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.
12 comments:
This is AMAZING! I too remember fondly our Scholastic book orders from elementary school. I will check to see if Griffin's daycare can do this...if not, maybe one of the elementary teachers I know will take pity on me....
Merci mille fois! Getting access to Scholastic French books will be this week's mission.
I was so happy to discover your blog via Multilingual Living!
Re: some previous posts . . . I, too, unplugged the TV almost a month ago. After only a few days of "withdrawal", my 5 & 7 year old don't even seem to miss it. Anything we now watch is very intentional. Definitely a quality-of-life improvement!
You can also search Amazon.com for "French edition" and then narrow it down to children books. There are many titles of famous books that are in French and you can find some used ones on the cheap.
Believe or not, I also want to give some French exposure to Sophia, even my husband and I don't know a single word of French (is it possible or realistic?)I just want to wish to lay some foundations in her childrenhood if she wants to learn French in the future. So I followed that link to Scholastic Ca. It is all french.... Is there any way to get the English version of this French website?
Thanks, everyone! Lina, I find Scholastic's websites confusing to navigate, and as far as I can tell the catalogues of French books are only available in French and the catalogues of English books are only available in English. Let me know if I can translate anything for you or help you find resources if you want to teach Sophia some French. I think it is perfectly possible to learn a language (to whatever extent you wish) along with your child, although it will certainly take some effort! I commend you for wanting to expose your daughter to a third language.
Great!! Susan. I will try to use yahoo bable translate service to see whether I can translate the website into French....
Normally where do you get French books for your children? Did you get them from Canada or directly from France? Or you get them via Amazon.com? I did find 7000 titles when I put "French Children books" in Amazon.com....
Whenever possible, I do order from Amazon.com or other U.S.-based websites to save on shipping costs, but I've found that most of the specific children's books I want either don't qualify for the free shipping (so it adds up anyway) or are overpriced because they're hard to find in this country. Therefore, I'm ordering from Canada and from France more and more frequently.
Sometimes it's actually cheaper to order internationally. For example, say I want to buy a copy of PETIT OURS BRUN FAIT DE LA MUSIQUE. The one available copy on Amazon.com is in good used condition and is going for $20.00 + $3.99 for shipping, for a grand total of $23.99. If I ordered the same book from Canada in NEW condition, I'd pay $6.95 + $7.99, for a grand total of $14.94! Actually, since I have a sister in Canada, I have my Canadian books sent to her, get the free Super-Saver shipping, and have her bring the books when she visits, so for this particular book I would only pay $6.95.
In any case, I often have no choice but to order from abroad, since most of the books I want are not on Amazon.com. There may be 7,000 French books on Amazon.com, but most of those are varying editions of textbooks and classic books used in high school and college courses. There are also some children's books created specifically to teach the language (which may be helpful to you as a beginner in French) and a limited number of used children's books originally important from abroad. I found some good things to get started with when I first started looking on Amazon.com, but it only took me a couple of years to get really bored with the selection.
Often I am disappointed even with the offerings for children on Amazon.ca (the Canadian Amazon), so I am ordering more and more from France (Amazon.fr). This is especially true for DVDs--the selection in Quebec seems to consist mostly of dubbed Disney films--but even for books there is a much greater variety of high-quality titles available in France. Unfortunately, I don't currently have a way of getting free (or cheap) shipping from France, so this option is expensive, but I can do it when I really need to.
I am looking forward to making my first order from Scholastic Canada soon partly because they have such a large variety of titles--more, in some categories, than I can find on Amazon.ca.
Whenever possible, I do order from Amazon.com or other U.S.-based websites to save on shipping costs, but I've found that most of the specific children's books I want either don't qualify for the free shipping (so it adds up anyway) or are overpriced because they're hard to find in this country. Therefore, I'm ordering from Canada and from France more and more frequently.
Sometimes it's actually cheaper to order internationally. For example, say I want to buy a copy of PETIT OURS BRUN FAIT DE LA MUSIQUE. The one available copy on Amazon.com is in good used condition and is going for $20.00 + $3.99 for shipping, for a grand total of $23.99. If I ordered the same book from Canada in NEW condition, I'd pay $6.95 + $7.99, for a grand total of $14.94! Actually, since I have a sister in Canada, I have my Canadian books sent to her, get the free Super-Saver shipping, and have her bring the books when she visits, so for this particular book I would only pay $6.95.
In any case, I often have no choice but to order from abroad, since most of the books I want are not on Amazon.com. There may be 7,000 French books on Amazon.com, but most of those are varying editions of textbooks and classic books used in high school and college courses. There are also some children's books created specifically to teach the language (which may be helpful to you as a beginner in French) and a limited number of used children's books originally important from abroad. I found some good things to get started with when I first started looking on Amazon.com, but it only took me a couple of years to get really bored with the selection.
Often I am disappointed even with the offerings for children on Amazon.ca (the Canadian Amazon), so I am ordering more and more from France (Amazon.fr). This is especially true for DVDs--the selection in Quebec seems to consist mostly of dubbed Disney films--but even for books there is a much greater variety of high-quality titles available in France. Unfortunately, I don't currently have a way of getting free (or cheap) shipping from France, so this option is expensive, but I can do it when I really need to.
I am looking forward to making my first order from Scholastic Canada soon partly because they have such a large variety of titles--more, in some categories, than I can find on Amazon.ca.
Whenever possible, I do order from Amazon.com or other U.S.-based websites to save on shipping costs, but I've found that most of the specific children's books I want either don't qualify for the free shipping (so it adds up anyway) or are overpriced because they're hard to find in this country. Therefore, I'm ordering from Canada and from France more and more frequently.
Sometimes it's actually cheaper to order internationally. For example, say I want to buy a copy of PETIT OURS BRUN FAIT DE LA MUSIQUE. The one available copy on Amazon.com is in good used condition and is going for $20.00 + $3.99 for shipping, for a grand total of $23.99. If I ordered the same book from Canada in NEW condition, I'd pay $6.95 + $7.99, for a grand total of $14.94! Actually, since I have a sister in Canada, I have my Canadian books sent to her, get the free Super-Saver shipping, and have her bring the books when she visits, so for this particular book I would only pay $6.95.
In any case, I often have no choice but to order from abroad, since most of the books I want are not on Amazon.com. There may be 7,000 French books on Amazon.com, but most of those are varying editions of textbooks and classic books used in high school and college courses. There are also some children's books created specifically to teach the language (which may be helpful to you as a beginner in French) and a limited number of used children's books originally important from abroad. I found some good things to get started with when I first started looking on Amazon.com, but it only took me a couple of years to get really bored with the selection.
Often I am disappointed even with the offerings for children on Amazon.ca (the Canadian Amazon), so I am ordering more and more from France (Amazon.fr). This is especially true for DVDs--the selection in Quebec seems to consist mostly of dubbed Disney films--but even for books there is a much greater variety of high-quality titles available in France. Unfortunately, I don't currently have a way of getting free (or cheap) shipping from France, so this option is expensive, but I can do it when I really need to.
I am looking forward to making my first order from Scholastic Canada soon partly because they have such a large variety of titles--more, in some categories, than I can find on Amazon.ca or even Amazon.fr.
I should also mention that individual sellers decide whether to do international shipping. Occasionally I am unable to order something that I want from France because none of the sellers who have it offer international shipping. This happens most often with older books/items carried by used-book dealers rather than with new publications.
Thanks so much for this tip about Scholastic - really clever of you to have thought of it. I have ordered my kids' books from Amazon.fr for almost 10 years, but recently the shipping more than doubled, and I am still trying to figure that out. It used to even out with paying the VAT if I was in France, so I just had the books shipped. But now, much more expensive, so thanks for the tip about Scholastic! Yay!
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