Happy Birthday, dear Blog! Joyeux Anniversaire!
"Bringing up Baby Bilingual" turns five years old today!
In the past five years, thanks to writing this online journal and sharing it with similar-minded parents and teachers, I have learned so much about raising children with more than one language--theories, techniques, challenges, joys, resources. I have made friends from Trinidad to Seattle to France to Namibia. It's a cliche, but yes, I have laughed, I have cried. I have fallen in love with my willful, whimsical son and his baby sister still growing in my belly as I sing to them both during quiet moments, singing to them in French, a language that I have fought to adopt as the language of my heart, my language for my children, even as my speaking it in Colorado draws questioning glances from strangers in the supermarket and sends me flying to the dictionary on a regular basis.
Thank you all for your support--for cheering, for empathizing, for explaining, for offering advice, for reading my words, for joining me on our journey of bringing up babies bilingually.
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Monday, May 23, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
30 down, 10 to go!
It occurs to me that I haven't had a lot to say about my pregnancy on this blog this time around. But other than awful "morning" sickness till 20 weeks, pronounced fatigue, and a scare at 22 weeks when I had regular contractions for 12+ hours and spent the night in the hospital, everything has gone swimmingly. No other aches and pains or problems to complain of--I feel much better in my third trimester of this pregnancy than I did in the first two trimesters or when Griffin was gestating!
My husband and I have met with my doula to discuss my birth plan (I'll be making a few changes this time around, like asking for an epidural!), and she gave us a lot of concrete suggestions of how to make the new baby's arrival easier on Griffin.
In the meantime, we're still trying to move huge amounts of books and papers and boxes from my home office to our recently-finished basement so that Unicorn can have her own room. (At the rate we're going, though, she'll end up sleeping in a drawer for the first six months!) (Not that she would even care!)
I'm looking forward to some visits from family and friends over the next two months (though I've warned them that rather than going into full-on hostess mode, I'll be defrosting lasagnas for dinner) and getting my substitute and a grad student intern trained at work so that they can take over the running of my Reading Buddies programs in June. (I'll cut back on my hours but still plan on working up until the week I'm due.) Griffin is enrolled for two full days per week at his preschool so that he can go on summer field trips with the other kids.
And I'm almost done with his first-year scrapbook, which I desperately want to finish before the next kid shows up!
My husband and I have met with my doula to discuss my birth plan (I'll be making a few changes this time around, like asking for an epidural!), and she gave us a lot of concrete suggestions of how to make the new baby's arrival easier on Griffin.
In the meantime, we're still trying to move huge amounts of books and papers and boxes from my home office to our recently-finished basement so that Unicorn can have her own room. (At the rate we're going, though, she'll end up sleeping in a drawer for the first six months!) (Not that she would even care!)
I'm looking forward to some visits from family and friends over the next two months (though I've warned them that rather than going into full-on hostess mode, I'll be defrosting lasagnas for dinner) and getting my substitute and a grad student intern trained at work so that they can take over the running of my Reading Buddies programs in June. (I'll cut back on my hours but still plan on working up until the week I'm due.) Griffin is enrolled for two full days per week at his preschool so that he can go on summer field trips with the other kids.
And I'm almost done with his first-year scrapbook, which I desperately want to finish before the next kid shows up!
Sunday, May 15, 2011
profile: Franck's trilingual family, adding Chinese now!
Please introduce us to your family.
My name is Franck. I was born and raised in Alsace, France. I grew up speaking with my parents and friends Alsatian, a German dialect, and learned French in school. I have lived in the US for 12 years, where I met Cristina, my wife, who is from the Basque Country in Spain. We both work in large retail and consumer goods companies and live in West Orange, NJ. We are passionate about teaching our kids languages.
Elena, our daughter, is six years old. She speaks French with me, Spanish with my wife, and English at school. She loves drawing, ballet and tennis. Pablo is three years old and is doing the same, although with a more limited vocabulary. He is a big soccer fan.
We all go as a family to Chinese school on Saturday afternoon to learn Mandarin.
What languages are spoken by the adults in your household and at what level of proficiency?
I am a native French speaker and my wife a native Spanish speaker, which makes it easy for us to teach our languages to our children. When my wife and I met, we did not speak each other’s languages, only English. We took classes for one year so that we could communicate with our respective families.
With our kids around, I speak French to my wife, and she answers in Spanish. We speak in English in front of the children when friends are around.
How are you exposing your children to the other languages?
We strongly believe in making every moment in the day together a language learning opportunity. I usually read at least one ten-minute story a day in French. When I cook, I like to have one of the kids with me to explain the vocabulary in French. When we play soccer, I make an effort to talk a lot about how to play in French. In the car I only put French nursery songs.
Why do you want your children to know more than one language?
We believe that learning is fun and we want them to communicate easily with their grandparents in Spain and France. It will also give them broader opportunities in the future to build relationships with people. And we believe that speaking more than one language will help build a more peaceful world.
How have you been able to expose your children to the cultures where French and Spanish are spoken?
Every year we spend one week in France and one week in Spain to see family.
What resources and activities have been most useful to you? What, on the other hand, has not been useful?
Useful: a lot of books, audiobooks in French, iPod and iPad. Playing with dolls and playing soccer also makes it fun and interactive. A lot of songs in the car. Watching a cartoon in French on YouTube five minutes per day.
I believe everything can be a useful activity if you weave in some language learning.
What challenges have you faced as you raise your children multilingually?
Finding the time. We both work full time away from home. The first one comes home at 7:30pm at the earliest. The market share of French is limited at home, and I need to find every possible opportunity to squeeze some French in.
Do you have any advice for us--for example, how do you encourage your children to use the minority/second language, or how do you cope with family members who don't speak the child's second language?
Reading princess stories in the second language works the best with my daughter, and also playing together with her dolls or puppets in French. It makes it interactive.
When my in-laws are in town, they do not understand French. So I tell things to Pablo and Elena in French, and translate it right away in Spanish. I basically tell them things in the two languages so that my in-laws do not feel left out.
If any of the adults in the household are non-native speakers of the language they use with the children, please tell us a little about how that works for your family.
My wife and I made the commitment to learn each other’s language. That was the biggest step I believe that helps us raise trilingual children.
We continue maintaining our languages. I read novels in Spanish, my wife in French (mainly on days off or on vacation). Vacation with our families is also very helpful
What do you think parents, caretakers, teachers, and/or researchers need to know about teaching a second language to children? What do you wish you had known when you started? What, if anything, would you do differently now?
I am in the process currently. However, I like to read a lot about other parents’ experiences, I learn a lot from it. Using the iPad, YouTube, a story in French every night, CDs in the car are all ideas I got from friends.
Answer your own question now--what did I not ask about that you would like to comment on?
I would like to know if parents have used the second language to learn a third one. I am trying to teach Chinese to my son with a French method. I would like to talk with parents who have tried it and how they did it.
Readers, parents of multilingual children, do you have any suggestions for Franck as he uses his children's second language to help them learn a fourth?
I'd also like to highlight his candid statement that when both parents work long days, it is very hard to give the children lots of input in the minority languages. When I gave a conference presentation earlier this year about raising children with more than one language, I asked the attendees what they found most challenging about the process; most of them felt similarly constrained. I know I'm very lucky to be working part-time and spending half my weekdays immersing Griffin in his second language. Kudos to you single parents and parents who both work full-time who still manage to enrich your children's lives with two or more languages! And Franck, thank you for sharing your story.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Penelope, Pezi, and puny songs and activities
My quest to find a fantastic educational DVD for preschoolers learning French continues to frustrate me. Some videos, like Brainy Baby French, are mediocre because of how generic and bland they are. Others, like Globe-Toddlers Adventures in France, are lively and show many aspects of French culture, but present lists of individual words that you can't really use to express anything meaningful in the second language.
French for Kids: The Fun and Easy Way to Learn French, from Language Tree, also disappointed me, but it wasn't dreadful, and Griffin watches it attentively. (This review is based on the "Beginner Level 1, Volume 1" DVD; so far only this one and volume 2 exist.)
The Language Tree website touts their Stanford-created, trademarked "Multi-Cognition Approach," which they see as innovative because it "stresses three proven learning techniques: 1) repetition, 2) deep processing and 3) information clustering." However, based on my experience using French with kids, I would argue that repeating phrases several times is not usually enough. (Of course, if your child watches this video several times a week, perhaps that does provide enough exposure to learn the expressions.) And the idea of "information clustering" makes a lot of sense to me--rather than tossing out long series of, say, nouns, for the children to memorize, this video limits the number of words and phrases introduced in each section and makes sure that they are logically connected to each other, like the names of some foods, polite ways to ask for or offer food, and how to express thanks.
I like that. And I truly like that this video presents conversations on a theme, doesn't translate them word-for-word into English, and then explicitly teaches phrases and sentences (not individual words). I also appreciate that each video that Language Tree publishes is unique to the language it teaches--so many of the language-learning videos (or programs like Rosetta Stone) out there use the same images and footage for all (or almost all) languages, changing only the narration and words on the screen. (Language Tree also offers Spanish, Chinese, Italian, and several others, each with a different child and a different pet, though apparently the same plot as the French version.) I'm not sure, however, that I would go so far as to agree with the company's claim that this is a "fun and natural" way to acquire a second language!
The "star" of the live-action French videos is Pénélope, a cute little girl who wakes up on her birthday morning to find Mr. Language Tree, a large man wearing a green sweatshirt with fabric leaves attached to it, in her bedroom. (A little creepy, perhaps, but he seems jolly and harmless.) Mr. Language Tree introduces each of the seven short scenes in English and then explains what the characters discussed in the scene.
Next, a smiling Pénélope repeats the key expressions from the scene while the English translation appears on screen. She is joined by her dog, Pezi (an animated character who wears a beret) in all of the scenes. (In the Spanish videos, the pet is a Chihuahua named Chiquita. I don't know if she wears a sombrero or not.)
The seven scenes in the 45-minute Volume 1 are the following:
1. Pénélope wakes up, greets us, asks us how we are feeling and what our names are, and tells us it's her birthday today.
2. She introduces us to her family who wish her happy birthday. Then Pezi dances stiltedly and sings an original song using the words for different family members ("Bonjour, je m'appelle Pezi/Je suis le chien de Pénélope/Et voici ma famille/Ma mere, mon père/Ma soeur, mon frère.")
3. Pénélope's friends arrive for the party and her dad distributes balloons to each guest. Each child politely asks for a certain color and then thanks him. We hear the balloon color song next: "Qui veut un ballon/Je voudrais le vert/Je voudrais le bleu/Voici, le bleu pour toi/Merci, monsieur."
4. Party games! First the children have to point to different body parts, which prepares the viewers to watch them play Jacques a dit (Simon Says). The target vocabulary includes the words for hands, feet, and so forth, along with expressions like "Êtes-vous prêts?" and "Où est…?" and "Allez!" This scene is accompanied by perhaps the lamest song of the video, "Mon corps," which includes scintillating lyrics like "Ma tête est là/Mon nez est là/Ma bouche est là/Mes yeux sont là."
5. The next scene finds the family and their guests at a table outside in the backyard. Her mother serves the food, asking each person what he or she wants to eat or drink, sometimes giving them a choice ("poulet ou jambon?" "du lait ou de l'eau?") Some guests politely ask her for what they want or to have something passed to them; others answer her questions; others inform us that they are hungry or thirsty. And everybody thanks her. (Pezi watches but doesn't sing this time.)
6. After the meal comes the dessert! Maman distributes slices of cake, counting each one. The song is "Compter c'est chouette" (counting is cool). (My favorite French counting song is one I found on a Beausoleil CD for kids; it's to the tune of the Alphabet song: "1, 2, 3, 4, 5 et 6, 7 et 8 et 9 et 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 et 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20/Je peux épeler et compter/Dites-moi ce que vous en pensez." Now that's chouette!)
7. Finally, Pénélope opens her presents, which allows us to learn some words for toys and clothes. (Surprisingly, this ten-year-old girl is thrilled to receive a box of blocks.) She thanks everyone, tells them how much she likes the gift, and asks if they want to play with her.
Can you tell I'm not impressed by the songs?! The promotional materials refer to them as "lively sing-alongs," but each verse is only repeated once and they're not that catchy.
More disappointing than the songs, at least to this former teacher, are the "interactive" and "playful" games. These four exercises are interactive in the sense that the viewer uses the remote control to select the correct true/false or multiple choice answer. The former provide a French expression and an accompanying English translation; the viewer must decide if the translation is correct or not. There's nothing natural about these exercises! And they just confused my three-year-old: when an authoritative voice on the television screen says "Does 'Comment t'appelles-tu?' mean 'How are you?'", he's inclined to agree.
In the other type of exercise, we see and hear the name of an object and then have to choose a picture of it (out of four), again using the remote control. Not thrilling, but at least it doesn't require children to translate, and kids older than mine will probably be more skilled at pressing buttons on the remote.
I didn't intend to be snarky in this review (at least not too much), but it's just that I have high standards for my own teaching, and if I'm spending $25 on an educational DVD, I want it to be stimulating and creative but not cheesy while introducing useful expressions in a communicative context that doesn't rely on translations! So far, I haven't found it. (And I'm well aware that a video in no way replaces actually teaching your child something yourself.)
But while I won't be purchasing Volume 2 of this one, I will check to see if my library carries it. (Besides, I need to find more chansons to make fun of!)
The Language Tree website touts their Stanford-created, trademarked "Multi-Cognition Approach," which they see as innovative because it "stresses three proven learning techniques: 1) repetition, 2) deep processing and 3) information clustering." However, based on my experience using French with kids, I would argue that repeating phrases several times is not usually enough. (Of course, if your child watches this video several times a week, perhaps that does provide enough exposure to learn the expressions.) And the idea of "information clustering" makes a lot of sense to me--rather than tossing out long series of, say, nouns, for the children to memorize, this video limits the number of words and phrases introduced in each section and makes sure that they are logically connected to each other, like the names of some foods, polite ways to ask for or offer food, and how to express thanks.
I like that. And I truly like that this video presents conversations on a theme, doesn't translate them word-for-word into English, and then explicitly teaches phrases and sentences (not individual words). I also appreciate that each video that Language Tree publishes is unique to the language it teaches--so many of the language-learning videos (or programs like Rosetta Stone) out there use the same images and footage for all (or almost all) languages, changing only the narration and words on the screen. (Language Tree also offers Spanish, Chinese, Italian, and several others, each with a different child and a different pet, though apparently the same plot as the French version.) I'm not sure, however, that I would go so far as to agree with the company's claim that this is a "fun and natural" way to acquire a second language!
The "star" of the live-action French videos is Pénélope, a cute little girl who wakes up on her birthday morning to find Mr. Language Tree, a large man wearing a green sweatshirt with fabric leaves attached to it, in her bedroom. (A little creepy, perhaps, but he seems jolly and harmless.) Mr. Language Tree introduces each of the seven short scenes in English and then explains what the characters discussed in the scene.
Next, a smiling Pénélope repeats the key expressions from the scene while the English translation appears on screen. She is joined by her dog, Pezi (an animated character who wears a beret) in all of the scenes. (In the Spanish videos, the pet is a Chihuahua named Chiquita. I don't know if she wears a sombrero or not.)
The seven scenes in the 45-minute Volume 1 are the following:
1. Pénélope wakes up, greets us, asks us how we are feeling and what our names are, and tells us it's her birthday today.
2. She introduces us to her family who wish her happy birthday. Then Pezi dances stiltedly and sings an original song using the words for different family members ("Bonjour, je m'appelle Pezi/Je suis le chien de Pénélope/Et voici ma famille/Ma mere, mon père/Ma soeur, mon frère.")
3. Pénélope's friends arrive for the party and her dad distributes balloons to each guest. Each child politely asks for a certain color and then thanks him. We hear the balloon color song next: "Qui veut un ballon/Je voudrais le vert/Je voudrais le bleu/Voici, le bleu pour toi/Merci, monsieur."
4. Party games! First the children have to point to different body parts, which prepares the viewers to watch them play Jacques a dit (Simon Says). The target vocabulary includes the words for hands, feet, and so forth, along with expressions like "Êtes-vous prêts?" and "Où est…?" and "Allez!" This scene is accompanied by perhaps the lamest song of the video, "Mon corps," which includes scintillating lyrics like "Ma tête est là/Mon nez est là/Ma bouche est là/Mes yeux sont là."
5. The next scene finds the family and their guests at a table outside in the backyard. Her mother serves the food, asking each person what he or she wants to eat or drink, sometimes giving them a choice ("poulet ou jambon?" "du lait ou de l'eau?") Some guests politely ask her for what they want or to have something passed to them; others answer her questions; others inform us that they are hungry or thirsty. And everybody thanks her. (Pezi watches but doesn't sing this time.)
6. After the meal comes the dessert! Maman distributes slices of cake, counting each one. The song is "Compter c'est chouette" (counting is cool). (My favorite French counting song is one I found on a Beausoleil CD for kids; it's to the tune of the Alphabet song: "1, 2, 3, 4, 5 et 6, 7 et 8 et 9 et 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 et 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20/Je peux épeler et compter/Dites-moi ce que vous en pensez." Now that's chouette!)
7. Finally, Pénélope opens her presents, which allows us to learn some words for toys and clothes. (Surprisingly, this ten-year-old girl is thrilled to receive a box of blocks.) She thanks everyone, tells them how much she likes the gift, and asks if they want to play with her.
Can you tell I'm not impressed by the songs?! The promotional materials refer to them as "lively sing-alongs," but each verse is only repeated once and they're not that catchy.
More disappointing than the songs, at least to this former teacher, are the "interactive" and "playful" games. These four exercises are interactive in the sense that the viewer uses the remote control to select the correct true/false or multiple choice answer. The former provide a French expression and an accompanying English translation; the viewer must decide if the translation is correct or not. There's nothing natural about these exercises! And they just confused my three-year-old: when an authoritative voice on the television screen says "Does 'Comment t'appelles-tu?' mean 'How are you?'", he's inclined to agree.
In the other type of exercise, we see and hear the name of an object and then have to choose a picture of it (out of four), again using the remote control. Not thrilling, but at least it doesn't require children to translate, and kids older than mine will probably be more skilled at pressing buttons on the remote.
I didn't intend to be snarky in this review (at least not too much), but it's just that I have high standards for my own teaching, and if I'm spending $25 on an educational DVD, I want it to be stimulating and creative but not cheesy while introducing useful expressions in a communicative context that doesn't rely on translations! So far, I haven't found it. (And I'm well aware that a video in no way replaces actually teaching your child something yourself.)
But while I won't be purchasing Volume 2 of this one, I will check to see if my library carries it. (Besides, I need to find more chansons to make fun of!)
Monday, May 09, 2011
real French kids dancing to real French songs!
Confession: I'm a little leery of YouTube. There are so many choices for videos to watch that it sometimes paralyzes me! Plus, some clips look like they're innocuous songs or cartoons but end up depicting things I never, ever, ever wanted to see T'choupi or Caillou engaging in. And yet I know that it's an amazing resource for language learners, so a year or so ago I started seeking out materials in French for children. Griffin now has his favorites, so I want to gather them here on my blog with my comments!
Take these four videos, for example. They feature a man and woman (and he has a dreamy voice!) singing traditional songs while a small group of children dance and act them out. The videos are a mix of live action and animation with very simple drawings, which makes them just charming! Based on my questions to the mamans at French playgroup and the fact that only one of songs appears on any of Griffin's CDs, it seems like some of the songs are less well-known in France; YouTube is the only source I have for them.
Here's the one you probably know already: Sur le pont d'Avignon. I love how earnest the kids look as they carry out the choreography and that they're actually dancing on the bridge!
Passe, passe, passera boasts a lovely melody, although I'm not crazy about the refrain that requires the participants to whack the kid in the middle. I would guess that the dance moves for this one are pretty standard--the kids make a bridge for the others to duck under until one of them is caught, and then they circle around the culprit.
Next we have a French song about Spain! You might complain that the elements featured--mountains, ocean, bulls--are stereotypes. But it's a song, not a thesis, and it was my son's first exposure to Spain, and now he can find it on a map and tell me about the toreadors. This song is Dans mon pays d'Espagne. (Ole!)
And finally, a song that we used recently in our transportation-themed storytime: Dans le pre s'en va le train. Again, the children are just adorable as they act out both the passengers on the train and the people doing the train dance as they hold onto each other's shoulders and chug-chug-chug through the countryside.
Up next: the always-whimsical Alain Le Lait! What are your favorite French YouTube videos?
Take these four videos, for example. They feature a man and woman (and he has a dreamy voice!) singing traditional songs while a small group of children dance and act them out. The videos are a mix of live action and animation with very simple drawings, which makes them just charming! Based on my questions to the mamans at French playgroup and the fact that only one of songs appears on any of Griffin's CDs, it seems like some of the songs are less well-known in France; YouTube is the only source I have for them.
Here's the one you probably know already: Sur le pont d'Avignon. I love how earnest the kids look as they carry out the choreography and that they're actually dancing on the bridge!
Passe, passe, passera boasts a lovely melody, although I'm not crazy about the refrain that requires the participants to whack the kid in the middle. I would guess that the dance moves for this one are pretty standard--the kids make a bridge for the others to duck under until one of them is caught, and then they circle around the culprit.
Next we have a French song about Spain! You might complain that the elements featured--mountains, ocean, bulls--are stereotypes. But it's a song, not a thesis, and it was my son's first exposure to Spain, and now he can find it on a map and tell me about the toreadors. This song is Dans mon pays d'Espagne. (Ole!)
And finally, a song that we used recently in our transportation-themed storytime: Dans le pre s'en va le train. Again, the children are just adorable as they act out both the passengers on the train and the people doing the train dance as they hold onto each other's shoulders and chug-chug-chug through the countryside.
Up next: the always-whimsical Alain Le Lait! What are your favorite French YouTube videos?
Thursday, May 05, 2011
les histoires qui font peur (mais pas trop)
Delphine and Jenny led our 12th French storytime at the end of April, with the titillating theme of les histoires qui font peur (mais pas trop) [stories that scare you (but not too much)]. Along with a couple of fairy tales like Le petit chaperon rouge [Little Red Riding Hood], they shared a book about a child who was apprehensive about going down a big slide at the playgroup.
The story spinners even found a cute song about something a little scary: "Les squelettes" [skeletons], from Ana Lomba and Marcela Summerville's Play and Learn French. All of the songs in this book accompanied by CD are originals designed for anglophones learning French, but they are sung in French with English translations and explanations in the book.
And for a craft after the formal storytime, Delphine had prepared an activity from Tête à modeler, a French website about arts and crafts for kids: we made simple cone-shaped finger puppets shaped like the animals who had appeared in the stories, like le loup [the wolf]!
The story spinners even found a cute song about something a little scary: "Les squelettes" [skeletons], from Ana Lomba and Marcela Summerville's Play and Learn French. All of the songs in this book accompanied by CD are originals designed for anglophones learning French, but they are sung in French with English translations and explanations in the book.
Another great immersion experience for the francophones in our community!
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
get inspired!
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