So you want to start a second-language storytime?

Yes!  It's possible!  And you don't even have to do it by yourself!

Ever since I started posting about the French storytime that I co-founded at my local library, readers have been emailing me to ask for advice on starting up something similar where they live.  And as our storytime is still in existence--even flourishing!--after six months, we must be doing something right. 

So here's my advice to other would-be story spinners, both as a storytime volunteer and as 3+ year employee of that same library....

Location:

While your local public library seems a logical choice, you could also look into a space at a college or university (like meeting rooms at the student center or in the foreign language department), an indoor play gym, a community center, a parenting support center, a daycare or elementary school, a bookstore, a toy store, or a city recreation center/YMCA.

How to decide?  I would start with a place to which you already have a connection so that you can speak with administrators or owners who already know you there and a place that already offers regular programming for children.  Independent bookstores or toy stores, for example, are probably more approachable than big chains for whom you are just another nameless shopper.

Here's what you might not know about public libraries, at least in the US: right now is probably not a good time to propose anything new.  The three or four months leading up to the launch of their Summer Reading Program is an intense period of planning--deciding on themes, creating handouts and flyers, arranging special programs and performances that fit the theme and will appeal to the various age groups that the library serves, recruiting and training extra volunteers, scrounging up prizes to award, ordering and labeling thousands of prize books....

Let's just say that if you approach a harried children's librarian in May about starting a brand-new program right away, she'll probably shake her head no, horrified, if not chase you out of the library.  And once the Summer Reading Program starts, the pace gets even more manic, as children of all ages descend on the library en masse to check out more books than usual, attend the programs, and redeem their prizes.

"Then why are you writing this blog post now?" I hear you asking yourself.  Well, 'cause this is what I felt like writing about.  Besides, this gives you a couple of months to pull together a proposal for your local library (if that's what you're going to try first).  And if you don't know the children's librarian personally, this gives you time to schmooze, make yourself and your kiddos known to her, let her hear you speaking the minority language in the library, and so forth.

Also, if you are not a regular storytime attendee, I really recommend that you visit as many different storytimes as possible to get a feel for how they can be presented, what can be included, what techniques the storyteller uses, what resources are available, and what you yourself would be comfortable with.

Planning:
If I were you, I would recruit at least one other person to co-found the storytime with you.  That way, you won't be responsible for carrying out every single storytime by yourself.  (This came in very handy when Griffin and I had to miss a storytime due to an emergency doctor's appointment.)  Our group now has four or five mamans who work together two at a time to plan and present.  Two of us are Americans, the other three native speakers.  We see each other regularly at a weekly French playgroup, where we often bounce ideas off each other and brainstorm songs and comptines that we could pepper our storytime with.

To choose a day and time, we checked out the library's regular storytime schedule to ascertain when nothing was scheduled: Fridays.  Because the French playgroup meets in the mornings when the older siblings are in school, we wanted an afternoon session.  Because the little kids still nap in the afternoon, we wanted to meet a bit later.  And because the library closes at 5:00 on Friday, we chose 4:00, and are pretty happy with that decision.

We meet every two weeks, which works well: every week would be too big of a commitment, while once a month seems not often enough to feel like a regular part of your schedule.

Format:
Our storytimes tend to run about 30 minutes, which is maybe a little long for the younger kids there.  (But we always have so much we want to squeeze in!)  And sometimes we plan an activity for afterwards, like eating crepes (the food-themed storytime), doing puzzles about trucks and trains (the transportation-themed storytime), coloring pictures, or making finger puppets.  (Other times we just sit around and chat while the kids play and run around.)

We do pick a theme for each session to provide some structure and to recycle vocabulary and ideas throughout.  We scour our kids' rooms to find books and magazine stories that address the theme, then narrow it down to three or four, generally starting with the longest one first (when the little ones are more willing to sit still).  We often end up with one nonfiction title that we use to introduce the concept.  For example, with seasons, I showed a book with illustrations of a cherry tree throughout the year and asked the kids questions about the colors of the leaves, the state of the bird's nest, and the weather. 

As our storytime has developed, we have seen that the books that encourage the children to interact work the best.  So as we go along, we ask questions about the book, help the kids make connections between the book and their lives, trail off at the end of a sentence to they can yell out the rhyming word (in books where the final words rhyme, that is), and make patently false statements about the topic that the kids can refute (and feel proud for catching a grown-up saying something wrong when they're done laughing about our idiotic comments).

We also try to include one book that is genuinely fun or funny or silly, because that so appeals to the children.  On the other hand, our selections can be somewhat eclectic, since we don't have a library full of French books to draw from.  A lot of my children's books were purchased from eBay Canada, so they're in French, but it's rare that my colleagues from Europe have ever heard of them.  Some of the storytellers take books in English and render them in French, but I'm not comfortable enough as a non-native speaker to do that myself.

What I do like is that we always read the book as it was written (more or less, occasionally shortening one that will take too long to read otherwise).  I have attended some storytimes (both English and French) where the leader simply talks about what's going on in the picture.  And books and their authors deserve more respect than that!

After choosing the theme and the books, we move on to the songs and nursery rhymes.  We like to alternate them--one book, then a song, then another book--to break it up and encourage the attendees to sing along.  Because half an hour is a long time for the toddlers and preschoolers to sit, we endeavor to plan something for the middle that will get them up and moving around, like singing a song with an accompanying dance, shaking jingle bells, moving around the room like a train or animals (or whatever fits the theme for that day), or a leading an activity I learned from Griffin's French teacher: when we pick a song that isn't traditional or commonly known, we play it on the CD player and direct the attendees to do different movements along with the song (jumping, hopping, swimming, flying, etc.), rather than singing something unfamiliar.

Speaking of song lyrics, when we started out, I typed up a handout with all the words to distribute to the attendees, but now we just write them on the white board in the storytime room.  And when I'm at a loss for one more song, I use the tune of "Ten Little Indians" and change the lyrics.  For instance, during the love-themed session, we sang "Un petit, deux petits, trois petits bisous, quatre petits, cinq petits, six petits bisous, sept petits, huit petits, neuf petits bisous, dix petits bisous pour toi" (counting kisses).

Finally, we also feel it is important to start with the same song each time and end with the same song, which the librarians always do at the official storytimes.  This helps the kiddos transition into and out of French storytime, and it means that after a month or two, each child will know at least two songs each time.  Our opening song is "Dans la foret lointaine," which features a cuckoo bird who sings coucou, which also means "hi" in French.  To close, we finish with "Ainsi font font font les petites marionnettes," because it includes the line "trois petits tours et puis s'en vont" (they turn three times and then go away).  We vary them up, asking the attendees to sing them very fast, very slow, very softly, etc.

Publicity:
This may sound odd, but the library doesn't actually do any publicity for our storytime.  If a patron asks if something like that exists, the librarians will tell them, of course, but as we are a group of volunteers and not supervised by a librarian, it is not considered an official library storytime.  Also, the most commonly spoken minority language in our community is Spanish, and our library doesn't currently have the resources to offer a Spanish storytime (though we often do some bilingual sessions), so it could be seen as insensitive to promote the French one while not providing anything exclusively in Spanish.  The library also does something similar with a baby sign language group.

As you might expect, most of the attendees come from the French playgroup where we do lots of publicity.  I also send emails to former members (whose children are now older), other Francophones in the area that I (or the other leaders) have met, other parents in Griffin's French class, and a handful of French teachers.  I also post the information on a wiki for French teachers in Colorado (the local chapter of the American Association of Teachers of French) and a listserv for language teachers in Colorado.  If we needed to recruit from an even broader audience, I would advertise the storytime on the local meetup.com groups for French speakers, but so far we have had enough participants.  (You could always start a meetup.com group specifically for the minority language storytime, though.)

We tend to see 10-20 people at each session; more than that would be unwieldy.  So far they have almost all been families who speak (at least some) French at home, rather than Americans who are interested in having their kids hear some French.  This means that we can conduct the entire session in the minority language with no translation or explanations necessary.  (I like being part of this immersion experience!)

In conclusion, I heartily encourage you to create a minority-language storytime in your community!  I'd love to hear about your experiences….

This post was written for inclusion in the April edition of the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism.

Griffin conjugates in Spanish!

So Griffin has been learning a little Spanish at preschool, and he showed a lot of interest in the language during our recent trip to Mexico, but it's not something I'm making an effort to reinforce at home because I feel like he just barely gets enough French from me.  I just don't want to "dilute" it with another language yet (even though we are hoping that we can enroll him in a bilingual elementary school in two years).

So imagine my surprise when Griffin corrected his father's Spanish the other day!  Ed was singing a tune from our Music Together class called "Don Alfredo Baila," but he was mispronouncing the verb as bailo ("I dance" instead of "he dances").  Griffin looked up at him, said, "Don Alfredo baila, Daddy," and went back to making a mess with monkeys, cars, and blocks.

Wow!

vroom vroom to storytime!

Our eleventh (!) French storytime zoomed into the library last week with a boatload of songs and books about transportation, to the delight of many little boys (and the little girls didn't seem to mind them either).  As usual, our selections tended towards the eccentric, because we're limited by what we own (or are willing to translate into French), which means that we neglected to include any books about trains as none of us had any!  Oh well--the little boys forgave us.

After our traditional opening song, I showed pictures from Les transports by Nathalie Bélineau and Emilie Beaumont, part of a delightful series of board books for the very young, Imagérie des bébés, which feature detailed and whimsical photos of clay creations.  I tried to engage les enfants by asking lots of questions about each vehicle ("Qu'est-ce qui est plus grand, la moto ou la bicyclette?") and by making deliberately false statements ("Voici un bateau qui vole dans le ciel!").

As an introduction to our next book about a bus, we sang "Les roues du bus," a collaborative translation of "The Wheels on the Bus," which we had prepared at French playgroup earlier that week.  Of course, this bus had the expected portes, essuie-glaces, enfants, and conducteur, but we also ended up with a few animals when we asked for suggestions from the kiddos.

That worked as a lovely transition to our next tome, Le petit autobus by Sandrine Chambéry, which features a normal city bus with some very unusual passengers--le pêcheur de mauvais temps (the man who fishes for bad weather), le dresseur des cauchemars (the nightmare tamer), le moulineur de devoirs (the man who grinds up homework), le jongleur de mots (the word juggler), la tricoteuse d'histoires (the story knitter), and Marius, the schoolboy who observes them all.  (These eccentric characters sailed right over the children's têtes and brought some puzzled looks to their parents' faces, but at least it was a book about a bus, right?!)

Next, while we didn't have a train book, we did share a train song, "Dans le pré s'en va le train," which instructs the singers line up, place their hands on the shoulders of the person in front, and hang on while they choo-choo-choo through the countryside.

Our final selections concerned fire trucks, always a perennial favorite for the fascinated little boys.  We sang "Au feu les pompiers"

and then read Pompier by Amanda Askew, a book about a day in the life of a firefighter, which concludes with the firefighters rushing to a school to put out a cafeteria fire (which made a nice parallel to the preceding song, in which two cooks blame each other for a kitchen fire).

Then after our usual farewell song, we handed out puzzles with trains, cars, buses, and so forth for the kids to play with while the parents chatted.  All aboard!

spring cleaning

This blog is coming up on its fifth anniversary--yay!--and I'm having more and more trouble locating specific posts from the past.  If it's unwieldy for me, it certainly must be for my readers.  So I'm adding extra tabbed pages to the main page of the blog to collect some of the posts worth highlighting and to put descriptions of some of my favorite resources all in one place.  And as I have way too many post-its floating around with notes of funny things Griffin has said, I'll also use one new page as a place to collect his Griffinisms.

Any suggestions, recommendations, or requests of elements, categories, or ideas to include?

scavenger hunts, family trivia, playing with photos, and more!

My last article in the series "Family, Friends, and Francais" has just been published at Multilingual Living.  This one covers tactile and kinesthetic activities you can do with your kids on our theme of friends and family. 

I'm hoping to squeeze in one more series of language-learning activities before Unicorn arrives--probably on the theme of food!  Do you have any recommendations for children's books about food in French or activity suggestions?  (I'll start with the ones we read at French storytime last month, of course.)

nouveaux livres pour Griffin (et moi!)

My parents just returned from a river cruise between Paris and Normandy during which they visited historic sites, ate authentic meals (including one at a French lady's home), and went shopping for their bilingual grandson!  I had given them a wish list of books that would appeal to Griffin (and me), like specific collections of comptines with CDs, fairy tales appropriate for preschoolers (nothing too gory), children's magazines, and some more Petit Ours Brun.  My maman speaks French, so she was able to hunt almost all of them down!  (And she reports that she enjoyed the chase.)  Merci mille fois, Maman!!!

miam, miam, storytime!

Two more French storytimes have come and gone since the last time I posted about them! I love that other moms are helping out--now there are five of us (three native speakers, two non-natives) who co-lead each session. It helps that we see each other regularly at French playgroup to brainstorm ideas for topics, books, and songs.

A maman named Brigitte and I did the ninth storytime, la nourriture (food), and last week was the tenth, les animaux de la ferme. The latter was similar to our storytime last fall on the same topic, which is of course fine, because repetition is the best way to learn language.

This time the leaders, Delphine and Mathilde, read a story from the magazine Histoires pour les petits (June 2010 edition) called "Soprano a perdu son cocorico" by Mireille Saver. It's a fun, long-ish story about a rooster who all of a sudden doesn't know how to crow any more. It includes a cute original song about the chickens ("Le rock'n'roll des gallinaces"), which the storytellers were able to share thanks to the CD that accompanied the magazine. We sang it several times, cot-cot-codec-ing like French chickens!

Mathilde also showed pictures of farm animals and barnyards, asking the kids questions about the animals. (She had a very engaging introduction: using an English book that had two-page illustrated spreads of animal habitats, she would say, "Les animaux de la ferme, comme cela!" but then show a picture of, say, undersea creatures or a zoo. The children would roar, "Noooon!" They loved it!)

Delphine once again shared the enormously popular and scatological De la petite taupe qui voulait savoir qui lui a fait sur la tête, a picture book about a mole who has been pooped upon and who interrogates his fellow barnyard residents to figure out whose caca matches the caca on his head. The kids loved this one and laughed a lot.

The final book from the farm animals storytime was the very cute Il etait dix petites poules by Sylvia Dupuis, a board book illustrating a song about where some hens of all colors were going to lay their eggs. Because it rhymed, the children were (usually) able to chime in on the last word of each line by looking at the illustrations. Below, for example, it says "L'etait une petite poule blue/Qu'allait pondre dans un pneu" (there was a little blue hen who was going to lay her egg in a tire).

And now for the storytime that I helped with!

Brigitte and I had a lot of fun with the food storytime; the hard part was narrowing our focus to just a few books and songs. (We have enough left over that we could do a second storytime right away if we wanted to.)

We started with a puppet show of La chenille qui fait des trous by Eric Carle (a translation of The Very Hungry Caterpillar), using these puppets that I had made for a tutoring session several years ago. (I love, love, love using drama as a language teaching technique!)

Our songs included: "Pomme de reinette et pomme d'api", Y, and "En voici, en voila" by Alain Le Lait, a very fun tune about different types of food in French. Because the last one has a lot of verses and is not a traditional song, we played it in the background while the children danced around.

To introduce the final book, Les crêpes, collaboratively written and illustrated by Sophie Ledesma, we sang "J'aime la galette" (a traditional song).

In the book, different animals explain what type of crêpe they want; as you can see above, the bird wants one with earthworms! Just adorable.

After the storytime, Brigitte and I served crêpes to everyone, insisting that the children tell us if they wanted Nutella or confiture on theirs. (Griffin was the oddball American--he asked for beurre de cacahuete, peanut butter, which we weren't even offering as a choice!)

New to this blog? Read about our French storytime history here:

• Why we started our own storytime


• Making plans for our storytime


• Storytime #1: Autumn and forests


• Storytime #2: Farm animals


• Storytime #3: Under the sea


• Storytime #4: Africa


• Storytime #5: Christmas


• Storytime #6: Dinosaurs


• Storytimes #7 (Bugs) and #8 (Love)

I need some space!

Is anyone else pulling their hair out about Blogger lately? I have spent five days trying to get the spacing correct for my next post which has a zillion pictures. Every time it looks good in the "compose" frame, the "preview" frame shows very screwy spacing (too much between paragraphs and pictures or else none at all). So I go into the "edit html" frame, fiddle with that, check the "preview," like it, click on "post," and the changes I made to the html disappear. Not all of them, but enough that I have to restart the entire process. Five days later, I'm still not happy but I'm going to post it anyway or I'll have no hair left. Any advice?

lots to read!

It's carnival time! Coco over at Multilingual Mama has published the next edition of the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism, always one of my favorite things to visit online, and as always full of inspirational posts from amazing parents. Learn more about the Carnival here. Next, you might enjoy the fifth article in my "Family, Friends, and Francais" series for Multilingual Living. This one concerns literacy activities like simple games (le pendu, word finds), easy everyday writing tasks, and creating your own simple books, all in the target language (doesn't necessarily have to be French), all about the people your children love. And finally, I'm also participating in this month's French Obsession Party at Chateau des Fleurs. She's offering a collection of links to posts about all things France (and is also doing a giveaway of a sassy black-and-white ring).

l'alphabet de Griffin

When you can't find the exact books you want for your bilingual child, sometimes you just have to write them yourself! You can do something simple like this, by adding photos to a word processing file, printing the pages, and putting them in a binder. Or you can get really ambitious and use digital scrapbooking software to make a photo book with captions! I wanted my toddler son Griffin to have an alphabet book in French that included concepts that were meaningful to him, so I decided to create one myself.

I started by opting to focus on nouns (to keep it consistent) and use photos of him for illustrations. Then I brainstormed things that are important to him that begin with each letter of the alphabet--in French except for the proper names. (This required the dictionary at times!) Finally, I went through 2.5 years of pictures of my adorable little boy to find ones that represented something from each letter. Will you indulge me and let me share? I hope it will inspire you to make a minority language alphabet book for your children!

A is for amour and amourson (my nickname for Griffin--amour plus ourson, which means "bear cub").

B is for bisou (kiss); C is for Cousin Carl and Cheerios (the photo of the latter shows the cereal all over the floor while Griffin looks on open-mouthed as if it wasn't him who spilled them!).

D is for Daddy; E is for expressions.

F is for famille (family), while G is for grand-parents. H is for heureux (happy) and herbe (grass).

I is for insecte (his Halloween costume his first year was a bumblebee) and J is for jardin (gardin). K was a lot harder to figure out; I finally said K is for kangourou and found pictures of him jumping (and added the caption, Griffin adore sauter, Griffin loves to jump).

L is for livre (book) and M is for Maman. N is for natation (swimming).

O is for oncle: Tonton Matt (Uncle Matt). P and Q were also tough, especially since the template for the book had them together on one page with room for only one photo. I ended up with the following: Griffin fouille dans le placard pour quatorze casseroles. (Griffin rummages in the cupboard for 14 pots.)

R is for rire (laugh) and rigoler (giggle). S is for sommeil (sleep) and solitude.

T is for Tatie (Auntie) Elizabeth. U and V were fun to put together: Utah and voyage with a picture of us hiking during a trip to Utah with a five-month-old Griffy in the baby carrier beside a sign that said "Dirt road 75 miles. Travel at your own risk."

W is for Wisconsin, where my parents live and where we travel two or three times a year. X and Y tend to be throw-away letters in alphabet books, so I stuck with the template's suggestion of the cognate excellent and added a Youpie! (yippee!) for the Y. I love the action shot of Griffin on the slide with his hair standing on end.

Can you tell I ran out of energy at the end? I left the template's "zip-a-dee-do-dah" and added a family picture at the zoo and one other of him smiling. The final page shows all the letters of the alphabet and the sentence, "Griffin, je t'aime de la tête aux pieds et d'A à Z" (Griffin, I love you from your head to your toes and from A to Z).

carnival call

A message from the next host of the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism, Cordelia from Multilingual Mama:

Dear multilingual parents & bloggers,

For those of you who don't know me - and that will be most of you ;) - my name is cordelia newlin de rojas. I am franco-american, my husband is mexican and we are parents to two little girls - Pacifique who will be 3 this May and Claude who is turning 7 months next week. I came across the carnival during my desperate search for some answers and compadres as I struggled linguistically with my first daughter. I was over the moon to discover such a wonderful active community as well as relieved and incredibly inspired.

I am hosting the March Carnival which will in fact be published in the very first few days of April as the last carnival was a bit delayed and I am actually away this last week. Ideally I'd like to have all the contributions in by April 3rd. I realize this is a quick turn around but I hope it won't put too many people off. I really hope you will contribute to it and look forward to meeting and discovering many new folks virtually through this experience.

Please send your posts to cordelia . rojas @ gmail . com .