As I mentioned recently, I’m working on adding more French to our lives through music.  I stumbled across La Montagne Secrète, a company that produces a number of titles.   Thankfully our library carries most of the collection, so we’ve been working our way through them.  Each book/CD combo has an illustrated book with a bit of a story and the lyrics to the songs, and of course a CD to listen to.  The CD’s we’ve tried so far start with talking through the story for the first track or so.  Since we’ve been listening in the car and not following along in the books, I’ve just been skipping that track and going straight to the music, but audio learners may prefer to listen to it. 🙂

Le petit chien de laine was fun to listen to.  It has a few catchy tunes, and it has a dog in the title so my daughter was happy.

 

 

We listened to Un cadeau pour Sophie the longest.  I found the music to be quite varied.   Apparently my son did too as it took longer than usual for him to ask for Star Wars instead.

 

 

Le petit ours gris was really boring.  We listened a few times and then brought it back to the library.

 

The next few titles that we listened to were boring as well.  🙁  I started writing this post after listening to the first one with the hope of giving you a list of great CD’s to look for, but unfortunately, the three listed above were the only ones in the collection that were remotely interesting for my kids.  I gave up on these and returned the rest to the library.

This next one was MUCH better

Alison from LearningMama.com suggested Le Clown Samuel by Suzanne Pinel, so I checked that out from our library.  Hilarious and fun!  So good that I plan to buy it from Librarie du Centre when I have to return the library copy.

The language in the lyrics is simple, making it a good choice for language learning.  Some of the tunes are recognizable so the words tend to stick better.  This one is still playing in the car right now – it’s being alternated with Bilingual Songs Volume 3.  The kids love these two CD’s so much that they are playing all the time, not just for the hour a week I had been aiming for.  And, best of all, they haven’t asked me for the Star Wars soundtrack even once. 🙂

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