Another Source for French Books (No Shipping Fee!)

At the end of last week Sebastian came home from Pre-K with a Scholastic book-order form in his backpack.  That brought back happy memories, for me, of tables covered in new books in front of the auditorium at Bishop Feild Elementary School in St. John's, Newfoundland.  There were two differences from my memories of twenty-five years ago in Canada: (1) I was instructed to place my order online, and (2) there wasn't a single French book in the flyer or among the other titles on the website.

I looked up the Scholastic Canada French catalogues and contacted a customer-service representative to confirm that schools in the U.S. can place orders from the Canadian catalogues.  I am excited to announce that Sebastian's teacher has agreed to set up an account with Scholastic Canada!  Thanks, Mrs. McCallion!

If you have children in a U.S. school (private schools and legal homeschools, as well as public schools, can open accounts) and you would like to be able to order French books through Scholastic Canada, ask your teacher to phone (1-800-268-3860), FAX (1-800-387-4944), or email (custserve@scholastic.ca) them the following information:

• Name of teacher and school
• The school's full mailing address
• The school's tax identification number
• The number of students in the class

An account can be opened and flyers sent out within a couple of days.  The best part?  There is no international shipping fee to pay--no shipping fee at all, in fact.

Scholastic has branches and book clubs in other countries, including China and India, and I imagine that similar arrangements may be available for parents looking for books in languages other than French.  Visit the Scholastic's international site for more information.

Chinese Edition of Breastfeeding Book to be Released

The Chinese-language edition of my book I Drink Mommy's Milk: A Book About Mammals is scheduled for release from World's Edge Books & Publishing later this month.  A bilingual (Chinese/English) edition is scheduled for release in early October.  The Chinese and bilingual editions, as well as the English edition, will be available through Amazon.com as well as through our website.

Back To School and a New Experiment

Sebastian went back to preschool yesterday and will be out of the house (and speaking only English) three full days and two half days a week until December.  Our No-Television Experiment is officially over.  So where do we go from here?  I have certainly learned that hyperactive and obnoxious popular English-language films like Toy Story and Madagascar add nothing of importance to my children's lives.  I have also learned that simply speaking to the children more and reading to them more in French and Chinese will improve my children's ability to use those languages infinitely more than buying them dozens of instructional DVDs.

I considered throwing the television set out, but in the end I decided against that; it seemed arbitrarily extreme to prevent myself from ever watching a set of lectures or a mystery on VHS, which I occasionally do.  And I would even like to let the children watch a strictly limited amount of TV--certainly not the standard English shows and not even language-learning programs that have explanations in English, but a small number of shows created for French- or Chinese-speaking children.  I have yet to find a good program in Chinese, due to my own inability to read websites in Chinese, but French-language children's shows such as the original and somewhat eccentric Passe-Partout (produced in Quebec) and the French editions of Caillou have a level of French that is just slightly above Sebastian's current comprehension level and so might help to reinforce and expand upon what he is learning with me (they are good for me, too, since they use vocabulary that I need with the kids every day).  I have decided to let the children watch two episodes (one hour) of one of these shows no more than twice a week.  Most of the other series and films at this level are on DVDs that can only be played in Europe, so I don't think I'll be tempted to go overboard with this.

And now I embark on a new journey: it is finally time to start speaking to the kids exclusively in French and Chinese when their father is at work.  Since Sebastian now has so many school hours in English, I realize that I am going to have to be more disciplined if I am going to make him truly multilingual.  And the hours when he's at school and Steve's at work will give Serena and Kai thirty hours a week of exposure to French and Chinese without any English interruptions.

I will continue to speak to them in French at least half the time when Steve is at home and to try to read mostly French (and Chinese) books to them, although I also want to encourage Sebastian's newfound interest in novels (in English) such as Stuart Little and Winnie the Pooh.  Next on his list are Misty of Chincoteague and Abel's Island, which I will read to him during our non-exclusive hours, when Daddy is home.

I have been doing most of my own reading in French, and that has been making it much easier for me to speak to the children in French.  I have found myself thinking in French part of the time, for the first time in ten or fifteen years.  In addition to a book to refresh my grammar and a book to perfect my pronunciation, I am re-reading Peter Mayle's Provence books in French translation.  I have just ordered a copy of A Wrinkle in Time (Un raccourci dans le temps) in French translation, as well as a complete set of the Spiderwick Chronicles (Les chroniques de Spiderwick), which will be fun for me to read and will also be good for the kids when they're older.

My father has just given me his enormous, multi-volume 19th-century Larousse dictionary along with an antique cabinet to keep it in, and I can't wait to get it out of storage and start using it; my thick desk-sized English/French-French/English Larousse is not sufficient anymore, and I haven't been very happy with the comprehensiveness of any of the online dictionaries that I've found so far.

The children's French has improved dramatically in the last six weeks, but their Chinese has not improved much; I am still looking for ways to improve my own Chinese so that I can speak to them in Chinese more often.  My Chinese translator Lina Mao Dickson has completed the Mandarin translation of my little book I Drink Mommy's Milk: A Book About Mammals, and we hope to have that out in Chinese-only and bilingual editions before the end of the month.  She is also working on Book I of our book-and-CD series Chinese Language for Parents and Children, which should be out later this fall.