Looking for products that build real language fluency? Whether you teach your child at home, or your child attends a language program, we have products for you.
Keep checking back in our brand new store as we add our more than 70 products. (Get our age-appropriate advice on our products.)
Advice to Parents
Ages 1-3
If your child is younger than three, we recommend starting with the Hop, Skip, and Sing audio CDs to learn Spanish or French. Learn the songs and rhymes and use them interactively with your child.
At this age, your child will not learn if he just listens to the product on his own. He is not developmentally able to do that. Toddlers need the active participation of an adult. Also, please, do not worry about your accent! Toddlers benefit much more from having fantastic learning models than proper accent models (and they have the materials for that).
Another great product for this age group is the Kindle book Mi habitación / My Room (Spanish/English).
The idea here is to learn easy games that you can use every day with your child.
Along the same line are the books and CDs in the Play and Learn series to learn Spanish, French, or Chinese (Mandarin). We suggest that you learn a few sentences at a time and integrate them in your everyday conversations with your child. The French and Spanish books also include songs.
Ages 3 to 7
Long before your child is ready to enjoy the experience of studying abroad, she will be thrilled to travel to the world of the imagination! In fact, you may have noticed that your child loves to dress up and is always ready to play the part, whether that is as a fireman, a princess, a pirate, or even a witch. All it takes to transform his/her existing love for adventure into a great immersion experience in a “new land” (e.g. Wonderland, the Red Hen’s Farm, or Oz) is to add a new language.
You will see that our stories are very theatrical. The idea is to give children the language they need to play the part in these new “lands.”
At this age, you, the parent, should read and act out the stories with your child. Please, do not worry about your accent! Children benefit much more from having fantastic learning partners than proper accent partners (and they can go back to the stories for that).
To complement the stories, we also offer “ToonFlips©”, which are printable illustrations of the characters’ faces that can be attached to sticks for quick role play transitions. For example, if you are reading the story, you can use the ToonFlips© and make pretend voices for more fun! Once you know the story, your child can try to act some parts without reading.
Other story-based products are our posters and games. Stories are so central to this age group that we wanted to offer even more possibilities for enjoyment and learning!
In addition to the stories, the Hop, Skip, and Sing audio CDs and the Play and Learn books and CDs are great sources for everyday language. As with the stories, you, the parent, should interact with your child in the language in order for the products to be really effective.
Ages 7 and Up
At this age, children are more independent and can do more on their own.
The stories continue to be a very powerful way to pick up language, but now they can begin to read them on their own. That being said, it is much more fun to act them out and play the games with other people, so you may want to keep engaged!
Your child can use the Play and Learn books and CDs on her own to learn conversational language, but again, it’s more fun that you both learn the language and use it in real life conversations.
For All Ages
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