Foreign Perspectives

We’d a special interest in reading to our kids when we were in France and we wanted them to grow up knowing English as native speakers and readers.

Of course, it’s not just the business of reading that matters in our case, it was the topics of the books too. In their nursery school it was the French nursery rhymes and fables that they were coming across so at home we made a point of working our way through the various stories that we came across in our own childhood.

To begin with, we concentrated on the Ladybird range which is for babies up to around five or thereabouts although that’ll depend on your childrens’ interests and notionally their range runs up to around seven. However, just by chance we came across the Usborne range of books which seems to pretty much take over where Ladybird finish although with quite a bit of overlap.

As with all these publishers aiming at the child market, they’ve loads of different ranges of books but the one we chanced on was their Young Readers Series 3. It’s actually aimed at older children than our nearly 4 and nearly 6 year olds but they just love the books so we’re planning on plugging away with those over the next six months or so although with the remainder of the Ladybird ones and some from the Usborne Series 2 mixed in amongst them.

When we were in France, we got a library book from the school each week and read that to the boys in English which is much harder to do than you’d think. After all, if you’ve learned French as a teenager or adult you’ll have missed out on all the words for things like witches and goblins which make up a surprising amount of the reading material that ends up getting brought home. In the end though we were only defeated entirely by one book.