app-ily ever after?

Griffin and his cousins gather around the magic glowing tablet.

I've been posting reviews of impressive iPad applications in French for kids and making a list of Griffin's favorites in English as well as fun children's apps that work in any language, but I haven't really stopped to reflect on what exactly it means to have tablets (and smartphones) as language learning resources for children.

Are these resources indeed as wonderful as I want them to be?

What can I take away from the knowledge that Griffin is more likely to clamor to play a game on the iPad (which he'll mention several times a day) than to ask if he can ride his scooter through the neighborhood (several times a week)?

(But still, that's better than his wanting to watch television several times a day, right?)

When does the iPad stop being an interactive learning tool and turn into an electronic babysitter?  (And can we even avoid that when we have two little children to take care of and need occasionally to shower, cook, and clean?)

And, good grief, why have we spent so much money on other light-up-and-make-noise games* that Griffin now disdains in favor of the sleek tablet with its infinite possibilities?

Tonton Steve likes the iPad as much as the kiddos!

Nope, no easy answers here.  When Griffin was younger, we tried our best--most of the time--to adhere to the American Academy of Pediatrics' proclamation that children younger than two should have no screen time--television, films, computers, smartphones, nothing.  (Ironically, most of the language-learning videos we found were targeted to very young children and held little interest for Griffin when we finally allowed him to watch them!)

My husband and I are pleased that Griffin isn't television-crazy; he likes watching Top Chef with us [and fortunately he hasn't yet tried to imitate the expletive-laden speech of the stressed-out chefs], DVDs from the library, songs and clips on YouTube, and a few DVDs and videos we have here at home.  We attribute this mainly to the fact that when Griffin is home with me, I can't bear to let him spend his quality French time with me watching television in English!  (I even discourage him from listening to music in English when it's just us.)

But, oh, the iPad.  The iPad keeps him calm and happy in waiting rooms, at restaurants, when I'm nursing the baby, when he's the only kid at get-togethers.  (And it's a lot easier to fit into the diaper bag than a couple of activity books, books to read, toys, and so forth.)  He shows his native-speaking-French friends at playgroup his French iPad games, which changes up the group dynamics and boosts his confidence (he becomes the knowledgeable one!).  He learns new words, new songs, new skills via the iPad, and in an interactive way (unlike if he were watching a video).  

And I love playing iPad games with him and reading French books together on the device.  It's very easy to encourage him to reply to me in French when he's so excited about the activities and stories!  An added bonus: exposure to so many native speakers in the various apps.

I know we're fortunate to be able to buy an iPad and that many families raising children bilingually don't have access to the materials we have.  You certainly don't need an iPad to teach your children another language.

But what a marvelous tool it is!

Your thoughts?

*LeapPad Learning System, Tag Reader, toy computer, Mon Premier Dokeo--all in French, thanks to eBay, eBay Canada, and amazon.fr.

six!

It's my blogiversary--six years ago today I wrote my first post about being a non-native speaker of French trying to teach the language to my baby nephew in just one afternoon a week.  Six years later, here I am nursing my second child in the middle of the night, singing Au clair de la lune, wondering if her first word will be in English or in French, while her bibliophile big brother, sound asleep, clutches a book to his chest in the room next door.

This sight greets us nearly every night--Griffin falls asleep "reading"--only the book and the jammies change. 

In August Griffin will start preschool at the dual immersion (English-Spanish) elementary school, and while my husband and I are thrilled that he's guaranteed a spot through fifth grade (after spending a year on the waiting list), I'm worried about what that will mean for his French.  Will Spanish supplant it?  Will he successfully juggle all three?  What language(s) will he learn to read in?  What language(s) will he speak with Gywneth?  What will the next six years reveal?

Well, we fully expect that Gwyneth will love books as much as the rest of us!

I marvel at the progress that my children--and my blog--have made.  Thanks for joining us for the journey.

shameless campaigning

Please?

Vote by May 28! (Click on the button above.)

Why this blog?  How about because for six years I've been chronicling this challenge of being a non-native speaker teaching French to the children in my life, which means 4+ years of never using English with my own son and daughter!  I'm sharing my stories and resources here so that other parents don't have to start from scratch as I did. 

(Plus we now have a nifty Pinterest page.)

A vote for moi means a shout of support for all the parents using non-native languages with their kiddos and a big ol' merci to all the teachers who have brought us to the point where we're able to do so!!!

who knew spelling could be so cute?--and other cool French apps for kids

When Griffin and Carl aren't playing "Chesskers" (where they put all the chess pieces and all the checkers on the board together) or "Tatiemonstre" (where they hide and I chase them), they like to borrow my iPad.

Dictée Muette Montessori ($3.99): A French spelling game with four different levels (including one that targets specific sounds of your choice), three different scripts (uppercase, lowercase, and cursive), and several hundred words.  You see a picture, hear its name, then drag and drop the letters to spell out the word pictured.  When you have successfully completed the word, you see a fun animated fireworks-type display, which you can interact with by touching the screen. 

When you tap a letter, you hear its most common pronunciation; as a result, Griffin has learned to spell words (lac, lavabo, etc.) that he wouldn't have even been able to read otherwise!  He has also started paying attention to diacritics thanks to this game.  (Hearing an anglophone four-year-old earnestly ask if “cafe” has an “e normal” or an “e accent aigu” means that I can honestly say that I find orthography adorable now.)  

This company, L'Escapadou, also makes another educational app called La Magie des Mots, which we haven't purchased yet.

My First French Words ($1.99): Another French spelling game with multiple levels and different scripts.  This one is even more appealing to emergent readers: at the easiest level, it provides the spelling of the pictured word and "cards" showing the letters of the word out of order.  You simply drag and drop the cards over the appropriate letters (unlike Dictee Muette, where you must choose from the entire alphabet).  Levels two and three also show the letters out of order (but you have to figure out how to recreate the word).  This game separates the words into categories--animals, foods, and colors--and covers fewer words than Dictee Muette.  
Griffin really likes the (wordless)  puzzle apps from this developer, by the way.

J'apprends les petites lettres ($2.99): This app encourages children's passive knowledge of letters: rather than asking kids to spell words or produce something, they learn to recognize letters as they trace, identify, and listen to sounds produced by the letters.  One nice touch is that the word that represents each letter's sound actually resembles it--the araignee (spider) looks like the lowercase "a," the coquillage (seashell) is in the form of a "c."  An animated kangaroo encourages the kids as they progress through the game.

So far, we have only used the free version of this app, but I expect to purchase the other 23 letters the next time Griffin needs to be bribed to do something.  (Actually, he sometimes gives me his own money to pay for an in-app purchase!)  Apparently two games--matching and memory--come with the full version.

A major downside of this activity for anglophone kids is that it features French cursive lowercase letters, and if you don't trace them perfectly in the French style (starting and stopping in the the correct places), you can't continue to the next screen.  Since French handwriting varies from American in several important ways, this might confuse students. (At least, it frustrated this grown-up American!) 

This developer, Hachette (a huge French publisher), also offers Les grandes lettres, which appears to be similar to the above--with capital instead of lowercase letters--but perhaps not quite the same, based on the screen shots on the website.

French Numbers ($4.99): This app eschews bells and whistles (and excitable animated kangaroos on roller skates) to focus simply on recognizing numbers.  You choose the mode--in "listen," you type the number you hear, in "speak" you type the number for the app to pronounce, and in "read" you read the word spelled out and type the number.  The free version goes up to 42, but if you pay for the full version, you can practice much larger numbers (just in case you need to, say, count to a million to impress a cute boy at a Parisian cafe).

A fun feature of this app is the choices that it offers: you can select the range of numbers you wish to focus on, for example, and whether you want to hear them pronounced as in mainland France or as in Quebec.  I think this would be a great app for students learning French numbers--we English speakers really need a lot of practice to get comfortable with concepts like 79 (soixante-dix-neuf, or 60+10+9) and 99 (quatre-vignt-dix-neuf, or 4x20+10+9).  But it doesn't really appeal to Griffin.

Erasmos, the developer, also has a version of this app for other languages (Spanish, Italian, German, and Russian), alphabet apps for these languages (with a similar approach to the numbers app, but with games for practicing), and even a French Gender app (which would probably be useful for students averse to dictionaries as well as those who want to figure out the patterns for predicting whether French nouns are masculine or feminine).

Apprends les saisons avec Poko (currently free!): This cheerful and fun app teaches weather-related vocabulary (seasons, meteorological conditions, and clothing and activities appropriate for the weather) in context.  It offers the following games:

• Pick a photograph for an album based on a spoken description (such as "Il est l'automne, il n'y a pas de nuages dans le ciel," which means you need to eliminate the photos showing the rain as well as the ones with apple trees heavy with fruit and deep green leaves).
• What's wrong with this picture?  Listen to the description ("c'est une chaude journee d'ete") and tap the elements that don't correspond.  In that example about summertime, when you touch the pile of autumn leaves, they are replaced by a sand castle; the girl's sweater becomes a swimsuit).
• Complete the calendar: a weekly calendar shows the days of the week with a picture explaining what the weather was that day.  The narrator also announces the weather.  Drag and drop a picture of an activity that the kids logically could have done that day.  For instance, when you hear "jeudi etait venteux," you add the image of the kids flying a kite to the box for Thursday.

According to the developer's website, this app reinforces information that children should be learning in preschool, and the difficulty adjusts itself according to how many correct answers your child has in each exercise.  Aaaand there appears to be other educational Bayard apps that I really want to try now, covering animals and their ecosystems; math (counting and adding); letters, syllables, and spelling; and various school readiness activities.

Please do note that these Bayard apps are designed for children who are already familiar with much of the vocabulary--the apps bring together the expressions and the ideas they represent in interactive, meaningful ways.  While these activities would probably be frustrating for young children who are just starting their exposure to French, they would be marvelous for older students and adults learning French to practice the vocab in context--so much more fun that stilted fill-in-the-blank exercises in a workbook!

(I also plan to post about apps that tell stories in French, apps that feature songs in French, and apps that are good practice for people like me whose French is strong but not fluent.  What are your favorite French-language apps?)

Sorry for the screwy formatting; at this point I've spent almost as much time trying to fix the spacing and font issues as I did actually researching and writing the post.  It's driving me crazy and I'm just going to walk away and not look at it for a while.  I'll probably just retype it from scratch when I have calmed down.

What's new at Baby Bilingual? (March-April-May 2012)

Just because I haven't been posting as often lately doesn't mean that I've stopped gathering resources for those of us who want to help our children (or students) learn languages!  (My sidebar is growing so unwieldy that I'm going to move a lot of the links to my Pinterest boards soon.  Or sometime.  Eventually.)  Here's what I've found recently while trolling the blogosphere for stories and ideas and inspiration....

Free books online:
Storyline Online--From the Screen Actors Guild Foundation, the website of this nonprofit project features videos of actors (many quite famous, like Betty White, Hector Elizondo, and Elijah Wood) reading picture books in English, including such beloved classics as The Rainbow Fish, Stellaluna, and The Polar Express.  Enrichment activities accompany each of the 25 or so books.
LiveBinders--a page with links to 29 other sites which read stories to children, some from a specific author (like Robert Munsch and Marc Brown), some from magazines (National Geographic Explorer, Highlights), some familiar (Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day), many not.

Bloggers:

Le blog de Zelba--chatty, cute, engaging comic strips authored by a Frenchwoman (because the only French texts I seem to read these days are children's books and current events articles)

Author Ashley Hope Perez' blog posts about living in Paris with her bilingual (English-Spanish) toddler

The Sweet Life in Paris--blog by award-winning American chef David Lebovitz (and now his book is at the top of my Amazon wish list--friends and colleagues have been telling me about him for months and now I understand why!)
Between Us Bilinguals (I really like that title!)--written by a multilingual Polish woman with a linguistics degree who now works as a travel professional; more academic than personal focus
Pragmatic Mom--a self-described "Failed Tiger Mom" shares educational activities, book reviews, and more

Children's Lit in English:
We Read It Like This--reviews and read-aloud recordings of favorite children's books by a bilingual Brit living in Spain
Imagination Soup--inspiring educational activities for children
Picture This! Teaching with Picture Books--literacy advocate and teacher shares picture books and provides suggestions for how to use them in the classroom

Activities in English: 
Mad Glibs--180+ free online Mad Libs (you provide words, names, and expressions based on prompts, which are then inserted into silly stories for you to read); includes some songs and poetry (even Shakespeare!) and longer stories as well as short goofy paragraphs.  Some cool features: stories in other languages, ability to sort them by length, and possibility of clicking "random words" to have the computer fill in the blanks
Wacky Web Tales--90+ free online Mad Libs, most of which ask for 8-12 answers for 3-4 paragraph stories; these are designed specifically for kids (recommended for 3rd graders and up)
Let's Get Creative!--very fun writing ideas (like this random headline generator) by author-illustrator-teacher Bruce van Patter; see this page for games and projects designed specifically for parents to do with their children
Learning Games for Kids--free online educational games and activities on many subjects (English language, math, geography, and lots more)
Sporcle Languages--games and quizzes about words (not necessarily for kids)

Global Learning:  
National Geographic Kids--official website of the magazine for children
Around the World--articles from Time Magazine for Kids
US states activity--drag the state name into the correct place (link isn't currently working, but I'm leaving it here in hopes that it comes back)
Geography Learning Games for Kids--puzzles, capitals, and more; select activities for specific continents from the list on the left
Sporcle Geography Quizzes--locate countries on maps, plus many other quizzes
Language Castle Lists--suggestions for making preschool classrooms inclusive of other cultures; many of these ideas are applicable to your home as well

Happy exploring!  I'll close with a couple of pictures of our recent family trip to Glenwood Springs, Colorado--after all, Gwyneth is 10 months old now, and she's changing so quickly.

des filles heureuses

Griffin's first train trip--oh, how I wish I could take him to Europe!

nightswimming in the hot springs pool, just my garçon and me

vote for moi--please?

I would be so flattered if you would consider voting for my blog in Lexiophile's annual Top 100 Language Lovers contest.  Bringing up Baby Bilingual has been nominated in the category of Language Learning Blogs.

Every year, Lexiophiles gathers nominations for nearly 1000 blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds--covering just about every aspect of languages you can think of!--and lets its readers vote for their favorites.  It's an impressive list of writers from all over the world and I'm thoroughly pleased to be included in their company.

carnival of words

Make sure to swing by Gato & Canard for the April Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism!  Merci beaucoup to Annabelle for hosting this month.  She spent four years analyzing language acquisition in bilingual children and brings a welcome academic perspective to our gathering!

French for kids: my first official class (as a teacher!)

For six or seven years now this idea has been simmering: could I offer French classes for very young children?

Oui and non.  "Could" is the kicker--I have ideas, resources, storytime experience, teaching and tutoring experience, more ideas, even a kid-friendly basement space to hold the classes--but I'd have to put Griffin and Gwyneth in daycare another half-day a week, and I'm not willing to give up more time with them right now.   Once they're in school, though....

However, this doesn't mean that I can't dip my orteils in the eau.  In June, I will be teaching a four-session French class to two four-year-olds!  (I donated the lessons as a silent auction item at a fundraiser for WOW, our local children's museum.)

What a win-win situation: the high bidder--who was in fact the only bidder--gets a short course at a bargain price, we can claim a tax deduction for the full value of the lessons, and I am forced to stop wondering "what if...." and just do try it without the hassle of recruiting students!

The only major probleme with this: since it won't happen till June, that leaves me a month and a half to plan and replan and research and rethink the class!  It would actually be much easier to have to start teaching tomorrow.

(On the other hand, it gives me time to try out some ideas on Griffin and friends at French storytime and playgroup, plus an excuse to buy more puppets and French stuff for kids....)

In the meantime, two recent pictures of my inspiration for these efforts:

I heart Pinterest

Yep, I'm sold.

Browsing Pinterest has become my favorite way to end the day as I nurse Gwyneth to sleep!  I love the pictures, the ideas, the connections.  Illustrations from vintage French children's books, a glitter-filled time-out jar, directions for making word family spinners, a Charlotte's Web t-shirt, printable paper cut-outs of Parisian buildings, and a griffin depicted in stained glass are just a few of the posts and websites that have caught my eye recently.

Honestly, the passivity of it appeals to this sleep-deprived maman--I can read and explore as I click with my one free hand, without having to type anything.

I like that I can do as much or as little as I want with my discoveries--collate them on my virtual bulletin boards, send them to like-minded bibliophiles, francophiles, and moms, try the new recipe or craft right away (but not feel disappointed in myself if I don't), blog about them, or simply browse and enjoy looking at the images and the creative and/or practical ideas they serve as a springboard to.

Join me!

Are there any pinners you follow that share stuff about language learning, bilingualism, or French?  Please let me know whom you recommend.  Especially if you yourself are on Pinterest too!  (For example,  I'm following Perogyo from Perogies and Gyoza.)

Griffin's Frenchified English: a good influence? a bad influence?

Yes, he really is reading while sitting
criss-cross-applesauce on the toilet lid.
I don't know why--we do have couches.

Bon, mauvais, it doesn't matter!  It's just really cool to realize that my son's knowledge of French affects his vocabulary and syntax when he speaks English.  Over the past year, I've noticed more and more examples of this.

Here are some recent Griffinisms that show that he's internalized how French works:

Vocabulary:

• Calls the stroller a "push" (in French, la poussette is from the verb pousser, to push)
• Uses the word "blocker" to describe the orange cones that separate the lanes of traffic from construction workers (he has heard me say that the cones are there to bloquer the lane)
• Says that the car "rolls" on the road (from rouler) 
• Tells people who are bothering him that he is "occupied" rather than "busy" (thanks to occupe in French)
• Disagrees with people who say they don't want to do something with "Me, yes!" instead of something like "Well, I do!" (in French, we'd say moi, si! to contradict)
• Tries to work out how idiomatic expressions correspond in the two languages; I'm thinking specifically of the time when he was muttering "Queue.  Tail.  We do the tail" while waiting in line (queue can mean the tail of an animal or a line of people, with the idiom faire la queue for "to wait in line")
• Expresses pain with "I have hurt," rather than "I hurt" or "it hurts" (the expression in French is avoir mal, to have pain)
• Confuses prepositions of place, such as "at the trash" instead of "in" (a la poubelle) and "at Denver" in lieu of "to Denver" (a Denver)

Syntax:

• Tosses an adjective after the noun from time to time, like "that's my shirt red" (chemise rouge--in French, most adjectives follow the noun instead of preceding it as in English)
• Refers to cornbread as "bread of corn" (thanks to pain de mais in French)
• Has used this same structure to show possession, such as "the truck of Granddad" (la camionnette de Granddad)
• Also indicates possession with "it's at me" to mean "mine" and "it's at you" for "yours" (one way to expression ownership in French is with the preposition a plus a disjunctive pronoun--a moi, a toi)
• Asks for an ice cream or a steamer "at vanilla" (blame it on une glace a la vanille)

Grammar:

• Occasionally uses a masculine or feminine pronoun, instead of "it," to refer to an inanimate object, as seen in "The car is rolling as fast as she wants" (la voiture is feminine in French)
• Also shows awareness of gender via pronouns, as seen in the following exchange:
• Maman: Qu'est-ce que tu vas lui dire? (What are you going to say to her [in preparation for a visit to the pediatrician])
• Griffin: Is Dr. Black a boy or a girl?
• Maman: C'est une femme.  (She's a woman.)
• Griffin: Mais tu as dit "lui"!  (But you said "he"--lui as a disjunctive pronoun means "him," while the indirect object pronoun lui means "to him" OR "to her," depending on the context)

And these are only the examples that I took the time to jot down!  I wonder if anyone else who hears Griffin speak picks up on these quirks--after all, most preschoolers and toddlers use imprecise or incorrect vocabulary and grammar from time to time.   Does your child's speech ever show the influence of another language?  Is the child aware that this is happening?  I'd love to hear how it works in other families!