As mentioned in a previous post, it’s really hard to compete with the amazing offer of books written in English here in the UK. The variety and quality is absolutely spectacular. Here I share a quick tip to captivate bilingual children towards target language resources.

When we last visited back home, I was determined to stock up on books in the minority language that would captivate my children. The surest way to do that was to pick characters they know and love.

Two of these books are of characters my children are really into at the moment: Frozen (yes, I know, you’d thought they moved on from that!..,) and My Little Pony. Normally I would prefer to go with more interesting books, but you know what? These are not too bad!

The Little Pony’s book, for example, has keywords such as adjectives, highlighted in bold throughout the book.

The girl’s face lit up when they saw the books, immediately recognising the characters. Needless to say, those two books have been asked for a few times. As for me, it’s good to have an easy win like that, something that can compete with so many other wonderful books, as well as screens. Something that makes the children desire to spend more time reading (or being read) minority language books is always welcome.

Frozen book

So my tip today is…

Think about what your child(ren) like the most – famous characters, themes, subjects… then find things in the target language that relate to that. You’ll probably find they will be a lot more attached to it, and therefore increase exposure to the language.

You see, this multilingual journey is made of small wins, and each little win adds up.

Plus, they were a bargain in the supermarket: cheaper than the other quality books, and one of them even had 40% off the original price. We all know that books are not cheap, and building our own library in more than one language can be challenging. So this was a welcome bonus!