Great DVDs for 0-5 year old (and free online videos of French nursery rhymes)

My plan was to write this post about resources for kids to learn French. However, I ended up selecting only my very favorite French DVD for young kids to learn traditional French nursery rhymes and decided to also mention other similar DVDs for kids to learn languages such as English, Spanish and German through nursery rhymes. So, I decided to go ahead with this and to write about other French resources in a later post. I think other families will be interested to find out about these DVDs, great for very young kids to learn languages (whether native or non native children).

The French nursery rhymes DVD is "Comptines A Mimer : Jeux De Doigts" (click here to follow link). It contains 20 simple French nursery rhymes with accompanying gesture and colorful videos. You can have a look for yourself by watching 7 of these videos online for free here (click to follow link).

There are also similar DVDs in the same collection for kids to learn English with "L'anglais facile pour les petits" (click here), Spanish with "L'espagnol facile pour les petits" (click here) and German with "L'allemand facile pour les petits" (click here).

I hope you and your kids will like these DVDs and will have lots of fun learning nursery rhymes in other languages.

Happy Learning !

  

European Language Portfolios for children (French and English versions)

Hi,
I am very interested in increasing languages and cultures awareness for both my 4 year old child and myself. As my child is bilingual French / English and also is in contact with various people speaking a number of different languages, he already has some form of awareness of languages and I have noticed he is really interested to find out about other languages (for example when he hears other people speaking a language he doesn't speak or when he hears a song in a foreign language, he would often ask what language it is and then regularly he would say that he wants to learn this language).
I recently found out about the European Language Portfolio. The concept of language portfolio is born from a European initiative. I would describe the portfolio as a tool to encourage discovery of languages and cultures (all languages and cultures, not just the ones that are "high-profile" and not just European ones) and help assess ability / achievement in languages. There are languages portfolios for age groups ranging from young child to adult. The children portfolios are done in a very lively way and easily accessible by children.
I liked the concept very much and ordered the French version : "Mon premier Portfolio européen des langues" for my child (only 2.37 euros on Amazon, click if you might be interested in ordering it !).

You can find more information about the UK European Language Portfolio for primary school aged children (4 to 11 year old) here:

http://www.primarylanguages.org.uk/resources/assessment_and_recording/european_languages_portfolio.aspx

You can also download the junior portfolio and a teacher's guide from there or you can order from Amazon. 

Enjoy your journey to discovering languages and cultures.
Next post, I will use my "French mum with an interest in language teaching to kids" knowledge and will share some ideas about how to help young children learn French (either bilingual children or non-native children learning some French) and in particular I will give some advice regarding a few resources (UK or authentic French) that are most appropriate to support French language exposition / learning.

Happy Learning !

  

Introduction

Hi,

Thanks for passing by and taking some time to read this blog.

This is my first blog and my very first post. I thought I'd start by introducing myself.

I am French. I live in London with my partner and our child. I started this blog as I have a strong interest in education / learning / teaching, in particular in relation to children and languages. I am interested in learning naturally, through play, fun or in any way that makes learning enjoyable. I would like to share my thoughts and findings with other people who have some similar interests. I hope you will find some posts of interest to you.

I intend to blog about my main interests, including education / learning / teaching, in particular around languages and how to help children discover languages.

In the next couple of posts, I will share some thoughts and resources about how to help kids discover languages.

Do leave comments as I would greatly appreciate to share thoughts with you.

Thank you for your time.

Happy Learning !