NORTH ANDOVER - The students in Nella Lush's art studio giggled as they showed off their Italian by singing.

The children, mostly ages 8 to 10, are learning art during the summer, not Italian, but Lush said the two subjects go together. She will teach both when she opens a bilingual Italian and English preschool this September.

Lush, an artist and a children's author, said she chose to teach in Italian because she is from Italy, and she will use an Italian teaching style that incorporates the environment and encourages creativity.

At her preschool, which will be known as Piccola Italia, Lush said she wants to take advantage of the time when children are first learning about the world and developing language to open their minds to something they might not come across in a typical preschool.

"Children absorb everything so quickly," Lush said. "I can expose them to new things and see what they pick up."

Mary Davidson, mother of Mackenzie, 10, and Isabelle, 8, said her daughters have learned some Italian because Lush incorporates the language in their art studies, including words about colors and shapes.

"This week they came home and told me two dozen Italian words they learned from Nella," she said. "She will be talking about a tree and will say 'tree' in her language and the kids will remember."

The Italian preschool will be four mornings a week from 8:30 to 12:30, including an Italian lunch. Lush said students will learn basic preschool lessons, such as colors and days of the week, but they will learn them in both English and Italian.

Solange Lira, linguist and associate professor in language and literacy at Lesley University, said a bilingual atmosphere when children are young is the best way to teach a language because the child is learning words from both languages at the same time.

She is from Brazil and raised four children to speak English and Portuguese.

She said young children do not necessarily learn languages better, but they will have a better accent and don't care as much how they sound.

"Adults are ashamed of making mistakes," she said. "Children don't have that. If they are taught in a stress-free environment, if they are taught like they are learning a first language, then they have a better chance of learning."

Lira said learning a language while young, no matter which language, opens up the mind to the idea of speaking in another language, which helps in other subjects such as math and music.

Lira pointed to other countries, such as Switzerland, where it is natural for students to learn three or four languages.

One or two years of language is not enough, however. Lira said the lessons need to be reinforced, and most children do not encounter language lessons until high school.

Moira Goodman signed up her son Broderick, almost 3, for Piccola Italia. She said since opportunities to learn Italian are limited in the area, she expects that he will probably learn another language at school unless she chooses to continue with private lessons.

"It's not necessarily that it is Italian, just that he is learning another language," she said. "It's mostly giving him exposure to the diversity of the culture and having the opportunity to learn about people that are different."

Laura D'Angosse Perlman, director of the Teddy Bear Club bilingual French and English preschool in Newton, has seen many of her students during the last 15 years continue in French or take up other languages.

"It seems that once the child is learning one foreign language, it is easier for them to learn others," she said.

While many schools are emphasizing the need to learn Chinese and Spanish, Perlman said parents of her students have their own reasons for wanting their children to learn French - a love of the language and culture, plans to move or travel there or a connection to the family's French history.

One advantage she has seen for children learning a language when they are young is they don't have to translate the words from English to French because they learn them at the same time. For instance, a child sees a chair and thinks both "chair" in English and "chaise" in French.

Lush will model her new preschool after the Reggio Amelio concept that started in Italy. This style of teaching uses the environment to teach about the world and gives freedom in the lessons to allow children to explore, be creative and ask questions.