Just picture this

As part of my quest to locate adaptable materials from other languages, I often turn to children's books. Such books usually employ fairly simple grammar forms, and basic scenarios, which is perfect for my needs. However, useful as it is to adapt them by covering up the text and writing the Cree equivalents, it gets a tad tedious.

Recently, though, I was reminded of an idea from one of our textbooks, How to Keep Your Language Alive: A Commonsense Approach to One-On-One Language Learning. Its solution removes the obstacle of another language altogether: caption-less picture books. That is, no words in any language whatsoever.

Now, word-free books are not exactly prevalent (if you know of some, tell me!), but one I just got that is chock full of different activities is The Snowman by Raymond Briggs. (First published in 1978, it's now a big merchandising hit as an animated cartoon in Britain!) It's the story of a boy and his snowman ('piponâpew / misponâpew' in Cree) who eat, dress up, play, eat, fly, etc., late one winter's night.

Now, I have a book I can take to speakers and ask them to tell me what we're looking at, in the language, free of the distracting non-Cree translations. Awe-some.

ekosi,
Rick