A child who reads a picture book in a second language will usually be able to retell the plot a week later. Point at a word on page four that she stumbled over at the time and the meaning is gone. Nothing has gone wrong here. A book is very good at teaching a story and only incidentally good at teaching vocabulary, and the vocabulary part takes about ten minutes of separate work per book.
The routine below assumes Spanish, because that is what most families reading this are working on, but nothing in it depends on the language.
Read the whole book first
The temptation on a first reading is to stop at every unfamiliar word and explain it. Leave that alone for one complete pass. A child interrupted six times a page loses the thread of the story, and the story is what makes the words memorable later on. When you come back to terco on Thursday, what brings it back is the donkey who would not move, so the donkey has to arrive intact.
Most picture books carry enough meaning in the illustrations that a child works out roughly what a new word is doing without help. That guess is usually close enough to build on.
Collect the words on a second pass
Go through the book again with a pencil and pick out ten words. Ten is about the most worth writing down from a single picture book.
Parents are often surprised by how low that is, because a typical picture book holds thirty or forty words a beginner has never seen. The reason to stop at ten is that a list of forty never gets finished, and a child who never finishes a list learns that learning Spanish is open-ended homework. Ten words on Tuesday that are all done by Friday teach the opposite, and that lesson is worth more than the thirty words left behind. Those thirty come around again in other books anyway.
Choosing which Spanish words to keep
When you look at a page of unfamiliar words, the eye is drawn to the most unusual one. That is generally the word least worth writing down.
The rarest words in a children’s book tend to be invented names, the odd technical term, and a species of bird that appears once and never again. They are memorable and almost useless, because a beginner will not meet them again for years. The words at the other end, the ones on nearly every page, are usually words the child had before opening the book.
What is worth keeping sits in between: prado, susurrar, terco, crujir, temblar, recoger. These are the plain, everyday words that a confident reader owns without thinking about them — common enough to turn up in the next book you borrow, but not so common that they were already known. A rough test is to ask whether the word could plausibly appear in a completely different story next month. If it makes no sense outside this plot, leave it out.
Keep the sentence it came from
Write each word down with the line from the book instead of a dictionary definition. “Terco: el burrito era terco y no quería moverse” gives a child something she can see in her head. A gloss like “stubborn, refusing to change one’s mind” is harder to hold on to, and it tends to get memorised as a phrase and then forgotten.
The sentence also carries information a definition drops: which words the new one usually sits next to, whether it describes people or things, whether it sounds formal or ordinary. Children absorb all of that from examples without being told about it. A good sign that a word has landed is when the child produces it in a sentence of her own, usually about her brother.
Two short sessions, on different days
One review is enough to remind a child what a word means. It usually takes a second one, with a night’s sleep in between, before she can produce it without prompting.
Five minutes over breakfast tomorrow does more than twenty minutes tonight, because the interval is doing much of the work. The morning after you read, and then once more two or three days later, is enough for most words. Anything the child gets right both times is finished, and it comes off the list for good.
That last part is worth insisting on. Vocabulary practice that never lets go of a word turns into a treadmill, and children work out very quickly that the pile never gets smaller. When words leave the list permanently, the list visibly shrinks, and a child who can see it shrinking will start another one next week.
When the notebook stops coping
For one or two books a notebook is fine. It starts to fall apart around the tenth book, when nobody can remember which words are already done and the child is being tested on words she has known for months.
That record-keeping is worth handing to software, and there are several apps that will do it. Full disclosure: this post comes from the team behind the Fluera language learning app for people who learn Spanish from what they read. You paste in the text you read and it pulls out the words, puts them in the order worth learning next rather than by how rare they are, and leaves out anything already known or already finished. You choose how many to take, and ten from one book is the low end of that dial.
None of this is essential. If the notebook is still working, keep it.
What a week looks like
A free picture book on Tuesday evening, read straight through for the story. A second pass afterwards, ten words on a list, each with its line from the page. Five minutes on Wednesday morning. Five more on Friday. By the weekend seven are crossed off and three need one more go.
Next Tuesday, a different book. The three leftovers join the new list, the seven finished ones stay gone, and the pile keeps getting smaller instead of longer.
