My four-years-and-one-month-old daughter recently expressed the wish to learn reading. So naturally I pulled out all the stops, ordered a reading kit from Kinder lernen lesen and bought an alphabet poster. Last night, she “read” the first letter and proudly declared “A wie pomme!”

The other day, while on holidays in Germany, we were walking through a pedestrian shopping street in Flensburg, the northernmost city in Germany. I told Daddy: “Admire les jolies façades !” (Admire the nice façades!) Which he dutifully did. (They were nice.) My words prompted my 4-year-old daughter to add: “Regardez ce magnifique hélicoptère !” […]

When we’re in Germany, I have a tendency to raid bookshops, much to the delight of my 4-year-old daughter (she always finds something by herself there). The other day, after our second raid in three days, we passed the bookshop we’d just left a little earlier. My daughter: “Können wir da nochmal rein?” (Can we […]

We had house guests from the U.S. this weekend. One of their presents for our daughter were some shiny new state quarters from their home state to play with and practise counting. We explained to her that she couldn’t buy things with that money here, only in the “États-Unis”. When our friends prepared to leave […]

Drawing in an activity book, our daughter counted two rows of six items each on the page. Daddy: “Ça fait combien, six et six?” (So how much is 6 and 6?) She: “Ben ça fait qu’il y en a encore beaucoup.” (Well, it means there are quite a lot.)

Yesterday we were getting into the car, when Dad told our almost-4-year-old daughter to put something into the trunk, “le coffre”. When she replied, however, she used the word suitcase, “la valise” instead. This is what I think happened: French le coffre – the trunk – is a false friend to German der Koffer – […]

If you have children (and probably even if you don’t), you’ll be familiar with marshmallows. And chances are, your kids will, too. My daughter’s teacher used them to introduce the concept of “alternating”, making the kids put alternating white and pink marshmallows on a wooden stick. In order to understand what follows, you need to […]

What do you do when there is no word to express what you want to say? And when on top of that you are not quite four years old? My daughter takes advantage of her dual vocabulary and borrows from the other language when she doesn’t know a word. She shows off her new long […]

Saturday morning, Daddy and my little girl let me sleep in. As they had breakfast together, my daughter asked for “un Glas”. Daddy refused: “No ice cream for breakfast!” It turned out she didn’t want “une glace” (an ice cream) but “ein Glas” (a glass, which in French would have been un verre). Maybe if […]

Yesterday I took my now-almost-4-year-old daughter to the playground at the end of the street where I grew up and where my mom still lives. We’d been there before on a previous visit, it’s a nice little playground for younger kids, but this was the first time we went there and other kids (and moms) […]