literacy » ginger beirut

Teach your kid to read French

I last wrote about the DELE Spanish exams, which surprisingly I passed, and I’ll have more on that some other time. But today I want to talk about a lovely book for teaching your kid to read French. This has been just the thing for helping my five-year old learn to read in French, but I can imagine it being useful also for older kids who are not native speakers. I’ve included photos so you can judge the level for yourself.

Kids are sponges, but that works both ways. Easy in, easy out. Growing up with several languages may sound exotic, but the reality is you have to strike a balance. Sure kids CAN learn anything and everything, but there’s only so much time in the week. And like adults they will conveniently forget what they don’t use. I’m also not a fan of high-powered schedules for kids. I’m just not willing to sacrifice a lot of family time and farm them out to afterschool classes all week long just to make them trilingual.

Balthazar découvre la lecture

There’s never time for everything, so you need to decide what is important and what level you want to achieve in each. I like to think I’ll see my kids speaking, reading and writing in English, French and Spanish with a good level of proficiency, and having an affinity with Arabic (spoken and written) even if they don’t learn to speak or read it as kids. I think we have enough language resources (ie relatives, friends, circumstances, travel and access to books!) to manage this, but of course life does throw surprises at you.

I think we have English nailed since I’m their main caregiver, and incurably pedagogical at that. Plus English will always hold its appeal when they are in their teens and wanting to watch blockbusters and other weapons of globalisation. And my daughter is already picking up Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to read to herself. So that’s English taken care of. As for Spanish, my little Beiruti is already in her second year at the local school, and my Paris baby starts in September. They’ll get ample practice at reading, writing and, of course, chatting in Spanish. French on the other hand risks falling behind. We already make sure they get plenty of stories and some one-on-one with dad. We haven’t ruled out returning to France at some point such as during secondary school.

But how to crack reading in French? Dad is at work all day and French is as hard to decipher as Spanish is easy. The orthographic depth of French is, well, deep. I found this out when I taught her to read. We began with easy three letter words which are read just as they are written, with no silent letters. That meant tonnes of household objects and animals in English, but scarcely a handful in French.

Enter Balthazar.

pain, train, bain…

Each page takes a grouping of letters which produces a certain sound. The example words are beautifully illustrated.

bille, vanille, chenille…morille?

Most of the words are simple, others are less common. Some of the sentences are frankly hilarious.

sound/word activity

And at the end 30 little sound cards with the relevant word on the back to match with picture cards.

Result: my five and a half year old is suddenly reading pages of the P’tites Poules collection of stories, which Amazon has down as being from 6 years and up. To see her so engrossed in a book, actually reading silently to herself, is just a treat.

Balthazar reading activity

I see Balthazar also has a range of first readers for little ones. They are in cursive, which could be difficult if your kids are in an English or US school, which either doesn’t bother with cursive or teaches it much later. The Spanish feel as strongly about it as the French do and teach it from five years old, and kids are doing loopy b’s and z’s before they can write much more than their name. However, in these books apparently the silent letters are in grey so kids can read the words and get used to the spelling, which sounds like a smart approach to French for novice readers.

Getting involved

We have been doing plenty of silly rhymes about ants and pants, and the ark in the park in the dark. We’ve also been grouping words in categories, such as lists of animals, and menus of food. Then we wrote this together and read it a couple of times.

Part 1

When we reread it about five days later, I pointed to the letters in turn, insisting if she misread something, and I read THE each time it came up (it was new), but otherwise said nothing. The only word which gave her trouble was “squirrels”. The next time round she was word perfect. It helped that she already knew the basic story, and it helped to reread it several times. But what made the most difference was that she wrote it with me. She chose from various ways of expressing the story, and of course she decided which animals got to go into the ark. It shows how a kid’s implication changes everything, as she couldn’t normally read for meaning to that level.

Part 2

Perfect timing for me to come across Célestin Freinet.

The basic tenets of his teaching are thus described:

Pedagogy of work (pédagogie du travail): pupils were encouraged to learn by making products or providing services.
Enquiry-based learning (tâtonnement expérimental): group-based trial and error work.
Cooperative learning (travail coopératif): pupils were to co-operate in the production process.
Centres of interest (complexe d’intérêt): the children’s interests and natural curiosity are starting points for a learning process
The natural method (méthode naturelle): authentic learning by using real experiences of children.
Democracy: children learn to take responsibility for their own work and for the whole community by using democratic self-government.

In fact, a lot of this ties in very closely with what Máire Mullarney believed in – Montessori, too, especially the concepts of work and exploration. Although there is a string of schools which follow Freinet’s pedagogical theory, I can see how teaching at home allows more liberty to follow it. Mullarney writes about how she taught maths as they baked cakes, multiplying the quantities for their large family. And how one of her sons learnt to read when he realised there were books about birds, his passion. I can’t speak for group-based work, as baby number 2 is only eight months old, but what I have done so far with my little Beiruti harmonises with a good few of these points, especially the centres of interest. If you set a time-lapse camera to watch the words that come and go on our terrace you’d know who we’d seen, where we’ve been and what we’ve had for dinner. I also like the idea of providing services. So now I’m out to brainstorm new ways to make learning relevant and fascinating – and helpful, why not.

Keeping it simple

Teaching my 2-year old to read in English took a fair bit of thought. But French is a whole different ballpark. It is really hard to come up with short, common words which are easy to spell. We have been playing around with a multitude of short, easy English words which are read pretty much as they are written, letter for letter, such as cat, mat, rat, frog, sit, run, just to cite a few of the top of my head.

In French there just isn’t the same abundance of phonemic words for tangible, everyday items. The same words in French require a much better level of reading, or a lot of guesswork. We have chat, tapis (or paillasson), rat (with a silent T), grenouille, s’asseoir (or m’asseois for first person), and courir (or cours if it’s I run). French is positively littered with silent letters, nasal vowels and strings of vowels. And verb endings are more varied too.

I have really had to work to pull together a respectable selection of words to help my daughter start reading in French. They follow a couple of patterns:

Baby talk: papa, pipi, dodo, bobo, etc (daddy, pee, beddybyes, hurty/owie)
Short words that by some amazing good fortune refer to things a child might be interested in: sac, bol, vélo, bus
-ir verbs and their past participles (ending in i): poli, fini. (-er and -é endings are a step further away)

However, French does have quite a lot going for it, from the viewpoint of a young (but not entirely novice) reader, that is. After all, French doesn’t have the random opaque pronunciation that English does. It isn’t full of contradictory patterns and churning with the exceptions that result from the English language’s mixed breeding. There is no French equivalent to the rough-cough-though-through conundrum or the difference in stress between the verb “to produce” and the noun “produce“, or the differing pronunciation of “I will read” and “I have read“, and other illogicalities. In fact once you can read in French, then you can read any French word, because pronunciation is quite consistent.

Also, in French basic reading does get easier once the children can take on longer words (e.g. nombril) and once they are ready for a silent final ‘e’ (e.g. balle, nage, dessine, culotte).

We are just about getting there and I can see that she has pretty much grasped that words are often written differently to what one would expect. She also reads well enough to be able to start taking on board the context whereas earlier all her concentration was focused on the letters. Now if we are talking about animals and she reads ‘KAN-G…’ she guesses that it says kangaroo long before reading all the letters. Much more like we adults read. This should help her to swallow nasal vowels and not pronounce chien as chienne or ballon as ballonne.

After the complexities of English and French, when she learns Spanish at school, it will be a breeze, with it’s simple consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel patterns. The spelling reform certainly helped. As Wikipedia puts it, Spanish has “a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes; in other words, the pronunciation of words can largely be predicted from the spelling.” Phew (or should I say Fyoo?).

Mystery box game

I got the idea for the mystery box game from a blogger who uses it to spark a guessing game when teaching English as a foreign language. The basic concept is mystery and I just adapted it for learning literacy skills. First I discreetly put an object in a large box and then we look how heavy it is and what sound it makes when we tip it. Next I write the name of the object on a slip of paper and tape it to the box (with the sticky tape that comes off easily). Motivated by the desire to discover the mystery object my daughter quickly sets to reading the label and opening the box to verify.

mystery box

The mystery element definitely livens things up and the game also provides a strong mental link between objects and their written name. Labelling objects with post-its does too, and we’ve played at reading labels and then sticking them on the relevant objects all around the house, but the idea of an item hiding in the box waiting to be found provides higher motivation.

We then moved on to hiding an object of my daughter’s choice in the box and writing the name of it in French to take to her dad to discover. I had to guide her choice of object to things with simple names (sac, bol, etc). I thought that seeing daddy accurately guess what had been secretly placed in the box would drive home the wonder of literacy, the way it can evoke so efficiently what is unseen. However, at 2 and 3/4 I think she still believes us to be all-knowing and all-seeing (long may it last). What’s more she had trouble not telling daddy what she had put in the box well before he got close enough to read the label. Nonetheless, she had a whale of a time sharing her game while shouting out the contents.

The next phase was to turn the box into a lucky dip of actions. I wrote messages like jump, hop, run fast, get a cup, sit down, stand up, put a peg in a box, hug mummy, and so on. We take turns drawing a slip of paper, since that adds to the suspense, but we both do the actions together. I would never have thought teaching my daughter to read would leave me this breathless.

A random note on the side: I have known a couple of children who will write their name backwards – a perfect mirror image. When it came to ‘GET A [top line] CUP [bottom line]‘ my daughter surprised me by reading: A TEG CUP. So she still needs reminding occasionally to start from the top left. I won’t be starting on Arabic just yet.

A cat and a hat

One morning this week my daughter had just (slowly) read “window” and then went in a corner to scribble a row of swirls on the terrace. “I wrote ‘window’”, she announced. “Nice,” I said, looking at the swirls, and trying to think of a reasonable word to suggest: “You could write the word CAT if you want.” I wrote the C and made room for her to copy it below. She started with a diagonal line. I outlined the curve of my C again and she did a wobbly C of her own. Next the A, which didn’t quite meet at the top. Then a fairly respectable T.

This isn’t the first time she has written letters. Even back in Beirut she was pointing out the Ns or As which emerged unintentionally (I assume) from her scribbles, so a year ago, well before her second birthday. But this was the first time we attempted to line up her letters in a word. Actually I haven’t put much emphasis on her writing her own letters at all as I can see it is hard work whereas reading is pure pleasure. It’ll come later, maybe when she is three or four. Or so I thought.

The first word she wrote

After lunch and nap time and all sorts of distractions, we were once again on the terrace. I had my laptop. She came asking, “Can we write HAT?” “Sure,” I said, thinking she wanted me to write it for her, even though it seemed a bit simple for a kid already reading words like rabbit and basket. So I began writing H. “Like over there!” said my daughter. When I looked where she pointed, there was H and A already lined up. She had already started writing HAT. “What’s the last letter that’s missing?” I asked. “T” she said, “like cat.” And she took a new piece of chalk and added the T. And that was that.

Clearly the cat in a hat which sat on the mat deserves some credit here.

All of the “three Rs” seem to be developing rapidly right now. She began reading two and a half months ago, and funnily enough both writing and arithmetic made something of a début this week. More on the numbers another time, but if anyone has any experience with Colour Factor or Cuisenaire Rods feel free to share, as I think it will be my next purchase on Amazon.