AN OLD FAVOURITE

When Marcel was a tiny man, this was his favourite book in the world. It had one clear advantage over most other books of this type, and that was that things were ordered by picture type, ie food, transport, clothes etc and not alphabetically. This was a very important difference when it came to learning, because he's bilingual of course. When you showed him most of these picture books, he started to associate a capital 'D' with the sound 'D' and the words beginning with 'D': dog, duck, door, dinosaur. We'd then open the French one and he'd be confused by dog and duck appearing under 'C', door under 'P' and dinosaur still at 'D'. Also when Marcel and Charlotte were small, I often simply translated their story books into French as I read them so using an English alphabet-based book didn't work when I translated. This big book meant one day I could teach the 2 year old Marcel or Charlotte all the words for food in English, the next day in French with no confusion at all. Léon, of course, is growing up trilingually, so re-acquiring this book will be even more important for him. Today he repeated every word Marcel said to him in the car as we drove along. Marcel then tried some of the words in French, he repeated those perfectly too. Thomas tried in Danish, same result, so I ordered it off Amazon tonight as he's obviously just waiting to read his way through it at least 3 times. Looking forward to that!