Very First French Words

 Published by Collins

I had mixed feelings about this one.  It comes with a CD which is good for parents who don't speak French.  The vocabulary is different than our Usborne French book.  Some of the different vocab is just a personal choice.  For instance, they use "être en collère", and I say "être fâché".  I hate that they sometimes use words that require prepositions when they could easily choose something else because trying to explain French prepositions to a 3 year old is a nightmare.  I learned it by ear because I was in an immersion class and was just copying a teacher that I listened to 7 hours a day.  We don't have that luxury here.

 The art is terrrrrrible.  Very obviously computer assisted.  And I can't stand that stupid monkey.  They were really trying too hard to appeal to the kids.  But they do try to work the vocabulary into a bit of a story and make pages that you can actually talk about in a bit of detail.

Ultimately, though, there just isn't enough to talk about.  The Usborne book has waaaay more vocabulary, and every page is littered with so many details and multiple recurring characters that you could read it forever.  As much as I found this Collins book useful, it wasn't $15 worth of useful.