free books and stories and fables and poems and rhymes, all online, in so many languages!

While researching my articles on French language activities for Multilingual Living, I realized that I could probably stop buying books for Griffin entirely--both in English and in French--beause so very many books exist online already, and some on websites that can even boast animation and/or professional narrators!

(Oh, let's be honest. I'll never stop buying books.)

Anyway, here are some sites that I've explored lately. I hope you'll enjoy them too!

free online children's books--because you can't always find an older cousin to read to you

Tumblebooks:
I first blogged about this program three years ago; read my original post about how it works, the few aspects I don't like about it, and how you could use it in a language classroom. Briefly, you select a picture book, chapter book, or nonfiction book in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, or Russian. (Predictably, English predominates; click on the "language learning" button at the top of the page to access the books in one of the other languages.) You watch the story unfurl onscreen, with a narrator reading aloud while the lines of text are highlighted like a karaoke storytime. You can opt to have it advance automatically or manually. Many of the picture books have activities that accompany them--matching games, quiz questions, and so forth. If your public library or school doesn't subscribe to Tumblebooks, you can access it through the Lafayette Public Library's kid's stuff page.

We Give Books:
At this charitable giving site, everytime you read a book, the publisher (Penguin Books) will donate one to the nonprofit organization of your choice. You have to sign up (for free) and the selection is fairly limited (smaller than Tumblebooks), but it's hard to argue with the idea! The books, all in English, are geared to ages ten and under and include both DK nonfiction titles (which my kids in Reading Buddies love) and familiar picture books--definitely a plus. You (or your child) do have to actually read the book yourself from pages identical to those of the printed book.

Lire et RéCréer:
This site in French has short stories, fables, poems, and nursery rhymes, both classic and contemporary. The text is presented on the screen, often with simple animation and background music, but the reader is (usually) invited to pronounce it aloud (note that music will start when the site is opened).The tales are divided by genre and also by age. It doesn't have as many "bells and whistles" as Tumblebooks, but it's all in French and the selection (and variety of genres) is a lot better!

Librivox:
Like Tumblebooks, Librivox reads books to you; unlike Tumblebooks, this program focuses on books for adults, and all of the texts are recorded by volunteers from their homes, which makes the sound quality less professional. On the other hand, this means that new texts are constantly being added. (By "new," I mean "previously unrecorded." The books are limited to those in the public domain, which means nothing from the past few decades.) Librivox offers texts in just about any language you can think of, limited only by the languages that their volunteer readers around the world speak, from Catalan to Korean to Latvian to Old English to Tagalog to Urdu (click here and select a language from the drop-down menu to see what books are available in the languages of your choice). Among their choices in French, I haven't found anything appropriate for Griffin or Carl--even the fables by Jean de la Fontaine would go over their heads, at least without illustrations, and no way would I give a preschooler the original versions of Charles Perrault's fairy tales! In English, though, they have stories by Beatrix Potter, Thornton Burgess, Aesop, and Mother Goose, plus The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (and with 10,000+ texts in English, many more are bound to be appropriate for kids).

Reading A-Z:
I found this one almost four years ago, before I started working as a reading enrichment program coordinator at the library; I'll be exploring it more thoroughly now to steal (er, adapt) some of their ideas for my Reading Buddies. As I stated in my original post, you must purchase a subscription ($85/year for one classroom) to access all of their materials, but they also offer a generous number of free samples. You print out the black-line books and staple them together (then the kids can color them themselves). As the site is designed for teachers of English, the vast majority of their books are in English, but they also have a selection in French and in Spanish (both translations of their original books in English). The subheading on the home page of this site claims "Everything You Need to Teach Reading," and I pretty much believe them--everything from phonics to poetry to readers' theatre to worksheets to lesson plans to assessments is here.

Enchanted Learning:
Like Reading A-Z, this subscription-based site markets itself to teachers with printable books and worksheets. Its offerings are much more limited when it comes to books, but the site provides more printable activities, games, and worksheets. You can also access all of their materials without subscribing ($20/year) if you're willing to look at ads and not have the prettiest versions of the pages when you print them. While Reading A-Z seems very educational, the Enchanted Learning stuff strikes me as more fun. Check out their materials, including short printable books, about Africa and Kwanzaa, in American Sign Language, about Canada, about China and the Chinese New Year, in Spanish and about Cinco de Mayo and Dia de los Muertos, in French, in Swedish, in Dutch, in German, in Hebrew and about Hanukkah, in Italian, about Japan and Japanese crafts, in Portuguese, in Russian, and about geography in general. Enchanted Learning's materials in English are divided into categories on the home page.

So now it's your turn!  What do you think about sites like these?  Do you prefer the interactive ones or the simpler text-based sites?  Which are your favorites (and least favorites) (and why)?  What others do you recommend?

Note: Do check out the comments, where readers have recommended many more worthy sites in the past two three years!

profile: bilingual with Mamapoekie in Ivory Coast

Meet Mamapoekie, originally from Belgium, who now lives in Ivory Coast with her Belgian husband and their toddler. She is a prolific blogger--check out her musings on being a mama at Authentic Parenting. I'm so pleased that she agreed to be interviewed here, because the majority of the families profiled on my blog have been in North America and Europe.

Mamapoekie is a stay-at-home-mom and her husband is an engineer. She has also lived in Sweden and Cameroon. Both parents are both multilingual: her mother tongue is Dutch, she characterizes her English and French as "very good spoken and written" (and based on her blog, I would push her English far beyond just "very good"!), and she can converse in German and Spanish as well. Her husband's native languages are Dutch and French, his English is very good, and he has also studied some German.

To read more about her impressions of the trilingualism of her home country, click here.

Their daughter (DD) just turned two a couple of days ago!

What languages are you exposing your children to, and how?
Currently French and Dutch, we live in a francophone country and the huz speaks French to DD too. I speak Dutch. Our carrier language is Dutch too. She’s a little bit exposed to English (we only watch English spoken TV – which she doesn’t get to do yet, but she hears it all the same - and hear a lot of English music), which we would like to up a notch. After our next holidays, we will be reading to her in English and I also ordered some English lullabies on CD.

Why do you want your child to know more than one language?
That’s a tricky one. I think we always wanted to benefit from our bilingual household situation to also raise our children bilingual. The fact that we now live in a francophone country is just an addition. We’ve gotten a bit more deliberate about it recently as to wanting to add English to the mix, just to benefit from the early language acquiring skills.

How well does your child understand and speak the different languages?
She understands Dutch and French perfectly. She speaks French in whole phrases, but Dutch only in words.

How have you been able to expose your child to the culture(s) where the different languages are spoken?
She has been on holiday in France multiple times and has so far lived in two francophone countries in West Africa. We go on holiday every six months and spend a part of our time with the grandparents in Belgium.

What challenges have you faced as you raise your child with more than one language?
Having lived in a francophone country for close to four years now, surrounded by only French speakers, makes me lose my language. I had set out to only speak French to my daughter, but I feel as if it is impolite to do so around French speakers, so I catch myself speaking more and more French to her. I even start doing it when there’s nobody else around – especially given that she knows I understand, so she will speak to me in whatever language comes first and I tend to respond n the same language, which most often is French, sadly.

Do you have any advice for us?
See previous answer. I find this very hard. We do get to balance it a little by visiting the Dutch speaking grandparents and family twice a year. I think most important is to try as much as possible for the minority language speaker to continue to speak that language, however hard it may be. And to keep correcting them if they address you in the ‘wrong’ language.

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 don’t think we’d do anything differently, although we would like to move to a country that’s neither French nor Dutch speaking one day, just to add a little to the language soup.
I think conversation and immersion are the two most important factors in anyone learning a language.

Kids pick up languages really quickly and understand much more than we do, so as long as we don’t fall in the trap of translating it to the kids language it’s fine.

I think any education of a language should be in that language only. Even if the pupil doesn’t understand, the teacher should not translate, rather point it out throuogh gesture and images etc.

Answer your own question now--what did I not ask about that you would like to comment on?
Just one little thing: A lot of people think/say that language evolves slowlier in a bi- or multilingual child. I beg to differ. I think much depends on how much of the child is spoken to. My daughter, who is a mere 23 months old, has a much larger vocabulary, speaks both languages and speaks in full sentences, when I compare to a monolingual boy she plays with, she is in fact in advance, even while the boy is almost three.

Just talk talk talk and try not to do kiddie talk.

Mamapoekie, thank you for being such a compelling advocate for bilingualism and also for admitting that it is a real challenge for you. I think a lot of families are in the same boat, and it really helps to hear that others struggle with using their mother tongue when living abroad. Can we revisit this profile in a couple of years when DD is older to see what has developed?

And one more question from me: Can you address the fact that West African French is a bit different from Belgian French? Does your daughter notice the differences? And does your daughter hear any African languages as well, the way that two-year-old Julia does in Namibia?

I'm always looking for other bilingual or multilingual families to profile...email me at babybilingual (at) gmail (d0t) com if you'd like to volunteer!

Profile: Nic's multilingual family in Belgium

Here's a multilingual success story to inspire us all! Nic and his wife live in Brussels and raised a trilingual son who is now in his early 30s.

Nic grew up in Belgium with parents who spoke Flemish (Dutch) and had a grandmother and grandfather who spoke French. In his Dutch-speaking school, he was already learning other languages--French (two hours per week beginning in grade three or four), Latin (grades 6-12), and English (grades 9-12). At age 14 he moved to bilingual Brussels (Dutch and French). At age 15 he started attending a 90% French-speaking sailing camp, to which he returned on weekends and in the summers and became a bilingual sailing instructor.

Other ways in which Nic was exposed to other languages as a child and teen included vacations in Italy; listening to English, French, Spanish, and Latin American radio stations on a short-wave radio; watching television in Dutch and French; and studying German for a year in college. He then began working in a bank which required him to use several languages, including German Yiddish, so he started reading in German because he needed it. He eventually obtained his masters degree in political sciences and international politics from a Dutch-speaking university.

Nic's wife is similarly multilingual, but via a different path. She had French-speaking parents and grandparents who emigrated to Dutch-speaking parts of Belgium during World War Two. Her parents learned Dutch at school and at work. At age 16, her father was abducted to Germany where he then learned German. He had also studied Latin. Both of his wife's parents continued to study French in school after moving to Dutch-speaking cities.

As for his wife, she went to school in Dutch from preschool through grade 12, also studying French, English, Latin, German, and ancient Greek (whew). In college, she continued with French, Dutch, English, German, and Latin, finally receiving a masters degree in Romance languages and a postgraduate degree in pedagogy. She is now a French teacher.

When their son was in preschool, they spoke only Dutch with him and he attended a Dutch school, while his maternal grandparents spoke strictly only French with him. During his time at a Dutch elementary school, they spoke French at home and on vacation in France (they rented a bungalow in the same village every summer, so he had French friends he saw each year). He also picked up some Italian during spring break vacations in Rome.

Their son studied more languages in high school (Dutch-speaking): French, Latin, English, and German. They also encouraged him to work on his English at home via subtitled English movies and television series. He then spent six weeks in the United States as an exchange student at age 17. He attended a Dutch-speaking university and ultimately obtained a PhD in mathematics (for which he defended his dissertation in English). He now teaches math at a high school and is married to a woman with a similar language background (French-speaking family and elementary school followed by studies at Dutch schools).

I'll let Nic tell you the rest in his own words….

Why did you want your child to know more than one language?
This is a bilingual country; the European Union is multilingual.

How well does your child understand, speak, read, and write the different languages?

• Speaking, writing and reading Dutch: 100%
• Speaking, writing and reading French: 100% but writing is becoming less perfect since he graduated
• Speaking, writing and reading English: He did his PhD in English, wrote and presented PhD-level papers in English (with French and Dutch summaries).
• Goes to several professional seminars in English-language environment, uses Dutch and French daily.
• Speaks alternatively French and Dutch with his wife (as we do).
  

How were you able to expose your child to the cultures where the different languages are spoken?

• French: family, vacation, books, magazines, television, movies.
• English: Student exchange and media (books, magazines, television, movies).
  

What challenges occurred as you raised your child trilingually?

• Keeping in mind: each language has to be connected to one and only one environment until he is really fluent /that language. No language switching until he's good at it.
• Each year, when coming back to school after vacations, his Dutch grades were down.

What resources and activities have been most useful to you?

• Multilingual family
• Multilingual country
• Latin at school gives an excellent base to study other languages.
• Reading entire libraries of books.
• Subtitled movies (spoken and subtitled in the language to be learned)
• Long (1 month) vacations in France, his friends there
• Our own multilingual background was very useful.

What do you think parents, caretakers, teachers, and/or researchers need to know about teaching a second language to children?

• Each language has to be connected to one and only one environment until he is really fluent in that language. No language switching until he's good at it.
• Never underestimate the capacities a child has to learn/adopt a language "naturally."

What do you wish you had known when you started? What, if anything, would you do differently now?
Considering the success we (principally my wife!) had, we would do it in the same manner.

Answer your own question now--what did I not ask about that you would like to comment on?

1. As said above: never underestimate the natural learning capacities of a child.

2. But keep in mind that 15% of a given population is reported to have difficulties learning the mother tongue and seems not to have the capacities to learn a second language.

3. Language lessons at school are good but there are NOT enough of them: my wife is a teacher and knows she isn't able to get her classes to be really fluent in two hours per week. I would recommend more language-oriented student exchanges. My own experience, being "dropped" as a 15 yr old adolescent in a 90% French speaking sailing camp and being a bilingual instructor there, helped me a lot. (I learned an extended vocabulary of French vernacular too, of course.)

4. My parents had a great library and subscribed to various magazines and media. I haven't read any Harry Potter but my wife assures me they're a boon to get children reading. I read other books in my teen years.

5. There's one problem I do not see a solution to: contamination between different languages.