Taking a break from my favourite books for primary language learning, I thought I’d share some ideas from someone else!
On her blog, The Architect and the Artist, Debbie Palmer has written two posts about Learning Spanish with children’s books.
The first highlights a few series of books that she has found useful –
Froggy books by Jonathan London which are quite long but have good stories
Oso books (Barefoot bilingual series) for basic vocabulary
Dr Seuss – familiar and fun!
Eric Carle – timeless!
All the links are to the US Amazon store so I searched UK sites to see what was available.
There are Froggy books available on Amazon.co.uk; Froggy se viste, La mejor navidad de Froggy, Froggy juega al fútbol although I’m not sure that El Primer beso de Froggy is worth THAT much money!
The Oso series can be found on the Little Linguist site for £5.99 e.g. Oso en la ciudad and are also available (for a reasonable price!) on Amazon.co.uk
Likewise Eric Carle books can be purchased from Little Linguist e.g. Oso pardo, whilst Un pez dos peces and Huevos verdes.. are only available on Amazon.co.uk.
Then I remembered Abebooks.co.uk which searches all over the place for hard to find books – and sure enough, up popped several of the titles including lots of Froggy books at much better prices (although watch out for shipping costs!)
The second post recommends book thematically e.g. colours, numbers, family, house and home, weather, prepositions.
Debbie lists several books for each category and stars some of her very favourites, some of which I haven’t seen before. She’s linked to where you can pbtain them if you’re in the US so I’ve looked for those and linked to sources for UK buyers.
NB I’ve highlighted books that I’ve read/used in RED; the others, I’m going on Debbie’s recommendations!
Elefante tiene hipo (out of print but available from Abebooks if you’re willing to pay the postage!) | |
Demasiados globos (Abebooks once more!) | |
Salí de paseo (Abebooks and Amazon) | |
Go away big green monster/ Fuera de aquí horrible monstruo (LittleLinguist and Amazon) | |
De la cabeza a los pies (Amazon and Abebooks) | |
Ruidos en la casa (Amazon – with Kindle edition!) | |
Si yo tuviera un dragón (Amazon, Abebooks) | |
Yo tenia un hipopótamo (Abebooks) | |
Chumba la cachumba (Abebooks – Amazon only have it at a ridiculous price!) | |
Azul el sombrero… (Little Linguist, Abebooks, Amazon) | |
Los animales no se visten (Amazon, Abebooks) | |
Un recorrido por las estaciones (Abebooks, Amazon) | |
Quiero más fideos (Amazon, Abebooks) |
So now I have a list of books to investigate to add to my library! I hope that’s helpful to someone – and obviously thanks to Debbie for the ideas!
PS If you’re not in the US or UK, Abebooks does have other “nationalities” of site as does Amazon of course!