New Year’s Resolution! Teach my child French!
Do you want to teach your child a foreign language? Do you want to teach them French?
Are you a parent who feels your language skills are not good enough to be teaching your child? or Do you already speak great French but are hesitant to introduce it to your child?
As leaders in teaching children languages Langmobile say YES YOU CAN! and we want to help you accomplish this New Year’s resolution and have fun doing it. I recently wrote a blog about More singing and dancing to learn, consider this blog as a follow up to a more specific New Year’s resolution to teach your child French.
How to start?
First: Learn how your child learns.
Check out my blog on How children learn. Attention span and understanding how your child learns is vital to presenting learning materiel.
An article in Early Childhood News shows that when children listen to music and songs they use their whole brain to process language and are able to remember much more of the vocabulary than if the words were simply spoken to them. Another very important reason to engage children in singing and music is that interaction between child and adult is key to fully engaging the child’s brain in the learning process.
Second: Small steps repeated often provide effective and rewarding results surprisingly quickly.
Here is how we know: We sing alot with children. Langmobile touches some 2000 children per week by providing language learning workshops in Daycares for roughly 45 minutes once a each week. We witness everyday how such a small amount of time playing with the language can make a huge impact on their child’s ability to understand and respond to new phrases. So imagine what can be achieved if songs are practiced daily at home, or if a variety of songs are used!
Third: Singing singing singing!
Singing songs in a different language is great for your child’s cognitive development and it helps them understand the sounds in different languages. Each languages has its phonics. Music brings those distinctions to your child s ear. Here are our thoughts on how to start and understand the learning process.
Don’t worry about trying to understand the whole song.
When deciding what songs to sing, choose simple ones that have an easily discernible theme, and don’t worry about not understanding every word or the grammar. Let the music do the work for you of singing and pronouncing, just listening to the foreign sounds are essential for your child to get used to hearing and picking out the new language sounds; make sure you read the lyrics of the songs so you know what they are about and focus on specific points of the song that you can highlight or act out.
Fourth: Movement and silliness are essential!
It has been well researched that movement in children is directly linked to their cognitive development. The more movement
Change the lyrics?
Another good way to get your child understanding the sentence structures in the song is to replace key lyrics with some of your own. They can be in your own language or just nonsense words; as long as they keep within the context of the song. These replacement words serve to highlight how the sentences are formed, cements the meaning in their brains and encourages them to experiment with the language outside the song.
Fifth: Go to I-tunes and listen to Langmobile original music !
Here is a short list of Langmobile songs that are easy to understand, full of repetition and good for simple vocabulary:
Ne Bouge Plus – Our own original version of head, shoulders, knees and toes.
Bonjour Comment Vas-Tu?– A Song to say Hello how are you?
Quel Est Ton Nom ? – A song to say What’s your name?
L’arc-En-Ciel – A song to learn Colors of the rainbow.
So start singing now and you can start your child’s French language education right away regardless of your own level of French!
Sixth: Stay tuned into Langmobile!
For even more of an enriched language learning experience stay tuned into our blog and connect with us on Facebook! We will be announcing the launch of our Language learning App soon but until them we invite you get our free gift offer to learn a bit of French today!
