to their children in English, as do their nannies of other nationalities. These children grow up on English TV and >80% parents prefer an English curriculum school. With everything being so English-centric, Arab children can’t read or write Arabic. The bilingual My Nursery introduces children to classical Arabic alongside English at an early age. We had to wake Arab parents up to this issue which they knew about but didn’t know how to deal with – and tell them that My Nursery was there to help.

Creative Execution

Our flash cards not only informed parents about the unique offering of My Nursery, but gave them a really useful teaching aid to give their kids a head start in learning their own language, even before they actually came to the nursery. They conveyed how this is an institution that genuinely cares about teaching & preserving the Arabic language, and not just another commercial establishment.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Our insight? Children fear the unknown. Things they've never seen before might come across as intimidating and even scary – and for most Arab kids in Dubai, this is the case with the unfamiliar Arabic alphabet. So to demonstrate this to parents, we took the letters of the Arabic alphabet and created scary versions of all 28 of them. They were converted into a set of flashcards with a twist – on one side was a scary letter and on the other, the original form of that Arabic letter and a picture of the most common object it stood for.

Results

350 sets of flash cards were given away as door drops in the locality of Jumeirah, the surrounding area around the nursery. After this exercise, My Nursery is functioning at full capacity, with 62 children on their waiting list for the next school year. The flash cards are also being used effectively by teachers at the nursery as their own branded teaching aid, helping them take out any fear of Arabic language, one letter at a time.