jeux de mots avec Griffin

Griffin loves to play with words in all three of his languages--he tells and invents jokes, plays word games, does crossword puzzles and word searches, and even makes up puns.  Here's his best one in French so far--I am soooo happy that he has fun doing this sort of thing!

Maman : Oh, non, je me suis trompée. [Oh, no, I was wrong.]

Griffin: No, Mom, you're not all wet!  ["Trempée," soaked, is pronounced the same way as "trompée," wrong.]

Maman: [giggles appreciatively]

Griffin, on a roll: And you're not an elephant, either!  You're not "trompée" !  You don't have a trompe ! ["une trompe" is an elephant's trunk; he turned the noun into a new adjective, "trunked."]

(Okay, so I guess you had to be there.)

Here's one more example.  During a long car ride on vacation, Griffin and my mom and I were playing "Last Letter/First Letter" in French.  (One person says a word, and then the next player says a word that begins with the last letter of the previous word, and so on.)

After a while, they were getting stuck on "E" and "R," both of which appear very frequently in French.  Knowing that the words for some animals' young are formed by adding a suffix like -on (ourson, chaton) or -eau (éléphanteau, souriceau), Griffin started adding these suffixes to words where they don't belong, and in such a confident voice that my mother believed that words like rhinocéroseau (baby rhino) actually existed!

(Again, you had to be there--but I'm really glad that I was.)

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!

Auto-immersion

Those of us who are doing our best to raise our kids with something other than the community language know that we have to seize every possible moment to barrage them with lots and lots of input in the target language.  (This is especially challenging for those parents who work full-time and have a very limited number of hours most days to share their language with their children.)

When we're at home, we can take advantage of games, books, toys, videos, and the simple fact that we're engaging in face-to-face interactions with their accompanying gestures, expressions, and props--we have a lot of tools to provide contextualized prompts for conversation and activities in the target language.

But what about those endless hours in the car, chauffeuring from one playgroup to another lesson, running errand upon errand?  The parent is driving, facing forward, no eye contact, hands occupied--not ideal conditions for practicing another language with small (or bigger) children.

So here's my challenge to us: let's take advantage of the fact that the kids are a trapped audience to immerse them in our language of choice! Let's brainstorm as many as possible ways to engage our kids in the target language when we're driving them here and there and everywhere!  Here, I'll start:

Music (duh): Listen to songs in the target language--children's music, yes, but also pop music, rap music, folk songs, music from all the countries where the language is spoken.  Sing songs to (or with) your children.  (Griffin, approaching age four, has learned to sing in a round, which sounds so lovely to my ears.)  And don't forget the nursery rhymes!

I still remember the trip Griffin and I took to visit with a friend in another city, a 45-minute drive, when he was about six months old.  I turned off the tape player (yeah, my twelve-year-old Toyota, Earl Grey, is so basic that he doesn't have a CD player!) to see if I could sing French children's songs the whole way there.  To my surprise, we made it to my friend's house without my repeating a single one!

(This video is just a placeholder--he's singing in English.  I'll try to film him singing in French in the car soon.)

Rhyme time: You say a word in the target language; your kids reply with words that rhyme.  Then let them pick the words to start with.

Counting: Count to 100 together, then count solo and pause for the kids to fill in the next number, then alternating (you count the odd numbers, your kids the evens), then by tens, fives, twos, then backwards (whatever the children are capable of); count objects that you pass (stop signs, cows, blue cars).

Twenty Questions: Play this vocabulary-rich game that involves guessing what object someone is thinking of, where the guessers can only ask yes/no questions.  A child who can't form complete sentences (much less questions) can still show his understanding of your questions by answering them while you guess!  (Unless your interlocutor is like three-year-old Griffin, whose answers tend to lead to things like "something green that's made of metal and bigger than the universe").

I Spy: Another fun and easy game that involves sighting an object (inside or outside the car) and giving clues so that the others can guess the object.

I Spy (on signs or license plates): Challenge your children to find the numbers 0-9 in order on signs that you pass, or specific two-digit numbers, or the digits in your telephone number, etc.  Ditto for the letters of the alphabet in the target language.

Chercher et trouver dans un livre (seek and find in a book): Give your child a book, preferably a large-ish imagier or other book with lots of labeled images (a picture dictionary, a book about animals, or something like that).  (In fact, keep it in the car so that it's always there and you don't have to remember to bring one with you when you're leaving the house in a hurry, which is pretty much the only way I do it.)  Tell your child to open to a random page and name one of the images; then, based on  that first image, ask him to find something related on a different page.  For example:

Griffin: Il y a une robe.
Maman: De quelle couleur est la robe ?
Griffin: Rouge.
Maman: Okay, tourne la page et trouve quelque chose d'autre qui est rouge.
Griffin: Coccinelle !
Maman: Est-ce qu'elle est grande ou petite ?
Griffin: Petite.
Maman: D'accord, maintenant trouve quelque chose qui est aussi petite que la coccinelle….

I draw upon any category that occurs to me, including things that he or I or his papa likes or dislikes, something found in or outside our house, something from far away, colors, shapes, sizes, opposites, material they're made of, and lots more.

This game seems to work especially well with animal books, because then you can make the categories specific to the animals--how they move, where they live, size, colors, sounds, features, foodwild/tame--which means that you're all using the target language to share information, not just to label objects.

I like "Cherche et trouve dans le livre" because it's so rich in contextualized language and because two children of different ages can play, passing the book back and forth.  (A child who doesn't know how to read can still play this game with a much older kid.)

Un truc dans un machin: "A thingy in a whats-it" is what I call this activity, where I pretend to misunderstand something Griffin said, repeating it back to him as inaccurately as possible (and making it as silly as I can).  For example,

Griffin: Regarde, Maman!  Il y a un chien dans la camionnette!  (Look, Mommy, there's a dog in that pickup truck!)
Maman: Quoi?  Il y a un dinosaure dans ta poche?  (What?  There's a dinosaur in your pocket?)
Griffin (giggling): Non, il y a un chien dans la camionnette!
Maman: Quoi?  Il y a un extra-terrestre dans l'arbre?  (What?  There's an alien in the tree?)
And so on; Griffin usually joins in and makes up other strange combinations.  We can do this for a good ten or fifteen minutes before one of us (okay, moi) tires of it.

And a related activity: sing a familiar song but insert other silly words here and there.  For instance, "Au feu, les pompiers/Voila la maison qui brule/Au feu, les pompiers/Voila la maison brulee/C'est pas moi qui l'ai brulee/C'est la coccinelle/C'est pas moi qui l'ai brulee/C'est l'arraignee" (instead of "la cuisiniere" and "le cuisinier").

Storytelling, of course!  I find that listening to audio books in French in the car is too challenging for Griffin at this point, unless it's a story he's already very familiar with because I've read it to him multiple times and he's seen pictures illustrating it.  (We have a small handful of stories-on-tape like Boucle d'or et les trois ours.)  Rather, I'll pick a story he knows much less well and tell it to him, simply at first, then   gradually adding details and length.  Changing my voice for each character helps him follow along (Occasionally I change it up to see how quickly he notices the differences, a la "Boucle d'or et les trois girafes.")

Now it's your turn....what do you do to keep your kids in the target language during car rides?

This post is part of the January 2012 Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism, hosted by Coco at Multilingual Mama.

Can I justify an iPad?

So I've been coveting an iPad for a while now and am wondering if y'all know of any apps in French for kids--games, books, etc.  A friend told me that the vast majority of the apps are published in English--but perhaps some fun French ones are available too?  I'd like to have some to play with Griffin (but wouldn't mind word games and such for me as well!).

Can you find Bobo-Dioulasso, Tabriz, and Longyearbyen on a map in 60 seconds or less?

Yeah, me neither.

How about some easier ones, like Honolulu, Baghdad, and Mumbai?

In honor of Santa and his eight marvelously fit, geographically savvy reindeer who were pulling that sleigh long before MapQuest and Google Earth, I'd like to share with you my newest "Hang on, Griffin, I'll change your diaper in a minute" distraction: Globetrotter XL, a dangerously addictive, frequently humbling free online geography game. I haven't made it past level seven yet!

Good luck and bon voyage.

fight hunger with English vocabulary

My friend Amanda, an English teacher in the United Arab Emirates, recently shared this new and addictive website with me: Free Rice. The concept is simple: answer an increasingly difficult multiple choice question about the meaning of a word, and the advertisers donate ten grains of rice for distribution through the United Nations World Food Program. I'm already up to over 3500--I can't stop playing this game!

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!