Finnish Society for Nutrition Research

ABSTRACT This study explores the characteristics of a bilingual kindergarten environment, focusing on the perspectives of educators working in a Finnish–Russian preschool in Helsinki. In this context, teacher agency refers to teachers’ capacity to make intentional decisions and take actions to adapt pedagogical practices that effectively support bilingual children while considering their individual characteristics and needs. This agency is shaped by teachers’ professional knowledge, beliefs, and understanding of sociocultural contexts. The study employed ethnographic methods, including individual semi-structured interviews and participant observations conducted during regular visits to the preschool, as well as a thematic analysis of teachers’ perspectives. By comparing these responses, the research highlights how interaction between educators and parents supports both teacher and parental agency, contributes to the development of bilingual institutions, and addresses the specific challenges of bilingual early childhood education. The findings indicate that collaboration between parents and educators is central to fostering bilingualism, with educators employing various translanguaging strategies to build a strong linguistic foundation. Children are encouraged to communicate in their preferred and in the second language, and educators switch to the child’s native language when necessary to provide comfort before gradually returning to the target language to strengthen bilingual competence.

Triacylglycerols from North Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus) were separated according to the degree of unsaturation by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) in the silver ion mode. Each of the eleven fractions collected was then separated by reversed‐ phase HPLC, which in these circumstances separated the molecules according to the combined chain‐ lengths of the fatty acyl residues only. One hundred thirty fractions were obtained for fatty acid analysis.Almost 50% of the triacylglycerol molecules had six or more double bonds in their fatty acyl residues. Saturated‐dimonoenes and disaturated‐ monoenes, 18.9% and 10.4%, respectively, were the most plentiful fractions of the more saturated species. Such a complex mixture of molecules was present that the most abundant subfractions from reversed‐ phase HPLC represented less than 5% of the total. Indeed, the largest single molecular species [16:0‐ 22:l‐ 22:6(n− 3)] represented only 2.8% of the total. These sequential analyses by complementary techniques made it possible to obtain a considerable amount of information on the composition of molecular species, but it was still not possible to identify all components.