I always hated this book when I was a kid. The first time it was read to me was in kindergarten. We read it every time we went to the library for the next two years, except for the times that we read "I'll Love You Forever", which I also hated. I hated it because it was a baby book and I was so tired of listening to my teachers fawn over it forever. I was getting into chapter books for crying out loud.
But it is a great baby book. I like reading it now. And it's fantastic to have a copy in English and in French. My daughter likes reading it in either language, because she already knows all her foods, so she understands at least a third of it. I'm hoping she'll start learning her days of the week soon. We read both copies over and over. I'll have to buy the French one soon.
There is no writer credited for this book. This company seems to still be publishing, but the books are all pretty random and not categorized in levels like the scholastic books are.
It's a real shame, because we love this book so much.
Because it's on a farm, the animals, activities and concepts are all words that we've covered while learning general vocabulary. There are a few crazy words in there, but that's good.
This book wasn't too bad. It had a fair number of basic words, some great activities on each page to talk about, and a fun family of cats? or bears? or something?
They have some different words AGAIN. I haven't seen the word "foulard" for scarf in a long time. It is so frustrating to have so many beginner French books with so many different names for clothes.
Do you say espadrilles? Or Soulier? Or Chaussure? Because in English we just say "shoe" and "running shoe". (and sure, there ARE words like "sneakers" or "wellies", but you don't get into all that nonsense with ESL students under the age of 10.)
I literally looked up the difference between all the terms just now on French Wikipedia, so now I get it, but I have never, in all my years of speaking the language, understood why there were so many terms for one item of clothing.
Back to this book. The gimmick here is that it has labels for all the items, and when you pull the tab, the labels disappear! Can you remember their names?
My daughter can't read, so this was useless, but distracting! And pretty flimsy because it's a library copy, so it's being slowly destroyed.
Anyway, I wasn't that impressed. I guess I should have learned by now that 100 words isn't actually a lot of words.
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.
These are Scholastic books from the "Je peux lire" series in "Niveau 1". There is one sentence per page. There are many, many books in this series, and they all have very similar sentences with different vocabulary. Lots of use of the verb "jouer" and words like "attends" and phrases like, "Je sais!"
Plus, you know, it's about an energetic dog. These are fantastic.
I found this book at a thrift store and recognized it. We had one about Family Meetings that was terrible... but I'd heard good things about the other books in the series. We're also talking a lot about sharing at home.
The art isn't great, but I think it's fairly engaging for kids because the expressions on the characters faces are over the top.
The text is very positive and simply stated. It really is perfect for young kids. It explains what it means to be selfish and explains how to avoid being selfish in a number of relatable situations.
These books are still in print with updated art, which isn't much better but at least there's more representation of different ethnicities. Basically every topic is covered, too, and they're available in French and Spanish as well as English. I haven't started reading this book yet because my daughter is getting better at sharing all on her own, but I imagine we'll have to break it out one day soon.
So, we took out the "Dedans Dehors" DVD by Whistlefritz and it's pretty great. I've had such bad luck with French DVD's for kids, but this basically met all my needs.
It isn't perfect. The animation is pretty cheap, but at least they didn't try to make it 3D. The acting is so hokey, but my daughter really enjoys all the fake laughter for some reason, and even mimics the French lady's laugh. The songs are okay: not inspired, but actually mildly educational.
The big difference between this program and any other DVD we've seen is that it focuses on some basic concepts, has a lot of repetition, and works the concepts and needed repetition into a narrative. It's methodical, so that by the time you're finished a video, especially if you've seen it a couple of times, you can come up with a few sentences.
For instance, they count cookies. Every time the lady counts the cookies, one of the kids steals one, and she ends up counting to a different number. So she repeats the counting, she repeats the phrase "Where is the cookie", and she also talks about how they are eating the cookies, so that the whole segment ties into other segments about eating.
I really can't stand watching it because of the dreadful acting. My daughter has seen it 3 times and excitedly brings it up in conversation randomly. When I ask her what they're saying on the video she says, "I don't know..." in her far away voice and with a grin on her face, because she is too embarrassed to talk about it. A little frustrating, but a little cute.
There are only two French videos made so far. I hope they make more and that the library stocks them. I wouldn't say that you could learn French watching them, but they're incredibly useful for supplementing haphazard French learning at home.
These books are pretty fantastic. They're not comprehensive, and there's no direct translation of any of the text, so it's just basic exposure to both English and French in the same book. I like to talk about the French sentences with my daughter, who at this point, knows a fair number of nouns and verbs, and can generally understand maybe one page out of ten.
The outings that they go on are all trips that I do with my kids. They even cover Christmas and Easter. You can listen to audio recordings of the books for free on Youtube. They have European accents (the dog is British).
Oops is the English speaking dog and Ohlala is the French speaking Koala. I think they're supposed to be brother and sister... and they have a koala father...
This is a really great book with some basic information about ice. It's hard. It's cold. It can be thick. It can be thin.
You think I'm being sarcastic, but there's very little to be negative about when the source material is interesting enough and the author decides not to embellish.
For more advanced readers, there's some more in depth information about ice written in bubbles inside the pictures.
This is currently my daughter's favourite book. She seems to like non-fiction best. I would like to find more in this series. Damn Scholastic Books and their unnavigable website!
This book is available in French, and it's been a great addition to our library. It works as a picture dictionary of animals and includes all sorts of animals from every ecosystem. There are hundreds of animals listed in the book.
It's narrated by a boy who is daydreaming about possible animal-tending related careers in his future. As a picture dictionary, it's good for toddlers, and as a story book, it's great for older kids.
The limited colour pallet gives the book great character. The art is wonderful to look at.
Of course, one of the career options is zookeeper, but not all zoos are bad.
This book is so fantastic. First off, it's a book about a boy picking up garbage in the street that he is fascinated with (a beloved pastime of all children), and his grandmother who takes this pastime seriously enough to arrange outings and give him a little backpack to store his treasures in (basically the kind of attention and love that every kid dreams of receiving from an adult).
This is a great book for beginner French kids. It isn't extensive, like a picture dictionary, or Imagier, but it has general terms for objects, and more specific explanations for them, and even talks a bit about each one in the back.
The boy and his grandma have lovely little conversations in French, too, which might go over a beginner's head, but are great for a more advanced student.
Best of all, after each excursion, the reader is asked to match up the found object with its origin.
My daughter doesn't have a firm grasp of French, but she's still totally and completely in love with this book. It has really big pages, really cute pictures, and great variety of vocabulary. We originally got it out of the library, but after we read it we immediately bought our own copy.
This is an excellent beginner French book. There's very little text. Basic sentences with few descriptive words aid the pictures to tell the story. Sometimes there are no words at all, and I can just talk about the scenes in French using words that my daughter knows.
There are a few sections of the story where the passage of time is represented abstractly, like with this tomato plant growing throughout the summer. This is a great way to meaningfully convey both the quiet loneliness of the main character as well as the idea of summer changing to fall.
It's a really great teaching tool for literary techniques of showing a story indirectly rather than listing facts.
The minimalist nature of the book means that the emotions of the characters are felt more poignantly by the reader. I actually wasn't sure whether or not the book was going to have a happy ending when I first read it. I was anticipating that the lion would just end up alone and it would be sad. (spoiler: it has a happy ending.)
I don't think it would be possible to dislike this book.
Not much to say about these except that they're brilliant. They can be purchased online in a set. They contain the verb repeated eight times followed by a different noun each time. The pictures are decent, too.
All the verbs are the very first most basic ones. The next series starts in on French phonics, or the méthode syllabique. We only have these two books right now, but I'm going to order more later in the year.
By Bernadette Rosetti-Shustak
Illustrated by Caroline Jayne Church
We like this book. It's okay. But it's corny. It kind of rhymes, but kind of doesn't, and is generally geared towards the parents. It's meant to explain all the ways that a parent loves a child, and not, as I had hoped, as a list of body parts or actions in French. It does have one sentence per page, though, so it's right at the level that I need. It's a great book for learning French.
There are only two pages that I can complain about:
I can't tell my child that I love her baby words. First of all, she's a BIG GIRL, not a baby. Secondly, don't you DARE suggest that she isn't pronouncing things properly. And don't you dare so much as mimic her, either. She's really touchy about her accent.
Also, I don't feel as much love, at least in the moment, at times like these. And my daughter reassures me that she never does anything like this, anyway, so neither of us feels like it's very representative.
These books, from the "Les Mots-outils" series are pretty good, but they're random. They're less for learning to speak French and more for learning to read in French.
I think you're supposed to learn the words by sight, which is ridiculous. But whatever.
Some of them, like the one above, are organized by level (you'll notice the A in the top, right hand corner). The series to the right is organized by season. Either way, it's a terrible way to organize the books. I had to read each book to decide if it was at my daughter's level.
The way I'm teaching is by using a picture dictionary, or "Imagier", so that she learns all of her nouns first, and then we're putting together sentences by learning verbs. These books tend to teach by common phrases, which may contain simple forms of common words, but may instead focus on adverbs, adjectives or prepositions while using a combination of verbs. I really just want to stick to verbs, first.
These books from the "Les Premiers mots" series were much better for my purposes. They tend to focus on one verb or preposition while varying the nouns. My daughter learns the verb or preposition on the first page, and then she understands the whole book on the first read-through.
This book is truly excellent. It is almost entirely in English and introduces basic Spanish vocabulary such as colours, numbers, clothing and some everyday objects, and every once in a while there's a stock phrase.
I've been searching high and low for good French books for my kids and I've been striking out. This book is perfect... I just have to translate every phrase myself and hope that my grammar is up to scratch.
I won't have to keep translating for long, though. It turns out that there was a French version of this book called "Babar's French Lessons". Currently out of print, I got it for about $10 including shipping from Abe Books. It's exactly the same in every way. It even has the Chocolate cake recipe found in the middle of the book.
The pictures are so great, and the pages are huge. And, come on: ELEPHANTS. ROYAL ELEPHANTS. Look at him lounging in his purple smoking jacket. What a class act.
English-French. There are a number of books in this series.
You know you're in for trouble when the book is uncredited.
I'm searching high and low for good French teaching tools for my daughter. This book failed. It rotates between using "la" and "une" for articles before the noun in order to avoid using the apostrophe before a word beginning with a vowel.
And beyond that, the art is cheap. So cheap!
We'll use it for a bit, anyway. There are a few words in these books that aren't in the Usborne book. But I'd never pay for this crap.
What the deuce. This is the second time that I've taken a "Learn French" DVD out of the library and struck out.
Can you imagine these two characters rattling off basic vocabulary in French with only their lips moving (although Professor Toto's eyebrows and mustache move too) through the magic of Flash. There is little to no repetition. The accompanying graphics seem to be poorly drawn animal clip art that doesn't match the style of anything else.
Each scene is spliced with the same 3d animation of a bus with static wheels jerkily moving down the street with an angular giraffe at the wheel. This same animation is played over and over with a different song in the background each time.
The songs aren't all that bad, except that they did the cheapest recording job, they don't have subtitles or any kind of corresponding pictures/animations to help the viewer determine what in the heck they're singing about. In fact, there's no English on the DVD at any point.
The "Eric Goes to School" cartoon is passable. It would be good if they actually talked about it and explained any of the words or phrases that were used.
My favourite thing by far is the giant sticker on the bottom: this DVD won 6 awards. There is no information anywhere else to indicate which awards were won. The list of credits is huge for something that looks like it was made by two guys in a basement with open source software and images.
This book is a lot smaller than we thought it would be. It's the size of a small paperback novel. The pictures are dark, probably too dark for a younger child. Some of the concepts are not ones that I expose my daughter to, like soldiers or arrests or vagabonds, which means that I have to fudge the story a bit so that she can understand it. But she seemed to follow it anyway; she asked to read it again quite a few times, and she wasn't even two yet when we started reading it.
It's a good story with a great format. The reader takes a trip from school to their home repeatedly. Each trip consists of a series of pictures labelled with a single word. The words repeat, new words are added, but the pictures are altered every time. Each trip gets longer and longer until the last day when the trip home takes up almost half of the book.
It's a REALLY long story, so I stopped reading it at bedtime and we only read it if we need some quiet time. It's totally unique, and it doesn't get boring. There's some good vocabulary, too, including abstract concepts like "omen".
I'd only recommend this for an older child who has a good attention span. It is also available in French.
Visually offensive. As far as I saw, which was admittedly only about 15 minutes tops, they didn't use any steady shots as backdrops when they were doing scenes with the animated dog. So he floats weirdly over the shaky-cam. The narrator is in the shot as a large man in a tree costume. Why? for branding. Oh, and the French girl wears a beret. Because we're learning about French culture, too, I guess.
Not very educational. The girl wakes up, rattles off 6 sentences in French and the viewer is immediately tested on the content. They don't tell you what she's saying, either. They rely on the viewer to be able to quickly read the English subtitles (I say quickly; the average 10 year old might be okay). So it isn't even for kids, really. But the large tree-man says, "See? Learning French is easy!" afterwards, which should fix EVERYTHING, but I guess my child is dumb.
Gimmicky. The test that we are immediately given has a long intro with 3D animated text! You have to pick up the DVD remote and answer true or false questions. My two year old can't wield the remote, or understand the concept of true or false, or understand 6 phrases rattled off in French with subtitles with no repetition or explanation. When they introduced the first question, "Comment ca va means 'Hello'!", she just repeated what they said so that she was learning the false questions as if they were true. It was kind of funny.
I can't see this video being useful for anyone under the age of 12, and anyone over the age of 12 would be so annoyed with the content. What a giant waste of time.
