YouTube for Bilingual Children

Parents raising their children bilingual in a minority language are normally looking for all sorts of support tools to increase their children’s exposure to the minority language and, unsurprisingly, TV and videos score fairly high among such tools.

There is a lot of debate on the pros and cons of TV, particularly for young children, and also quite a bit of debate on how useful are videos in enhancing preschoolers’ language skills. We’ll come back on this separately in depth, but for the time being we can probably say that a very moderate exposure to good content in the minority language, supported by parental supervision and sharing, probably won’t do much harm and might actually help learning the second language, or at least associating it with fun (which is a very important thing as MOTIVATION is key!).

The good news is that good quality videos are readly available for free. Ok the news wouldn’t quite make it to the headlines, most people know about YouTube, but may be not everybody realised how much good material for kids there’s on Youtube. Really excellent stuff, some of which you might not even hear of otherwise!

For months now we have used YouTube to watch In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle, which we love! But I now discovered amazing stuf there, like cartoons from Eric Carle (The Hungry Caterpillar’s author) among which my favourite is Papa, please get the moon for me (I bet every single father will love this one, particularly if they have a baby girl). And then there’s great stuff in French, German and Italian, too. And certainly much more yet to be discovered, by me at least…

Have a look here for Biligual For Fun’s Playlists in different languages.

By the way, you can watch Youtube videos on your PC, or download them with a free software Youtube Downloader and watch them however you prefer, iPod, TV, etc…

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