French storytime: le vert

After day after uncharacteristically rainy day here along Colorado's Front Range, our lawns are lush and weedy, our skies cloudy, and we are all rolling our eyes about the fact that for the second year in a row, it snowed on Mother's Day.  So in honor of our soggy springtime, I picked GREEN as the theme for my most recent library storytime.

After "Dans la forêt lointaine," our usual opening song (which happens to be about birds in the woods, so, green), we read and discussed a nonfiction board book about the seasons, Au fil des saisons.  Well, as much discussion as you can get from toddlers and preschoolers.  In other words, we named the seasons with help from the grown-ups; exclaimed about how pretty the tree in the book was; established that the apples were red, the leaves started out green but turned to red and orange and brown; and waved bye-bye to the baby birds as they left their nest.

To transition, we sang and danced to "Savez-vous planter les choux," a traditional song about planting cabbages with different parts of one's body.  Perfect for this time of year, and very much in keeping with the green theme.

And what else happens in the spring?  The caterpillars transform into butterflies, which means I had to read the French translation of Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar, prosaically titled La chenille qui fait des trous (the caterpillar that makes holes).  Everybody loves that little caterpillar!

And once you've spent time with a little green caterpillar, it just makes sense to move on to a little green mouse, so then we sang the vaguely psychodelic song "Une souris verte," in which the narrator catches said little green mouse by its tail, shows it to some gentlemen (who tell him to dip the mouse in oil and water in order to turn it into a hot snail--wtf, right?), and then tries to resettle it in cozy new homes (his drawer, his hat, and his--ew--underpants), each of which it objects to.  The song closes on the indelible and cringe-worthy image of the souris verte leaving trois petites crottes in the singer's shorts.

In other words, the children loooooooved it.  And not just the boys!

We concluded with another French translation of a familiar picture book, Ed Emberley's Go Away, Big Green Monster (thanks, Carol, for showing me the French version!).  This one is such a favorite for storytimes because the kiddos get to yell "Va-t-en!" (go away!) at the monster a lot.  (Go on, try it yourself!  Feels good, doesn't it?)

After our good-bye song ("Ainsi font font font"), we did a petit bricolage to close our green afternoon--a craft project that involved gluing torn pieces of brown and green construction paper onto a black-line drawing of a tree (copied onto card stock).  I also printed out some cute little clip art pictures related to trees--apple blossoms, apples, bird nests, owls, beehives, and squirrels.  (I am very fond of craft projects that require no artistic ability and very little prep on my part, especially since I do these storytimes on a volunteer basis!)

Gwyneth got tired of gluing before she finished her tree.  Oh well, she's three.

So, happy spring, all.  Hope you've got lots of vert where you are, too.

cheap and easy in the target language: Go Fish

cheap, easy, and in French

If your kids are anything like my five-year-old son, you can get them to do almost anything if you turn it into a game--the Getting Dressed Race (first one to finish wins), the Brushing Teeth Un-Race (last one to finish wins), Laundry Basketball, Walking Backwards to Distract Little Boy From the Fact That He Doesn't Want to Go Where You Want Him To Go....

Griffin loves board games, too, so much so that he has been known to combine them (for example, "Chesskers," which features elements of Chess and Checkers), play them by himself during quiet time, and even burst into tears when "the red guy won" (despite the fact that he himself was the "red guy"-- and the blue guy, and the green guy, and the yellow guy!).

Parchesi is his current favorite; he plays the camels, the bulls, the elephants, and the tigers simultaneously, even if  it takes two or three naptimes to get through one game!

He likes card games a lot, too, especially once I learned how to help him see all his cards simultaneously (without placing them face-up on the table in front of him--and all his opponents): turn an empty egg carton upside down, make a diagonal slit at the bottom of each egg cup, and slide the cards into the slits.

This is someone else's kid--thanks, Google Image Search!  I like to cut diagonally so that the cards are offset instead of directly in front of one another.)

A few months ago, Griffin was obsessed with Go Fish and wanted to play it All. The. Time.  And I realized that it would be easy to turn this simple game with a common deck of cards into one that would require him to speak French with me!

1.  Select about 12 four-letter words in the target language that a child can illustrate without any help.  (I deliberately picked words that used all the diacritical marks in French, like the accent aigu over the E in vélo, bicycle, and the letter pairs that cause trouble for English speakers, like i/e and j/g.)

2.  Spell out the words on the index cards, with four cards devoted to each word, writing one of the letters in each upper left corner: 

Griffin deliberately drew four different versions of most of the objects we made cards for.

3.  Ask your child to illustrate each of the cards:

4.  Play the game!  Ask each other for cards that spell out words--"Maman, est-ce que tu as une carte pour 'bleu' ?"  "Non, je n'en ai pas.  Va à  la pêche !  Est-ce que tu as une carte pour 'père' ?" "Oui, la voici !"

5.  When someone collects all four cards for one word, he announces what it is and spells the word as he places the cards on the table in order in front of him.  (Yay, alphabet and reading practice for our kiddos!)

6. And finally, since I'm turning into an "early literacy nerd" (I used to be a "word nerd," but five years working with emergent readers at the public library has fine-tuned my linguistic nerdiness into "how can I maximize the learning potential of this game?"), I always ask Griffin to make up a sentence--or a story--using all the words he won with.

Postscripts:

1.  If you want your child to make sentences afterwards, include a few verbs on your cards.  

I threw in some adjectives too.

2.  Figure out how to say "go fish!" in the target language so that you can tell your partner that he needs to draw a new card.  (I assume it's "Va à la pêche" en français?)

3.  Ignore my advice to use index cards.  Griffin very quickly realized that he could see right through to the other side of the fairly thin white paper to figure out what cards I already had in my hand or what was on top of the draw pile.  Use card stock cut into the size of playing cards.  Or scrapbook paper.  Or laminated construction paper.  (Or just write and draw in pencil, not markers.)

See?  Cheap and easy in the target language, plus a game that your child helped create, which (theoretically) means he feels some ownership of it and is thus more eager to play it and speak the target language with you!

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).

Carl's newest French book

I wrote a book! Well, not a book that will ever be published, and not too scintillating to us grown-ups, but Carl seems to like it just fine. Frustrated by the lack of books in French for kids which are both reasonably priced and available in the US, and tired of reading him books about baby animals and seasons and such, I decided I should just create my own about things that are important to my darling 18-month-old nephew.

So this tome is called Le quartier de Carl--Carl's Neighborhood--and it takes him on a walk from his house to the park and back. I've illustrated it with pictures of what we typically see and do on such a walk--for example, running through the grass, watching squirrels, playing with the mailbox, and so on. (I used a digital camera, and then copied the pictures into a Microsoft Word file. There are usually two pictures on each 8.5 x 11 inch page, with narrative underneath. Then I printed the story out in color, placed the pages into clear plastic sheet protectors, and put them all in a thin three-ring binder. Voilà! Instant toddler-friendly book!)

Here's the text of the story, first in French and then in English, with a handful of the 25 pictures. (If any fluent speakers of French catch any mistakes, or can suggest a more felicitous way to phrase something, please let me know!)

Voici la maison de Carl. Elle est en briques. Quelle jolie maison confortable ! Elle se trouve sur la rue X à Lafayette dans le Colorado aux Etats-Unis sur le continent de l'Amérique du Nord.

La maison a une porte, des fenêtres et un garage. Qu'est-ce qui habite dans le garage ? Les voitures ! Voici la voiture de Tatie Sarah. Carl aime beaucoup les voitures. Sur cette photo, Carl trouve la roue de la voiture.

Au fait, Carl adore tous les moyens de transport ! Dans son quartier, il voit aussi le bus, des motos et le facteur dans sa camionnette. Le facteur apporte le courrier à la maison. Carl aime regarder dans la boîte aux lettres pour voir s'il y a des lettres pour lui !

Carl se promène souvent dans le quartier avec sa famille. Parfois il s'asseoit dans la poussette et quelquefois il préfère marcher tout seul. Marche, Carl, marche! Sur cette photo il marche sur le beau gazon vert au parc.

Il y a beaucoup à faire au parc! Dans l'aire de jeu, Carl monte et descend l'escalier, traverse les ponts, descend le toboggan et et se balance dans la balançoire. Après avoir joué, Carl a soif, donc il boit de l'eau.

Qu'est-ce qu'il y a d'autre dans le quartier de Carl? Carl voit des écureuils, des oiseaux, des chiens, des abeilles (dans les fleurs), de grands arbres avec des feuilles vertes, des pierres, le trottoir, des barrières et des clôtures, la poubelle et la rue.

Carl est très content d'habiter dans ce quartier !

Here's Carl's house. It's made of bricks. What a pretty, comfortable house! It's located on X Drive in Lafayette in Colorado in the United States on the continent of North America.

The house has a door, windows, and a garage. What goes in the garage? Cars! Here's Tatie Sarah's grey car. Carl likes cars a lot. In this picture, Carl finds the wheel of the car.

In fact, Carl loves all types of transportation! In his neighborhood, he also sees the bus, motorcycles, and the mail carrier in the mail truck. The mail carrier brings mail to the house. Carl likes to look in the mailbox to see if there are any letters for him!

Carl likes to go for walks in the neighborhood with his family. Sometimes he sits in the stroller, and sometimes he prefers to walk by himself. Walk, Carl, walk! In this picture, he's walking on the beautiful green grass in the park.

There's so much to do in the park! At the playground, Carl goes up and down the stairs, crosses the bridges, slides down the slide, and swings in the swing. After playing, Carl is thirsty, so he drinks some water.

What else is there in Carl's neighborhood? Carl sees squirrels, birds, dogs, bees (in the flowers), big trees with green leaves, stones, the sidewalk, fences, the garbage can, and the street.

Carl is very happy to live in this neighborhood!

fun and games with English and French

Teaching languages to children, I'm finding, usually requires a very different approach than teaching languages to college students and adults. It's taken me a semester and a half of working with a four-year-old and her six-year-old sister for me to realize that I don't have to knock myself out by creating, say, an elaborate three-round Jeopardy-style game pitting different teams against each other one day, then a rousing game of "flyswatter" where students race to the board to hit pictures of words that I define in French the next day, like I might do to help my college kids practice French vocabulary. (Not that I don't enjoy activities like those--especially once I've developed them and then can just adapt them the following semester. Email me if you'd like a handout detailing my favorite vocabulary activities--I used it for a conference presentation and gave it to the graduate student teachers I supervised.)

Anyway, the girls I tutor don't need complicated games, and they don't care if we play the same game more than once--in fact, they seem to prefer the repetition! This is refreshing. It means that as a tutor I don't have to come up with brand-new games for every session, and more importantly, playing the same game over and over builds the girls' confidence and gives them more exposure to comprehensible input in the language.

So I thought I'd share some of the activities that they've liked the most. The first ones are in English, because I'm also tutoring a first-grader who's struggling to learn to read in school, but the games we play could also work with children learning a second language.

Here's our first hopscotch game. We meet in the public library--no drawing on the sidewalk allowed--so I used a cheap plastic tablecloth. I wrote a simple sentence about what we had done the previous lesson (reading a book about making pizza and then actually doing so ourselves) and included two possibilities for two of the words. As she hopped, she read the sentence aloud.

Now here's the extreme hopscotch version with thirty different circles to choose from; to make a logical sentence you pretty much have to jump all over. Sometimes we take turns, and sometimes we have stuffed animals do the hopping. Either way, she has to read aloud and it has to make sense! I like these two games because they get her up and moving around. A solid hour of reading tutoring after a full day of school would be hard on anyone, but especially a six-year-old with a short attention span.

Hopscotch offers all sorts of possibilities for language learners. In this example, all the subject pronouns are third person singular, as are the verbs; but you could practice verb conjugation by using different subjects. For pre-literate students, you could always draw pictures, use different colors, or make other modifications. And I bet a Twister game with words could prove interesting, too!
Next, I adapted a Candyland game board by writing word families on each square (such as "eet" and "ump"). When you land on a square, you have to say a word that belongs in that word family (like "feet" and "jump"). Repeating words is not allowed.


We also worked on word families with the card game Go Fish. I took cards and taped one of her spelling words on each card, then three other words in that same family. We then played the game, asking "Do you have a word that rhymes with 'street'?" and so on. She had to read the cards she received and the cards she laid down.

I also used the same deck of modified cards to play Memory. With the cards all turned over, we took turns flipping two over. If they were from the same family, they were a match. If they weren't, they turned them back over and the other player tried. (Thanks to my mom, a retired remedial English teacher, for many of these ideas!)


I've also played Go Fish and Memory with my French tutees using purchased French flashcards (published by Usborne).

As with most language learning activities, first we start with recognition, demonstrating their passive knowledge of the words. The cards are set out on a table, I ask "Où est la chaise?" and they point to the picture of a chair. Only after they've heard the word many times do I expect them to produce it on their own, as I point to pictures and ask them "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" Then I might ask them--still in French--to show me animals, things in a house, things in nature, something they like, something they don't like. After a couple of sessions like this, we play Memory (I have a double set of these cards, and I have also made my own flashcards with other words I've taught them) or Go Fish (they have to find four cards in the same category).

We've also been working with a book-and-CD set called French for Children by Catherine Bruzzone, published by McGraw-Hill. Each very short unit includes a simple song using the target vocabulary and structures, a simple game or activity (matching, fill-in-the-blank, Chutes and Ladders, etc.), cute pictures, French cultural notes in English, and a cartoon called "Superchat." While it's a good introduction to topics in French that interest children, each lesson is too short on its own to really make an impression on the kids I tutor.


For example, in unit two, kids learn to say what they like and don't like. On this sample page, the directions for "I like" say "Listen to the tape. Draw a line between Oui and the things you like and Non and the things you don't." There are pictures of cats, pizza, strawberries, soda, ice cream, witches, monsters, and spiders. Well, this is a good start, but I don't think it's enough practice. Plus, once the child has drawn a line, it's hard to repeat the activity. Here's the game I made to supplement the book:

As you can tell, it's very simple (both in concept and for a non-artistic person like myself). The pictures are color copies from the book, but they include vocabulary from some of the other chapters to recycle it and reinforce the "j'aime" and "je n'aime pas" structures with expressions from outside of the examples. I also wrote in the words for family members (since I didn't have pictures of them). To play the game, we review the words for all the pictures first. Then we roll the die, move the marker the appropriate number of spaces, and say in French whether or not we like the person or object in the square. This is the type of game that my college students would scoff at--I would never try this, or hopscotch or Memory, with them--but the girls adored it and still clamor for it!

It's been fun trying to figure out how to help these kids enjoy learning so much that they forget that it's educational! Bingo has also been popular, both in English and French, with words and pictures and numbers. (Click here to read about other language-related activities that don't require game boards.) Please share your ideas for language enrichment and easy reading activities--just click on "comments." I'd love to hear from other teachers and parents!

the very hungry caterpillar = a very eager reader

I've mentioned that I'm tutoring Julia, a six-year-old who's struggling with reading in English, and that I love using drama as a teaching tool, so I thought I'd share an example of an activity that could be done with kids learning either their first or second language!

You probably know the classic picture book The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, about a ravenous little guy who eats his way through leaves, fruits, sausages, and ice cream cones before building a cocoon around himself and later emerging as a butterfly. I made color copies of the leaf, the butterfly, the sun, the cocoon, and many of the foods he ate, backed the pictures with cardboard, and glued them to plastic knives (since we didn't have any popsicle sticks).


Then I made a caterpillar with loopy brown chenille yarn and brown pipe cleaners and glued it to cardboard(appropriately enough; did you know that the French word "chenille" means, in fact, "caterpillar"?).


After Julia and I had read the book together several times (it was too hard for her to read straight through by herself), we decided who would hold which puppets, where we'd move them when, and which words/lines each of us would read (with our reading some of them together as well). We then performed our caterpillar play for the people hanging around the children's section of the public library, which even has a little puppet theatre for the kids to use! (But this sort of thing can also happen from behind a couch or a counter or in a large appliance-sized box with a square cut out for the performance space.)

As a follow-up, I made a little book called "The Very Hungry Julia" with lines inspired by the caterpillar book: "On Monday, Julia ate ________. On Tuesday, Julia ate ________." And so forth, concluding with "And then Julia turned into a _______." Her "homework" was to fill in one page each day with a description of what she ate and draw a picture.

While this one activity didn't turn Julia into an amazing reader, it did help her slow down and use context (the pictures, the repetition of days of the week, predicting what the caterpillar would transform into) to figure out words she didn't recognize. Reading it a total of five times over two days helped reinforce the new words and built up her confidence. And being able to perform it for her dad and other people made her feel important and capable and creative.

Now that I've got these colorful paper puppets, I'm planning on using them and the Caterpillar book with the four- and six-year-olds I tutor in French. I'll teach them the key vocab for new words like "caterpillar" and "cocoon," read the French translation with them, encourage them to interact with the text by asking questions all along, and then we'll perform the puppet show with me as the narrator, one of them as the caterpillar, and one of them as the foods the caterpillar eats. While they don't know enough French to tell the story themselves (even if we change it to the present tense), they'll be able to follow along with the puppets and chime in on words like "butterfly" and "ice cream."

I hope to find or create more interactive book-related activities to do with all my tutees! Any suggestions?

valentine's day: the icing on the cake

As a one-year-old, my nephew Carl is too young to understand what happens on holidays, and his arts and crafts activities are limited to scribbling under supervision and smearing banana in his hair, so we didn't celebrate Valentine's Day last week. I considered not doing so with the little girls I tutor in French--especially since in France, Valentine's Day is generally celebrated only between lovers--but I figured they'd be so hyped up on candy from a day spent gorging on it in school that it would be hard to do a French lesson with them that evening. So instead of trying to get them to listen to a story and play a quiet game of Memory, I gave in.

We started with a song, "J'aime Papa," a sweet ditty about loving the members of your family:

J'aime Papa, j'aime Maman,
Mon petit chat, petit chien, grand frère [I changed this from the original "petit frère" since the girls do have an older brother],
J'aime Papa, j'aime Maman,
J'aime ma grand-mère et mon gros éléphant. [This last line about loving both their grandma and their fat elephant sent the girls into gales of giggles.]

Then, having established how to say "I love" in French, we did an arts and crafts project. I had cut out six hearts in decreasing size from colored paper. On the smallest heart, I wrote "J'aime." Then their mom and I helped them write words in French for what they love on the top of the other larger hearts. When placed one behind the other and stapled at the bottom, the hearts displayed all that is dear to a four-year-old and a six-year-old: Noël, bon-bons, Superman, etc.

We concluded our Valentine's Day lesson by decorating individual-sized cakes with icing from tubes. What started out as "Happy Valentine's Day!" in French quickly deteriorated into half-inch high splotches of color seeping into one another over the white frosting--but while channeling her inner Pollock, the four-year-old sang "J'aime Papa, j'aime Papa, j'aime Papa" over and over to herself.