summertime slide

No, not that kind of slide.  That's the fun kind!

I've been volunteering at our public library's Homework Center since 2005, tutoring kids on a drop-in basis in whatever subjects they need help with, which means lots of math, lots of language arts, and occasionally everything else--even Spanish!  Very few students come in for French, unfortunately, though that's my favorite class to tutor.

However, a boy whom I have known for years now told me something that delighted me: he decided to take French in middle school because of me!  So now whenever he sees me around the library or the neighborhood, he greets me with a "Bonjour" and a "Ca va," and he even makes an effort to speak French to Griffin, too.  At the Homework Center this past school year, we reviewed vocabulary and played games and did worksheets in French together.

We even played a few games in French on my iPad!

His mother recently asked me for some suggestions of what he can do during summer vacation so as not to forget what he worked so hard during the school year to learn.  This phenomenon, known as the "summer slide," exists in all school subjects, but especially math, reading, and languages.  Use it or lose it, right?

And since getting a solid understanding of the basics the first year or so of language learning--as well as developing confidence and a genuine interest in the language--is so crucial to your success if you're hoping to continue with it, I want to help my young friend and all other language students find ways to have fun with it and keep practicing over the summer!

Griffin on his last day of preschool

(Hmmm....as I type this post, I recognize my hypocrisy: Griffin just completed nine months of Spanish immersion preschool, and other than taking him to the occasional Spanish storytime or helping him get through an Easy Reader book in Spanish, I have done nothing to help him review what he has learned. But our French time together is so precious, I don't want to replace any of it with Spanish right now, and his dad doesn't speak any Spanish!  Maybe my husband should start playing Spanish music for kids when Griffin's in the car with him.  We should find some Spanish lullabies for bedtime, too.)

So as long as I'm preparing a list for my favorite middle school French student, I may as well share it here on the blog.  Your suggestions, ideas, and questions, as always, are very welcome!  This post will provide some general advice for children (or adults!) learning any language but on vacation for a few months; my next post will offer specific resources for young students of French.

What, you're not here either?

If money is no object (ha!  if that were true you'd probably be reading this while yachting off St. Bart's and would roll your eyes and say "duhhh" when I suggest that you travel with your kids):

• Hire a nanny or au pair who is a native speaker who will live with you and interact with the whole family in the target language for the summer
• Engage a private tutor who can spend an hour or two a day with your children
• Travel to a country where the language is spoken and sign your children up for summer camps, music lessons, and similar activities
• Send your children to the Concordia Language Villages (Minnesota) or Middlebury College (Vermont), where they can attend residential immersion camps (or day camps) in over a dozen languages; Concordia even offers camps and classes for the entire family!

campers at Concordia's Russian village

If any of the following are available in your area:

• Sign your children up for day camps in the language (such as this one at a private school near us in Boulder or these at the Denver International School).
• Sign your children up for classes that meet weekly during the summer (such as this one offered at a children's museum in Lafayette or these at the Alliance Francaise in Denver).
• Take your children to language-specific storytimes at libraries (such as these ones in French in Boulder County or this onehttp://www.francedc.org/events/?id=71 at the Alliance Francaise in Washington, DC).
• Host an exchange student who speaks the language.

For example, the Alliance Francaise in Denver offers art classes for kids in French!

If your children are more or less beginners (after a year of middle or high school language study, a semester of college, or some exposure via camps, travel, or family members), encourage them to try the following:

• Play games in the language on a computer, tablet, or smart phone (such as these apps for games and interactive books in French).
• Modify games that you already know or own so that they are in the target language (such as writing a letter of the alphabet on each square of Chutes and Ladders, prompting the players to say a word that begins with that letter; hangman; Go Fish).
• Read and reread a little every day--the stories and articles and dialogues from your textbook, song lyrics, kids' books, comic strips.
• Watch videos (songs, cartoons, movie clips) in the language on YouTube, especially those with the words onscreen (such as these easy tunes in French).
• Watch familiar movies with the soundtrack and/or subtitles in the target language.
• Borrow language-learning videos from the library and see if any of them appeal to you; it's probably not worth purchasing them unless the child is fairly young and will tolerate multiple viewings that don't bring anything new.
• Borrow language-learning CDs, DVDs, and books from the library; purchase the one you like best to listen to in the car and at bedtime.
• Try out Rosetta Stone or Mango Languages software.

one of my Pinterest playlists of French music videos

If your children are at an intermediate or advanced level, encourage them to do all of the above, plus:

• Write letters or emails to teachers, classmates, friends, or family in other countries, then read their replies.  
• Try to find a new kid "keypal" (email penpal) who speaks the language!
• Sign up with LiveMocha to do conversational language exchanges online for free.
• Watch unfamiliar movies and television shows in the target language, with or without English subtitles, depending on the student's level.
• Stream radio stations, news reports, and podcasts to develop listening comprehension skills (we like Radio Ouistiti for French).

the LiveMocha logo

And, of course, read:

• Read, read, read, and then read some more!  
• Read books for children and magazines for adults and simplified stories for students and short stories and plays and essays and newspapers and restaurant menus and comic strips.
• Reread the stories and articles and dialogues from your textbook.  
• Read the French translation of a favorite, familiar book in English.  
• Listen to a story online and read along with the words.  
• Read lyrics while listening to music.  
• Read websites on any topic that interests you (skateboarding? politics? art?  Justin Bieber?) and online newspapers and blogs.
• Then reread the ones you liked best--you'll always understand more and read more fluently on subsequent readings.

Moreover, to increase familiarity with and interest in the cultures and countries where the language is spoken, your child could:

• Read books in English (fiction and nonfiction) about or set in the country.
• Watch movies in English that take place in the country.
• Watch documentaries and travel shows in English about the country (check your public library and Netflix's streaming service).
• Visit websites about the country, its history, its art and architecture, and other cultural aspects.
• Read cookbooks focusing on the country and then prepare some traditional foods.
• Interview (or simply chat with) people who have visited or lived in the country.
• Take virtual tours of museums and cities via websites and apps.
• Research a singer or musical group in a genre that interests you--find out how they got famous, what characterizes their music, which songs they are best known for, what the critics have to say, and which other musical acts are similar.
• Using travel guides from the library and online research, plan your dream trip--what places would you visit and why?  What would you do there?  What would you eat?  Where would you stay?
• Go on a virtual shopping spree via websites for department stores, supermarkets, and other shops in the country--decorate your dorm room, update your wardrobe, buy a scooter, furnish your home, do the grocery shopping for a fancy party.

So what are you waiting for!  School starts back up soon--don't let yourself lose more of that language!

What's new at Bringing up Baby Bilingual? (February 2012)

A new month brought new categories for my blogroll--radio in French, children's books in English--and more cool websites to share.  (I just wish I had more time to read everything they recommend, listen to everything they offer, try their activity ideas with Griffin and Gwyneth, and blog about my reactions!)

You can now find the following sites among the others in my blogroll:

Streaming radio in French:
French, Swiss, and Canadian radio stations--a list of links with short descriptions of each station's genre

Radio Barbouillots--Internet radio in French, featuring music for children

Radio Ouistiti--Internet radio in French for children, with songs and stories (but not all necessarily in French)
RFI Langue française--specifically for learners of French
RFI home page 

Children's lit:

Childhood 101 posts about reading

365 Great Children's Books--a blog featuring thoughtful reviews of picture books by a mom whose background as a geography teacher brings a slightly different perspective than the other sites'

Read Aloud Dad--enthusiastic reviews of books for children (not just picture books) by a father who advocates reading to our children

Reading Rockets--literacy resources for parents

Language teaching activities:
French Activities from Beth Manners--coloring pages and more, including CDs for purchase (she also offers ideas and materials for Spanish as well)
LanguageMom French for Kids--a website with fun resources to support anglophone parents teaching their children French, with a program to purchase to use at home
Spanish Playground--resources and ideas for teaching Spanish to children


Multilingualism:
Gato and Canard--Blog by a Frenchwoman with a PhD in linguistics, married to a Portuguese man, living in Germany with their toddler
Multilingual Family in the UK--Connect with other families in the UK who want to get together to practice using the minority language; and even if you're not located in the UK, check out their links to language-learning resources in 18 languages (here's French, for example)
Panda Mom blog--American mom and Taiwanese-American dad learning Chinese with their children
Perogies and Gyoza blog--Canadian mom raising kids in Japan

Parenting resources:
Brain, Child magazine--I have subscribed since before Griffin was born, and this magazine makes me laugh and think and cry.  It's eye-opening and well-written.  Plus, it published an essay by my friend Kelly Feinberg, which won her a Pushcart Prize posthumously.)

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.

art and drama around the maison!

The latest installment in my series for Multilingual Living about French language learning activities is posted; this one is about art projects and theatre games you can do with their kids to encourage them to speak French and practice home-themed vocabulary.

The next article is on literacy activities, and I'm also planning to give an annotated bibliography of kids' books (and poems, stories, fables, etc.) in French that focus on "home" as a central theme. If you can suggest any titles, please add them here in the comments! Thanks.

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!

Who knew you could play online Peter Rabbit games in French?!

Worms, scavenger hunts, interactive Peter Rabbit games, "Jacques a dit," online cooking, comptines....you'll find all this (and more!) in my fourth (and final!) installment of the series "Learning French In and Around the Garden" over at Multilingual Living, all about hands-on, kinesthetic activities you can do to help your kids learn or practice French.

In fact, a lot of the activities I describe in the series will work regardless of what language you want your children to speak! Here are the first three articles if you want to see for yourself....

Part I: Music, rhythm, and rhyme

Part II: Art and drama activities

Part III: Literacy activities

take your kid into the backyard already!

In other words, part three of my series "Learning French In and Around the Garden" has just been published over at Multilingual Living. Please take a look--I hope it's helpful for those of you with little kids, regardless of what language you speak with them.

And now, a question: what topics would you recommend for future articles about language-learning activities? The editor and I anticipate keeping the same four-part format for each series (dividing the activities up according to their type: songs/rhymes/music, art/drama, literacy, and kinesthetic). But what should the content be?

It would probably be pretty easy to pick, say, seasons, or animals, or outer space, or food, and then find or develop activities around those themes. Or would you rather see lesson plans for something less commonly taught to little kids, like maybe geography or physics or mythology, or a topic less broad, such as a specific craft like weaving or a specific type of animal?

Please let me know if you have suggestions or requests! (Just keep in mind that the activities I write about are designed for younger children--kids Griffin's age through early elementary students, more or less.)

Learning French In and Around the Garden, part 2

Read about garden-related art and drama activities over at Multilingual Living! (This is the second of a four-part series I have been commissioned to write. It's so much fun to brainstorm what Griffin and I can do do in French in the jardin!)

writing better with Writing Buddies

What do you get when you cross four talented, enthusiastic young adults with 15 fourth and fifth graders who need practice writing and have them meet once a week for six weeks? My brand-new Writing Buddies program!

As some of you may know, I work part-time coordinating reading enrichment programs at the public library. In Reading Buddies, middle and high school volunteers are trained and then paired one-on-one with a younger child to read together and play literacy games in order to give the kids practice reading with a caring teen mentor in a fun, non-judgmental environment. They meet together once a week for two or three months, and thus a significant rapport can develop between the Little Buddies and their Big Buddies.

This summer, however, an elementary school with which we have partnered asked me to provide Big Buddies for their summer school program for first through fifth graders, and I knew that our traditional model of one Big Buddy per one Little Buddy wouldn't work--there wouldn't be enough volunteers available to assign one to each child in each grade. Plus, making a fourth or fifth grader read with a student who was only a couple of years older could feel like a punishment, like these kids were being singled out to prove that they're not very good readers.

Instead, we piloted a Writing Buddies program. Four experienced Big Buddies (aged 14 and above) worked in small groups with two classes. They met with me beforehand to plan out the lessons, and they were the ones in charge of carrying them out while I watched from the side. (This is a good exercise in not-being-a-control-freak for me!)

Here's what we did:

• Chose a theme (outer space exploration) that would connect all the reading and writing.
• Planned different types of writing assignments, most of which would help them practice skills they would need for writing in school.
• Created worksheets with brainstorming activities, graphic organizers, and writing prompts.
• Selected books to use for a short storytime at the beginning of each class to help the kids transition to our literacy class and start thinking about our theme.

The writing skills we focused (and the writing prompts we gave them) on were:

• Description: You are an astronaut who has been traveling for years and you just landed on a brand-new planet. Describe what it looks like.
• Procedural: Follow the directions to build a spaceship out of carrots, celery, peanut butter, and bread, and then describe in your own words what you did. (Click on the link, scroll down to The Jigaree, and select "Spaceship Snack")
• Persuasion: Convince the inhabitants of this planet why you deserve to stay there.
• Poetry: Exercise your creativity to write one or more of the following types of poems using the outer space theme: an acrostic poem, a shape poem, a haiku.
• Revision: Choose one piece and edit it for inclusion in the booklet we send home on the last day. (The kids each read one of their writings aloud.)
• Vocabulary Building: Do a Mad Lib written by the Big Buddies about traveling in outer space. (We had this one on hand for kids who finished the revision early.)

The most frustrating part was the inconsistency of the students' attendance; very few actually attended all the classes, and some joined after the first or second week, thus missing out on our attempts to set the stage for the rest. However, it worked well enough that I'm eager to start offering Writing Buddies at the library to serve the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students who are too old to be Little Buddies but too young to be Big Buddies in our reading programs.

I would love to hear about other similar programs that you might know about or learn more strategies of how to get kids to write and how to empower teen volunteers!

Email me at babybilingual (at) gmail (dot) com if you would like copies of the materials--I'm happy to share!

This post was written for inclusion in the Teach/Learn Blogging Carnival sponsored by Deb at Science@Home; the category for this month's carnival is "English." Click here to see the other authors' inspiring ideas for promoting literacy in your home or classroom!

my new gig

I am now officially a regular (paid!) columnist for Multilingual Living. Right now the editor and I are planning one four-part article every two months with French activities for children. July/August's theme, inspired by Griffin's nascent obsession with earthworms, is "gardening." Each post will deal with one area--songs and rhymes, art and drama, literacy, and kinesthetic activities (though they'll all be hands-on in one way or another).

And the first part of the article is right here!

flashes of brilliance

Well, of "above averageness," at least. (Mostly I was just looking for a catchy title for this post.)

I have long been skeptical of flashcards as a way to learn languages. The thought of a parent forcing a child to sit still while showing him one unrelated card after another, making him repeat the word aloud, telling him to stop fidgeting and memorize--well, that just makes me cringe. (I once played the role of a precocious but screwed-up teenager whose mom-with-unreasonable-expectations subjected her to Greek and Latin flashcards as a baby in a very good play called Eleemosynary by Lee Blessing. This is perhaps what turned me off kids and cards.)

Now, mind you, I have no problem with using flashcards as a study technique, which I've done with every foreign language I've ever studied. But there are so many other (better) ways to introduce words and concepts!

Yet when I saw this cute box of bilingual (French-English) flashcards when I was pregnant with Griffin, I bought it anyway. (I'm such a sucker for kids' French stuff. I'd probably buy a new set of knives if they had drawings from Le petit prince embossed on the handles.) The company that makes them is eeBoo. Other companies that make French flashcards are here. (I have a few other sets, too, but this is the one that Griffin is drawn to.)

Flash forward 2.5 years, and we discover a toddler with a propensity for dumping things out and transferring things from one container to another. Translation: a toddler who loves flashcards!

As long as this post began in a negative light, let me get my critique of this set of cards out of the way: the sample sentences illustrating the target vocabulary are often either dorky, very dorky, or decontextualized.

For example, "The pig is happy." Really? How do you know? I can't tell. Will this sentence help a learner figure out what "cochon" or "content" means without reading the translation on the back? Nope.

Even worse: "The dress is for my sister." Oh? I don't have a sister. It's not like we're reading a story and we know who the narrator and the characters are, so when someone says "The dress is for my sister," we can nod and say, "Oh, yes, that does look like something Fifi would wear."

A few other pickier complaints: the wrong gender is provided for the word "shirt," which is even featured on the cover of the box; four of the eight "nature" cards show the same tree in different stages (ie, no leaves for winter, buds for spring, green leaves for summer, and other colors of leaves for autumn), which Griffin simply doesn't understand (having, say, snow accompany the winter card would help, but I would have prefered just using different pictures to represents other elements of nature, like a lake, a forest, a stream, an acord, roots of a plant, a garden, rocks, a flower....).

And this is probably a good place for me to mention that you don't even need to buy bilingual flashcards for your babies, toddlers, and preschoolers: if they can't read, it doesn't matter what language the words are written in! (On the other hand, if your husband is trying to learn French along with your kid, he might appreciate seeing the sentences written out.) Or you could just put Post-it notes with your translations on the English flashcards.

And for that matter, you don't need to buy flashcards at all. They're handy, yes, but also limiting. Make your own! (I haven't created any for Griffin--but I could, right? Especially if I'm not happy with this company's nature cards.)

Anyway, here are a few non-flashy things that Griffin and I do with these cards (in addition to the simple displacement of them from their box to his play kitchen to the slats on his crib to behind the changing table). We play flashcards a lot, but it hardly ever involves my holding up the card and asking what's on it.

We put them into categories--all the animal cards together, all the food, all the objects found in nature, etc. What's really cool is that my toddler is not constrained by the categories we grown-ups would create.

For example, he put la lune in the pile of pictures of things in the house. When I asked him why, he pointed out that the moon is in his room. And right he is--his nightlight is a 3D replica of the moon which lights up in different phases. (Yes, we're geeks, and proud of it. It's inevitable when a teacher-librarian marries a rocket scientist.)

Griffin also assigned this card to the "dans la maison" category:

He says it's because he has a stuffed cow that he sleeps with. That works for me!

We also practice identifying colors using these flashcards. But rather than holding up the, say, bleu card and asking him what color it is, I hold up the color card with an object and ask if the combination makes sense.

"Le lait est bleu, Griffin?"

"Non!" (giggle giggle giggle)

"Le lait est noir?"

"Non!" (more giggles)

"De quelle couleur est le lait?"

"Blanc!"

Trust me, this is endless amusing when you're two years old.

And finally, a few other ideas to try:

--Set out examples of objects pictured in the cards. (We do stuffed animals, his toy food, and other toys.) He has to put the card beside the real object like a label.

--Place three cards in front of him. Ask which one is in the middle. Then move it to the left, to the right, up, down, behind, and so forth to practice the prepositions.

--Give him five cards and ask him to put them in order from his favorite one to his least favorite. (Griffin can't do this yet--he either likes something or he doesn't. And that can change from day to day. Just ask the carrots.)

--Count the cards. (Griffin can only kind of do this--and he's better at counting in English, because he always skips "quatre" and gets very confused in the teens.)

--Have I mentioned throwing the cards around and hiding them behind furniture? (That's more of a linguistic challenge for me than for him--I have to work hard to express my displeasure without teaching him words he doesn't need to know yet.)

What other language-rich activities could we try with cards like this? Please share your flashes of brilliance in the comments!

Where to "commencer"?

commencer = to begin

In recent weeks, two vastly different moms have approached me for suggestions on helping their kids learn French. One is Adriana over at My Bilingual Boys, an experienced Spanish teacher whose two young sons already speak English and Spanish fluently. The other is the mother of a large home-schooled family, two of whose teenagers want to learn French.

The former has a multitude of resources available to her online and through her colleagues, plus the knowledge and experience that comes from already having raised her children with two languages, while the latter's resources consist exclusively of what she can access in the public library (no Internet at home and no possibility of buying books or materials for the kids to use at home) plus her memories of learning German when she was younger. And unfortunately, our library does not have extensive French learning materials--Muzzy, yes (for little kids), but Rosetta Stone, no.

My challenge for myself will be to go back through my previous posts and the French materials for kids that I have accumulated to figure out what I might recommend to both of these families (even though what works for two teenagers may have little in common with what appeals to younger children). This means that I will (probably) finally get around to posting reviews of the more of the books, games, and videos that I've used with Carl and now Griffin!

suggestions for supplementing Rosetta Stone software

The daughter of a friend of my cousin (did you follow that?) has started using the Rosetta Stone software to learn French; she's in middle school and living in Cheyenne, WY, where she can't take a French class until high school. They're wondering if the software will be enough and how to reinforce what she's learning. Instead of just emailing them some recommendations for enhancing her studies, I thought it would be a good idea to post them on the blog and ask my readers for additional possibilities!

While these ideas are directed at a middle school student learning beginning French on her own in Wyoming, most of them would be applicable to students of any age and any language who want to supplement the Rosetta Stone (or other language learning software). You have to be very dedicated to learn a language by yourself exclusively from a CD-ROM! It's important to bring more into the equation.

Find people to practice speaking with. (This is easier said than done in a place like Cheyenne, but still possible!) Contact your local Alliance Française (a nonprofit international organization that offers French classes and activities for Francophones and Francophiles; the closest AF to Cheyenne is unfortunately in Denver). Take advantage of opportunities that community colleges and universities offer--for example, find out if you can attend a class there (many have study privileges for non-degree-seeking students, especially senior citizens), if they sponsor a French film series, if non-students are welcome at French club events, if the school hosts a conversation group (Colorado State University, not far from Cheyenne, does all this). Call the foreign language department and ask for info about events; contact the admissions office about taking a class. (Community colleges often tend to offer beginning conversation classes and language for travel classes, recognizing that many students want the skills from the language but aren't ever planning on majoring in it.)

Other possibilities for speaking practice would include hiring a tutor. To find someone, contact the foreign language office at schools, who often keep a list of available tutors, and/or ask high school teachers if they do private tutoring or could recommend someone. You could also put up notices on bulletin boards or on Craig's List. Also consider finding a babysitter who speaks the language (if the student is young) or babysitting kids who speak the language, if the student is old enough (check the International Programs office at a university or, again, Craig's List). Finally, investigate the possibility of doing a language exchange with a native speaker: you help them with their English and they help you with the language you're working on. This would not have to entail formal lessons; rather, you'd meet and spend half an hour chatting in each language.

Improving your listening comprehension will have a positive effect on your speaking ability and your vocabulary in the target language. Therefore, watch movies on DVD with the subtitles and/or soundtrack in the target language (start with American movies whose plot you're already familiar with). Also, listen to music and read along with the lyrics. You can buy CDs, download individual songs from the Internet, listen to radio stations online, etc. Try several different styles--contemporary music might be harder to understand than older songs, while children's songs tend to rely on lots of repetition which is good for beginners. For French, you can find lyrics to just about every song ever written at paroles.net.

Read simple things. These might include: poems, short texts, and cultural notes from a first-year textbook; websites on topics that interest you (including commercial sites from stores like clothing shops or grocery stores); websites with material for children such as nursery rhymes (for example, momes.net for French); translations of books and stories you already know, like The Very Hungry Caterpillar (try to focus on stories told in the present tense for beginners); books that have accompanying tapes/CDs of a narrator reading the story; the website Tumblebooks which offers many animated and narrated books in English, French, and Spanish with a handful of other languages; and bilingual picture dictionaries. Reading in another language is empowering and expands your vocabulary exponentially while exposing you to grammar in context (rather than in a series of unrelated sentences used as examples as so many textbooks present).

By the way, speaking of vocabulary, keep track of new words that you encounter outside of the educational CD-ROMs. I recommend using an address book whose pages are notched with the letters, which will allow you to keep words in more or less alphabetical order. Once you've looked a word up in the dictionary three or more times (keep track with check marks), then consider it important and useful enough to learn by heart. Copy it into your vocab notebook with the English translation, but also note the part of speech, any expressions it occurs in (like idioms and phrasal verbs), and other relevant information. If you have a small paperback dictionary that doesn't provide much detail, consult an online bilingual dictionary (such as wordreference.com, which covers French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese). And label objects around your house with notecards in the target language--you'll see them all the time and they'll sink in! (In college, I hung posters with irregular French verb conjugations in the bathroom and over the stove; even my linguaphobic roommate learned a few Frenchy things that year!)

Take advantage of interactive websites which can help with reading and listening skills. In French for teens and younger students, I like:

Kids Playground for FSL (French as a Second Language)

FLES resources (links to other websites for kids learning French, like "adopt an escargot")

The BBC's very interactive and kid-friendly French for Children website

Petit Ours Brun (click on the link to take you to the magazines' home page, then click on the four pictures at the top of the page for activities)

French Embassy children's pages with simple cultural readings

Reading A-Z's printable children's picture books (plus some shorter chapter books) in French

Lire et récréer with stories, poems, and more, including worksheets (all in French)

Mama Lisa's songs and nursery rhymes

Then move on to writing: find a penpal (or "keypal," as email penpals are called) and/or keep a journal in the language. Even beginners can keep track of, say, the weather and their feelings on a daily basis!

Children have one awesome opportunity not open to adults: attend a Concordia Language Village for an immersion experience in the language with high-quality teaching. Located throughout Minnesota, the villages are amazing: they are summer immersion camps for 14 different languages for kids through 12th grade. In high school, I attended Sjolunden, the Swedish village, for two weeks, and Lac du Bois, the French village, for a month (and then got credit for a year of high school French because it's so intensive). They recreate the country where the language is spoken, right down to exchanging your money for the other country's currency, feeding you food typical of that place, and taking away reading material in English when you go through "customs." All the activities, from sports and meals, are centered on exposing the campers to the target language and teaching them about the target culture(s), and there are formal language classes several times a day as well. It's all extremely interactive and high energy with great communicative activities. (Plus I can still sing songs from both camps 15+ years later!) I would recommend these camps to any child learning any language they offer (from Spanish to Arabic and Korean), even if the child is a complete beginner. (And last year, one of my former students worked as a counselor at Lac du Bois! I was thrilled.)

Adults, on the other hand can't go to summer camp, but of course they can travel abroad and even live with host families and take classes in countries where the target language is spoken! The language villages or teen/adult study abroad are ideal for really learning the language--just working with a CD-ROM or taking a class or three isn't enough.

Anyone else have suggestions for this middle schooler or other people using Rosetta Stone? Click on "comments" to share your advice!

she can speak--but she can't write

I recently heard from Carla, a Panamanian who lives in Brazil and works as an English teacher. She has a new student, Dahanara, who was born in Brazil and grew up in South Africa. This nine-year-old speaks Portuguese and English fluently, but, says Carla, "she writes English as she speaks. So I'll have to teach her how to write and read in a different way, for she isn't learning how to speak (as most kids her age are learning here in our Language School). I've never had to teach a kid that was fluent in English, but didn't know how to write."

Carla agreed to let me post her emails to solicit some suggestions from the readers of Bringing up Baby Bilingual. She'll be able to work with Dahanara separately from the rest of her classes (who are learning EFL, English as a foreign language), so that means that at least the student won't end up in a class where her peers are much farther behind than she is, and the teacher won't have to teach two very different audiences in the same classroom (which is not uncommon for language teachers around the world)!

Dahanara's situation recalls that of what we call heritage language speakers, people who grew up speaking another language (typically the language of their parents) in a country whose majority language is a different one. These students tend to be fluent speakers but have not had formal instruction or much experience in reading and writing the minority language. They may speak very naturally and fluently, but perhaps can't recognize all the written words of the language and lack the writing conventions of the language (for example, spelling words phonetically and not knowing where the boundaries of words are, resulting in writing two or three short words as one long word). Heritage speakers and students like Dahanara bring special challenges to their teachers, who can be initially misled by their ease in speaking and their strong listening comprehension.

I have only worked with a handful of heritage speakers or students in Dahanara's position, so Carla's challenge as a teacher lies beyond my level of expertise. My first instinct, though, is to get her reading as much as possible in English, because that will help her become a better writer by familiarizing her with the spelling, punctuation, and conventions of written English. (Carla says that Dahanara sometimes has trouble reading, which is not a surprise; she should probably begin with books and stories below the level of what a native speaker would read at age nine, but nothing that she'd see as "babyish.")

I also suggested that Carla create some reading-writing activities that are as personalized and contextualized as possible. For example, have her tell a story about a funny picture or what she did over the weekend. Type up her story and cut it into separate phrases or sentences, and then have her put it back together in chronological order. Then give her the story with words missing that she has to fill back in. Finally, have her rewrite the story in her own words without looking at the original text.

Once Carla has some examples of Dahanara's written prose, she can do "error pattern analysis," where she determines what the most frequent mistakes are--spelling, verb use, organization, etc. The goal with error pattern analysis is to identify the problems that occur most often and prioritize them, with the mistakes that interfere with comprehension considered more serious than, say, spelling. Then Carla can find or create worksheets to practice those structures, ideally within a context (rather than a list of fill-in-the-blank sentences that have nothing to do with one another).

It might also be valuable to give Dahanara traditional lists of spelling words for her to practice (she can illustrate them, write sentences that use the words, do crossword puzzles that supply the definition of the word, find synonyms and antonyms, etc.). Even if she already knows what the words mean, she's bound to learn more about how to use them in writing. Then she can take spelling tests like she would in a class for nine-year-old native speakers of English. Carla might want to start with the traditional Dolch sight words, lists of "service words" and common nouns that students should be able to recognize automatically.

These are just a few ideas that came to mind while thinking about this dilemma. Carla and I would love to hear from other teachers or parents about their ideas for improving Dahanara's literacy skills! Please share your ideas, experiences, or resources by clicking on "comments" at the bottom of this post.

Help! These kids just arrived in the US and they don't speak any English yet!

My friend Katie, an experienced and award-winning university Spanish instructor, has been tutoring a woman who wants to learn Spanish because she's adopting three children from Guatemala. When the kids (ages 7-15) arrive, Katie will be tutoring them in English. (They won't be starting school right away; their mom, Kirsten, is going to homeschool them as she has with her other children.) Katie asked me for input since I've taught English as a Second Language (ESL) and worked with children. However, as I haven't taught ESL at the elementary level, and as the girls I tutor are learning French for fun, not survival, I'm turning to you all, the readers of this blog. Do you have any suggestions for ideas, activities, and resources?

Here are my recommendations so far:

Katie should not let on to the kids that she's a fluent speaker of Spanish. This way their lessons can be complete English immersion and the kids won't ask constantly ask for translations. She can do this by using lots of gestures, pictures, drawings, props, repetition, and cognates, and by acting things out or demonstrating. Oxford University Press makes some good picture dictionaries specific for English language learners, as do other publishers, but I suspect that most children's illustrated word books would also be useful.

Katie and Kirsten should set goals of what they want to accomplish, what they want the children to be able to do--talk about themselves, ask important questions, follow directions around the house, identify objects, listen to stories, etc. (Should she start teaching them to read in English? I don't know; if they don't read in Spanish yet, probably not, as we wouldn't want to overwhelm them. So then should they learn to read in Spanish? Help! This is beyond my expertise!) Each lesson should address those objectives and the kids should leave the session feeling like they've learned something new or understand something better.

Katie should vary the activities in each lesson to appeal to different learning styles and to accommodate the fact that seven-year-olds usually don't sit still very long. Including as many different kinesthetic activities, movements, and games will keep the kids engaged. (Click here for some of my homemade games ideas.)

Katie and their mom could pick out some textbooks and materials for English language learners at the elementary level; perhaps local elementary schools could tell them what they use in the different grades. Each child should have his or her own book(s) (rather than sharing them). Unfortunately I don't know enough about this genre to make recommendations myself. Anyone?

While teaching lists of nouns and verbs (to any age student) is very manageable for a good teacher like Katie because these words are easy to illustrate and act out, she should also familiarize them with function words like articles (a/an/the), pronouns (I/me/she/her etc.), interrogatives (who/what/where etc.), prepositions (in/on/near/to etc.), and conjunctions (and/or/if etc.). It's frustrating as a language learner to be able to point to objects and label them but not actually make sentences or express complete thoughts.

By the way, a book that has worked amazingly well for the little girls I tutor in French is called I Can Read & Speak in French: The Simple Picture Method for Kids to Learn French Immediately. It draws upon the Symtalk method where a usually-logical symbol represents a person, place, object, action, or idea. In this book, which also exists in Spanish and so probably in other languages, a sentence describes a photograph. Each word in the sentence is illustrated by its assigned symbol. As soon as the child can associate the symbol with the word, he can "read" the sentence, especially when aided by looking at the illustration. The goal is not to have them read, but rather use the vocabulary (composed of all the different parts of speech) to describe the picture. Eventually the child is able to tell the whole story of the children who go to the park with their bikes and dog and kites and end up falling in the fountain. It's very empowering for students to be able to tell a story in the new language! I also encouraged the girls to personalize, to tell me about when they go to the park, to describe their possessions, and so forth, using the same key vocabulary and the included flashcards. All this took, of course, a month or two of going over the new words little by little, reviewing the previous ones, playing games like Memory with the flashcards (I also made bingo cards with them)--it doesn't happen all at once. And the Symtalk method becomes increasingly more complex and can be used with many different levels and ages, but I don't know much about it beyond what I've seen with this book and at one conference session where the presenters showed us a lot of advanced Symtalk games. The book I describe here also comes with a CD, stickers, and directions. Here's a sample vocabulary page and one of the story pages:

If Symtalk books like this for ESL children don't exist, perhaps Katie or Kirsten could create something similar, using pictures of the family and their home and their possessions to tell a story.

The parents and siblings should reinforce at home what Katie covers in the English lessons, but also expose the children to songs, appropriate television programs and movies, lots of books, magazines, and poems in English, and interactions with other kids at home, on the playground, at playgroups, perhaps something like a music or gymnastics class.

Katie and the parents should check out the websites TESOL/ESL/TESL Resources and Colorin Colorado, too.

I recognize that so far these are pretty general guidelines. I'd also like to be able to suggest some specific activities that Katie can start doing the first day she meets with the kids. If you have any ideas or comments, please share them with us!

Click here for an update (as of September 2007).

homeschooling in French

My dear friend Amy, who is homeschooling her children, reports from Mississippi:

We’ve just begun formalized French study. Lily, who is six years old, is the primary student, though Gregory (4) and Lia (2) sometimes participate. We’re using Il etait une petite grenouille, a French as a Second Language (FSL) curriculum. We begin by listening to part of a story on CD and following along in a picture book. We review the previous lessons and then work on the new lesson. For instance, yesterday we worked on “Qu’est-ce que c'est” (what’s that? with the appropriate response) and pointed to pictures in the book, as well as in a picture book of French words, and we also practiced with “what is his/her/your name” and the appropriate response. Then, the new information included using “Je suis” (I am) so we did that for a while and the children pretended to be various animals, and tell me “Je suis une vache” or “Je suis un cheval” or whatever was correct. Already I’m concerned about my own grammar, however because I couldn’t remember if I ought to have them use the article in such sentences. (ARGH!) Over the next several days Lily will also use her activity book, writing, and reading book that go along with the lessons. Then, we’ll move to the next lesson on the CD.

Lily has also been playing a computer game called Adiboud Chou au Bord de la Mer for fun and I’ve found some online sites with FSL computer games that I’ll let her begin playing as soon as I have a faster connection. (This site also offers games in English.)

I'd love to hear from other parents who are homeschooling their kids in French (or other languages too, like Jeanne and Corey). What activities and techniques work best for y'all?

summer literacy volunteer teaching

My tutoring clients are taking all or part of the summer off, and I went on five different trips in May and June, missing many of my regular Thursdays with my nephew, so I haven't had as much to report about children learning foreign languages. But I have been doing some volunteer work at Lafayette's Sanchez Elementary School as part of a summer school enrichment program. Another volunteer and I are spending Wednesday mornings there doing creative writing and readers' theatre with third, fourth, and fifth graders; I'm also getting paid to oversee the Lafayette Public Library Reading Buddies program at the school with the first and second graders (where middle and high school students spend time reading, playing literacy-enhancing games, and doing group activities with the younger kids). (The library hired me for that after paying me to write a manual for the Big Buddies with guidelines and activities and suggestions of what to do with different types of readers--strong, weak, easily distracted, and so forth.) This work at the elementary school seems relevant enough for me to tell you about it here on this blog, even though it's not specifically about foreign language teaching. (On the other, lots of these kids are bilingual Spanish-English speakers.)

The elementary school students seem to adore interacting with the big kids--they read a book or two together, discuss it, and play something like Boggle Jr. or card games matching words to pictures or Chutes and Ladders (transformed into reading games by adding blends or word families to each square). When I walk around the room eavesdropping, I hear the big kids asking their Little Buddies questions about the story and their interests, kids getting excited about books, kids laughing or smiling while their faces light up. Very cool. My friend Estela Kennen, a regular commenter on this blog, is the coordinator of the Reading Buddies program, which now runs throughout the year and will take place at the library and two different local elementary schools (it was initially just a summer program at the library). She's done fantastic work!

The most successful creative writing activity so far was when we played with lemons. Every kid received his own lemon and had to spend time using his five senses to investigate the lemon (some of them took these directions very seriously and licked their lemons!). I even asked them to put the lemons up to their ears and listen to what the lemon wanted to whisper to them. Then they wrote five-line poems using the letters in "lemon" (written horizontally, one letter per line) to describe their lemons. Finally, they had a choice for the most open-ended writing activity: either write and perform a commercial for the lemon or write an autobiography of the lemon. (I had had trouble choosing which one to ask them to do, but then realized that it didn't really matter to me and that they might feel more empowered by deciding themselves which task to take on.) The results were charming, and it was fun for me. (Next time, though, I might use lemon drops, because then the children can actually eat what they're writing about!) I can't wait till my nephew is old enough to do some creative writing!

resources for bilingual education, foreign language education, teaching/learning English as a second/foreign language

Charity Dell, a librarian at the Plainfield Public Library in Plainfield, NJ, recently compiled this valuable list of online resources for bilingual education, foreign language education, teaching/learning English as a second/foreign language. She's very interested in language education; she speaks Spanish every day with patrons at the library, wants to learn Spanish and French, and is currently working on a TESL certificate. She points out that her school district has 54 languages represented among their students--and this diversity is not unusual in our country. Bringing up Baby Bilingual readers are welcome to contact her directly at jubilate7@yahoo.com with questions or comments (and/or share them with the other readers by clicking on "comments" at the end of this post). Here's what Charity wanted to share (some have already been discussed on this blog, but they bear repeating!):

1. Languages currently spoken in the United States:
A. There are now 337 languages spoken or signed in the United States.
B. Several states and territories are officially or de facto bi- or tri-lingual:

• American Samoa (Samoan and English)
• Guam (Chamorro and English)
• Hawaii (English and Hawaiian)
• Louisiana (English and Cajun French)
• New Mexico (English and Spanish)
• Northern Mariana Islands (English, Chamorro andCarolinian)
• Puerto Rico (Spanish and English)

C. Here's a good article about Spanish in the United States.

2. Resources for parents, students, and educators:

• National Association for Bilingual Education
• Information about the AMIGOS Program
• Parent Links: Second Language Learning (This is a huge collection of websites to help parents develop their children's language skills.)
• The Advantages of Multilingualism
• Bilingual Children's Mother Tongue: Why Is It Important for Education?
• Spanish Workshop For Children--Parent Resources
• Bilingual Children
• Bilingual Parenting (two different sites; click on each word)
• Raising Children Bilingually (three different sites; click on each word)

3. Great websites for developing multilingual children:

• Multilingual Children
• Multilingual Munchkins
• Multicultural Kids
• Culture for Kids
• Bilingual Books for Kids
• Bilingual Kids
• Bilingual Families Connect
• Bilingual Families Web Page

4. TESOL/ESL/TESL Resources (This is the "MOTHER OF ALL ESL LINKS"--everything and multiple links to ESL websites for parents, students and teachers, including a great list of links for bilingual education.)

On behalf of myself and the readers of Bringing up Baby Bilingual, thank you, Charity!

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!