My youngest son is 3 years old. We adopted him from Taiwan when he was about 6 months old. He's speech delayed in English so I haven't worked too much with him on learning French. We've just been concentrating on English. However, now we're in France and he really does need to learn some French especially since he starts school here tomorrow. He's a bit hyper and it's hard to find something to keep his interest. The one thing I did finally find was to use what he was already playing with and add a little French to it!
He was playing with his little cars from the movie "Cars" and wanted nothing to do with what I wanted him to do. So, I just got down on the floor with him and started to play with some of his cars. I started to line them up and say the numbers in French. Soon he began to follow and repeat what I said. Granted, it didn't last too long as he was off and running to his next activity, but this is a start. So, the moral of the story is to use whatever motivation you can find and take your child's lead as well.
In case anyone was interested, I wanted to write about what we had to do in order to get them into school here. After finding and renting a permanent house here in Paris, we had to go to the local mayor's office. They gave us a list of what we needed to give them:
