Ta maman a un accent: Your has an 1

A bilingual French English picture book about the voice that carries a whole country inside it.Your child answers you in English while you speak to them in French. Or your grandchild does. Or the child in the back row of your classroom does.This book was written for that moment.Ta maman a un accent. Your maman has an accent.She crossed an ocean to build a home. She learned a second language in a hurry, while working and raising a family. And now she says a word a little differently, and someone at the school gate hears the accent before they hear her.This is a story about what an accent really is. Not a mistake. A map. Proof that someone was brave first.Somewhere around four, many children in bilingual homes start answering in the language they hear most outside the house. Nothing has gone wrong. It is simply arithmetic. This book does not promise to reverse it. What it does is give you and your child one page to sit on together while it happens, in both languages at once.Meet RouxRoux is the small fox in the terracotta onesie who notices things. Roux never explains and never lectures, but wonders out loud, in French and in English, and lets your child arrive at the answer on their own.What makes this book different- Written twice, not translated. French and English sit together on every spread. Both languages were written side by side from the first draft, so each one reads the way a parent would actually say it out loud, and a French-speaking parent and an English-speaking child can read the same page at the same time.- Emotionally true. No moral bolted on at the end. No child who is fixed by page thirty.- A keepsake, not a workbook. Soft watercolour styling in warm sepia and terracotta, across 32 pages made to be kept rather than filled in.- A gentle refrain that makes it a natural bedtime read-aloud, the kind a three-year-old asks for again before the light goes off.A meaningful gift for- Bilingual French English and multicultural households- Fête des Mères, Mother's Day, baby showers and international moves- Grandparents sharing a native language with a grandchild who answers in English- Heritage language programmes, French immersion classrooms, ESL teachers and international school librariesAges 3 to 8. 32 pages. Square format, 21.6 x 21.6 cm. Around eight minutes to read aloud.Et maintenant, tu sais. And now, you know.Book 1 of The Accent Series, for families who loved Alma, How She Got Her Name and The Name Jar.And if you know the papa in this family, he has a book too. Look for Ton papa a un accent, Book 2 of The Accent Series.