My daughters have asked about learning English, so I decided to go ahead and teach them.

For my youngest (8) I have bought a book with a 1000 English words. Each page has a picture, and then surrounding it are little drawings with the name of each thing in the picture. I teach her to pronounce the words, and then we do a little game where I ask 'where is/are...' and then she has to say 'there is / are...' by making it a game, she finds it exciting and interesting, So far this method suits her well, and I regularly change the question to some other format 'do you see / yes I see' etc. For now it is all very simple.

My oldest thinks this is too childish, so for her I've bought books like the gruffalo, from which I read a page, I tell her what it means, and then she reads the same page. Personally I think my youngest's approach is more structured, but if my oldest enjoys this more, at least she will be more motivated to keep this up. I think it is great that they understand the importance of language.

They'll not start learning English until high school normally (French starts in 5th grade), but this way they'll be so far ahead of the curve for English language that at least that will be one class they can just cruise through without effort.