No. 1 – Eating and Drinking

Bravo – Tres Bon!

When I popped this DVD in for my two-year-old daughter, all of the adults in the room, including myself, abruptly stopped our ongoing conversation and immediately turned our full attention to the television without prompting.

To qualify why this was significant, my daughter and I were keeping company with a well-traveled, veteran family and marriage counselor and a retired French/ESL/English Composition high school teacher now doing a post-doctoral stint – both extreme critics of television for children.

The immediate and overall consensus is that the Little Pim video content is a delightfully well-integrated visual feast created by someone who obviously understands and loves filmmaking (Julia Pimsleur Levine). The varied and colorful frames were well-lit, visually stimulating and the objects of interest were easily discernable in every frame. Even more enjoyable were the highly expressive close-ups of the young actors’ faces.

All found this to be totally engaging as the lessons expanded nicely upon each previous concept, coupled with cheerful music and a lexicon of vocabulary items – perhaps too much for a young child to take in, in full at one sitting, it held the adults rapt for most of the presentation. Bottom line is that we absolutely loved this DVD.

The animated circling of the vocabulary items and the graphical overlay of the French words identifying the items blended perfectly with the audio pronunciations and then quickly moved onto the next concept. Although we only had a young toddler, it felt just right for a pre-school child (or maybe an adult trying to remember their French from years gone by).

While the adults in the room were eagerly anticipating the next word or concept and refining our pronunciations of existing words we’d misused over the years, my two year old’s primary interest was in that of Little Pim, the bold but cute black and white animated panda character who popped in and out of scenes and the series’ namesake. She tracked him intensely and even got upset when he left the scene or moved to another position on the screen and she didn’t see him momentarily. During the vocabulary displays, she stayed interested in the objects she already knew (apple, banana, milk, cup, etc.) However, the still visually glorious but un-animated (‘Pimless’) sections of the DVD proved immediately too taxing for her attention span, and she quickly lost interest. In fact, she actually got bored at one point and deliberately left the viewing area. This was due to what I interpreted as a lack of ongoing animation and/or follow-along Barney-esque singing with interactive dialogue about the word or concepts presented here. This is what toddlers love and, as demonstrated, have come to expect, perhaps even rightfully. And this is the only failing noted about this beautiful video series – it may not be quite raucous or kinesthetic enough for little ones who tend to learn better by engaging in song and dance since they can’t concentrate very long. The individual chapters are not too long but the DVD does cover a wide variety of topics and is rather quick moving, and thus, intense – especially if you can’t even say your own name yet.

But, if your child can concentrate long enough to sit through the scenes, it’s got great potential. To that end, I offer the following suggestions to truly meet the needs of the target audience (babies through pres-school aged kids).

First, I’d like to see a bit more of a story line that a child could get involved in, as opposed to a mere theme, as in this example of drinking and eating. A more danceable or sing-able musical beat (instead of the lovely but rambling acoustic guitar present) would help to prolong their focus. Toddlers love to sing so this could also allow for a few short teachable singing phrases or two to support the vocabulary theme. And, last, let’s see more of the affable Little Pim in the scenes with actors – he keeps the babies happy and offers a lighter touch to the mental work of learning vocabulary. These improvements would surely broaden the audience appeal to the younger age group for which it is intended. That could then include the ‘not quite ready for primetime’ (i.e. un-potty trained) demographic that inhabits my house.

Since we had an early release of the DVD without the chapter formatting, English subtitles or parent’s guide, I decided to just let the DVD repeat continuously after formally viewing it in its entirety, twice. I waited, mentally citing the research findings indicating the importance of engaging all of a child’s language receptors throughearly multi-lingual exposure for better multi-lingual success. It worked and my daughter took the bait. She eventually returned to the video on her own, but only for the same Little Pim sections of interest as mentioned earlier. When I returned to the viewing area and joined her, sitting with her on my lap and mimicking the words and sentences, she immediately and very cheerfully re-engaged and, ah-hem, ‘spoke French’! Hmmm. Maybe those folks at Romano’s Macaroni Grill and La Madeleine with the foreign language tapes playing in the background really do know what they’re doing?

Quality-wise, we did have some digital signal tracking problems – little blocks of black pixels would occur and the audio warbled or disappeared for a bit, but I happily attribute this to an early production batch and nothing more.

So, all in all, we think Little Pim is a great video tool for working with older toddlers and younger pre-school children and, thus, expect it to be a well-received product. However, because of the relatively new and much publicized research on the importance of language exposure at much younger ages than traditionally done in the past, we really would like to see the suggestions mentioned above incorporated so that our younger children could experience a fuller engagement. Regardless, we look forward to the next release of this charming series because, over time, this approach appears to have real potential.

Until next time, auvoir, mon amis!

Lee Anna Loehr

Lee Anna Loehr, M.S. (Statistics), M.A. (Mathematics), has logged 20 years working for biotechnology companies, specializing in regulatory oversight and clinical development. She quit her ‘day job’ in December ’06 to care for and transition her daughter into the ‘real world’ of day care and has enjoyed this opportunity immensely. Her passions include consumer advocacy of all kinds, writing, photography and quilting.