recent posts
- Media Tip: Who to Follow to Discover German-Language Books with Diversity Representation
- Family Viewing: Video Content to Watch Together
- Elementary Spotlight: Die Ampelchen Series by Anna Böhm
- Elementary Spotlight: Video Content for Ages 6+
- Elementary Spotlight: Der kleine Drache Kokosnuss Series by Ingo Siegner
Category: German for Kids
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I’ve talked to a lot of parents who worry that their family constellation won’t be ‘enough’ to teach their kids a second language. Here are some examples of family situations like this — This can be a hot-button issue — so many resources will tell you that parents should speak their native language (and only…
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The classic series Ich habe einen Freund, der bist… / Ich habe eine Freundin, die ist…, by Ralf Butschkow teaches children about diverse occupations. In each book, a child goes to work with a different person and learns about their career. They are nice, simple little stories where kids learn about everyday life as a…
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Liane Schneider’s Conni series is one of the most famous children’s book series in German, and follow the everyday life and adventures of a young German girl named Conni. Since the first book was published in the early 1990s, the Conni world has expanded to over 100 stories across four different series, audiobooks, cartoons, movies,…
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Wimmelbücher are picture books where the child looks for different things in a large picture (like Where’s Waldo) and they are extremely popular in Germany. The best Wimmelbücher to facilitate language learning include text that help give the child additional German language input. Here are some top Wimmelbücher series:
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There are absolutely wonderful German nonfiction series for children. The most well known is Ravensburger’s Wieso Weshalb Warum series that explain common topics (e.g. our bodies, robots, airplanes, Christmas traditions). In general, I find that the Wieso Weshalb Warum books go into more depth than Americans might expect for the target ages, which makes the…
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High-quality video has been shown to be a valuable source of authentic language input for children learning a minority language (study link). There are many ways to bring video in to support your family’s learning objectives for your child. Variety in video (as in other media) is extremely useful. We want to give kids access…
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The Kleiner Jakob series is an excellent series for very young toddlers. Each board book consists of about five scenes with one flap per scene. Each narrative has a clear beginning, middle, and end, and includes gentle humor that connects with the youngest readers. The series builds on the expansive world of Liane Schneider’s famous…
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Sandra Grimm is one of the best German authors for babies and toddlers and she’s also very prolific. In fact, you could outfit a very satisfactory toddler library with only her books. Her books follow the standard German pedagogical approach to focus on daily life of toddlers in the earliest years. As Grimm has been…
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Markus Osterwalder’s Bobo Siebenschläfer series is a very successful series for very young children. With the first books published in the 1980s, it’s a long running classic. The oldest books have charmingly amateur illustrations, in my opinion, but also seem very authentic — as if someone followed a real young child around and saw the…
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Audio content is vital to kids’ language learning. There’s just something about singing and listening to stories that will do wonders for your child’s comprehension, accent, and even productive vocabulary. However, in today’s world, finding a way to safely and simply serve up audio content is not so easy… access to streaming devices via a…
