the very hungry Gwyneth

We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog to bring you a report of Gwyneth's Very Hungry Caterpillar-themed birthday party!  (Since it's based on a classic children's book, this post is at least tangentially related to my blog theme, right?)

Party appetizer: grape caterpillar skewers

This is not a new concept, of course: just do a search for Very Hungry Caterpillar Party on Pinterest and an overwhelming number of ideas for decorations, foods, and favors will assault you with the ferocity of a thousand swirling Martha Stewarts sculpting a butterfly piñata out of twelve years' worth of carefully-stored-in-archival-quality-lignan-free-paper belly button lint, hand-dyed in a rainbow of hues from organic beet peelings, kale leaves, and harvested-under-a-blue-moon fairy wings.

Me, I'm not crafty like that.

Therefore, we rented a shelter at a local city park so we wouldn't have to do much in terms of decorations, and I put my energy into food, activities, and the favors.

(Mmmm...caterpillar food!)

Rather than staying scrupulously faithful to the book --I didn't really want to prepare one apple, two strawberries, three plums and so forth all the way through a slice of pizza, a sausage, and a cupcake--I started with several book-inspired salads and appetizers.

"In the light of the moon, a little egg lay on a leaf."

Rather than serving the fruits separately, I just threw them into a salad.  

(For the dressing, I infused fresh ginger into a simple syrup and added lots of fresh mint.) 

Butterfly Pasta Salad--featuring farfalle pasta
(shaped like butterflies!)

"Then he ate through one nice green leaf,
and he felt much better."

Sandwich supplies

Dessert was easy: Caterpillar Cakes!

(store-bought cupcakes spread with store-bought icing
into which I mixed green and yellow food coloring)

As for the decor, I ran out of time to do what I really wanted (making yard decorations out of green paper plates stapled to chopsticks and inserted in the ground at appropriate lengths to look like the iconic famished creepy-crawly).  But since the party was outside, decorations weren't even necessary.

We did set the atmosphere with some insect-inspired children's music:

silly, catchy songs about bugs--educational, but the kids don't even realize they're learning!

And we did a craft: a "sticky table," using adhesive contact paper (backing removed) taped to a table. I provided little crafty doodads, like paper leaves, sequins, plastic grass from sushi plates, pompoms, pipe cleaners, and colorful caps from squeezy baby food pouches, and the party-goers made 3D scenes that stuck to the paper--even on a windy Colorado day!

la chenille la plus longue de Lafayette !

The "sticky table" scenes then became a fun background for blowing out candles
 and serving the cupcakes.

la chasse aux papillons

Our main activity (besides eating, of course, and running around like small wild beasts) was a butterfly hunt, which involved donning the antennas that Griffin had helped prepare,

pompoms, pipe cleaners, and plastic headbands from the dollar store

grabbing some butterfly nets (also courtesy our local $1 establishment), and running after tissue-paper-and-pipe-cleaner butterflies

take a small rectangle of tissue paper,
pinch the center together,
and wrap a piece of pipe cleaner around it
so that the antennas are sticking up

that another (tall) parent threw into the air on this very windy day.  

Gwyneth's fête was magical!  (Other than the fact that the birthday girl participated in almost nothing except the eating of the cake.  Oh well--she was only turning two.)

I also put a ridiculous amount of time and energy into creating the favors: spiral-bound workbooks about caterpillars.  With the help of Google and Pinterest, I printed out coloring pages, mazes, seek-and-finds, easy crossword puzzles, poems about bugs, and other activity sheets, then had them copied and bound.

(I hate all that plastic crap and candy that guests typically receive in the 
ubiquitous child's birthday party favor bags.)

Martha Stewart, eat your heart out!  I'll take a creative and (semi) educational kid's party with store-bought cupcakes any day.  (Although, apparently, it will take me 15 months to finish blogging about it.)

language, literature, love

For this month’s installment of the Raising Multilingual Blogging Carnival, the host asked us to write about how we keep our children immersed in the target language--travel, games, music, and so forth.  While I wish I could say that we spend every summer in France, or that we have regular contact with native speakers via an extensive social circle and a Swiss au pair--or simply that my husband was fluent enough that we could speak exclusively French at home!--I realized that our solution is decidedly less complex.

Books.

Our children have heard me reading to them in French since before they were born, and not just because I work in a library and used to be a teacher.  As a non-native and far-from-perfect speaker of French, I knew that books were our golden ticket into French and Francophone culture and language.  In books, we--and especially our children, with their brain-sponges--encounter words that we might never use in a week, or a month, or a year.

In books, we hear dialogue at its best--flowing, clear, articulate, sassy, thought-provoking, and (generally) grammatically correct.

In children’s books and magazines, colorful illustrations accompany the text, allowing us to better understand the words and the story, giving us ideas about the book before we even start reading it.

Also, for parents like me, who learned French in school as teens and adults and never had to talk in their second language about dirty diapers, sippy cups, “love and logic” discipline, and which fast food restaurant has the cleanest indoor playground, children’s books give us that crucial daily dealing-with-a-baby-or-toddler vocabulary.

Because of books, I finally understand all the lyrics to the songs and rhymes that delight my children and keep them content during long car rides and when doing chores around the house.

If traveling opens doors for us, then books are windows into all those other places and people’s lives.  Because of my reading to him, Griffin knows what French children drink for breakfast (chocolat chaud in a bowl), what is sold in souks in Tunisia (a little bit of everything), and that not all contes de fée have truly happy endings.  (Gwyneth, on the other hand, knows that the cow goes “meuh,” that Madeline lives in Paris, and that board books with flaps to lift are the best. Thing. Ever.)  Every book I share with Griffin and Gwyneth is another window for our home.  When they’re ready to walk out our front door, they’ll know where they’re going (or at least how to talk to the folks when they get there).
 

I also read in French to my children for selfish reasons: poring over a book together gives me an excuse to snuggle with my oh-so-big almost-six-year-old son, that boy whose dinner conversation already tends toward monosyllables when we ask him what happened at school that day.  Reading with him allows us to laugh together, figure things out together, share our thoughts and questions--in other words, to have genuine conversations.  (The fact that it happens in the target language is just a bonus.)

And as for my daughter, who is two years old, and VERY two years old at that (willful, imperious, unpredictable, shrieky, simultaneously independent and helpless), books give her a reason to slow down, sit down, calm down.  She actually listens to me when I read to her. 

Oh, how sweet it is, to cuddle together in the rocking chair with a stack of books at my feet, her current favorite dolly tucked between us, making her giggle when I point out a funny picture or read a silly rhyme, watching her eyes grow wide when she is surprised or confused, aching with pride as she identifies which animal says “cocorico” and which vehicle goes “tchou tchou,” rolling my eyes and smiling when she tells me that the ladybug is rouge, and the banana is rouge, and the bathtub is rouge (“red” is the only color word she can say so far in either language).

The fact that this happens in the target language is just a bonus.
 

So I’m not just immersing Griffin and Gwyneth in a target language--I’m immersing them in books, cultivating their curiosity, helping them learn about life outside of our comfortable home, developing and maintaining strong bond.  I’m not just immersing them in French, I’m immersing them in a mother’s love.
 

The fact that this happens in the target language is, oui, just a bonus.

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!