Clip-Clop, Tippity-Tap: French Vocabulary on the Farm

Kim Chatel
Guardian Angel Publishing (2011)
ISBN 9781616331368
Reviewed by Cayden Aures (age 6.5) for Reader Views (3/11)

In “Clip-Clop, Tippity-Tap” all of the animals on the farm have different jobs that they have to do every day.  There is a little horse and his name is Mini-Moi.  He isn’t even close to as big as the other horses.  All of the other horses do things like pull wagons and help the farmer plow.  Mini-Moi is too little to do those things.  He is pretty sad about that but in the end he finds something he can do.  That is good because I think that there is always something that somebody can do even if they are little.

I liked that I learned some different words in French from reading “Clip-Clop, Tippity-Tap.”  It was sometimes hard to figure out how to say them though.  Even mom had trouble.  Some of the words were easy to say like for bird in French it says oiseau (wazo).  But some of the others where it says how to say it had things like buisson (bɥisɔ̃) for bush.  I really didn’t have any idea what that meant in the parentheses.  It sounds kind of like the word is spelled though.  We did listen to how to say the words on the computer though for the ones I wanted to know.  It was fun to learn new words.  My favorite one we learned was poulet, which is chicken in French.