Okay, so I’m Vietnamese and Daddy’s Congolese (French-speaking) means that LO is a little multi-lingual machine. He’s mastered baby-English and fully understands Vietnamese but can’t speak it yet, and can grasp a few phrases in French and when I ask him “ça va, Kaleb?”, to which he replies “oui, maman” – so adorable! 🙂
That’s when I had my light-bulb moment – I need to get LO learning French now while it’s still easy for him. Mastering three languages can become difficult as he gets older so the saying “the sooner the better” really is actually true in the case of learning languages. I headed down to my local library and picked up two bi-lingual books (French/English) that I really liked the look of. I chose these two specific books as they’re not too bulky, have lots of pictures that accurately tell the story of the book, and (of course) were super-easy to read as I am a little rusty with my French.
The book on the left, “Lucie Chat a la ferme” is all about a cat named Lucy who went to visit her local farm one Sunday. She saw ducks, chickens, and lots of other animals. I really loved this book as the back of the book had a little picture dictionary of keywords in French and English, and it also showed me how to phonetically pronounce the words. This came in really handy as I don’t want LO’s French pronunciation to be terrible like mine haha 🙂
The book on the right titled “Miam-miam! Allons manger!” is all about different families and their country’s popular dish. I loved it as it’s great for teaching LO about diversity, different countries and their cuisines. For example, there’s a Spanish family eating paella, a Japanese family eating sushi, and a Moroccan family eating cous cous and tagine. At the end of the book, the author recaps the different families and their country’s flag. This helps me to teach LO about countries as well as food and culture.
I highly recommend these books but there are loads of bi-lingual books available from local libraries that there’s simply no need to purchase your own… unless you feel like you need to own the books or really don’t fancy picking up the occasional tattered book then go ahead, buy your own. To be honest, most of the bi-lingual books are kept in really good condition and many popular children’s books including “The Giant Turnip” are available in a wide range of languages from Punjabi to Chinese to Polish. So even if you don’t speak another language but still remember a few Italian/Spanish/French words from school, get one of these books out and brush up on your story-telling in another language. 🙂
Have fun reading!
Manny.Wandering | The Wandering Mother Blog 
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