The Book First Thousand Words in French by Heather Amery and Stephen Cartwright first came to my attention because of the artwork of Stephen Cartwright. As a child I had loved books he illustrated, without of course actually knowing who he was. When I had children of my own I couldn't wait to revisit my own childhood and bring his charming and wholesome images into their lives through the Apple Tree Farm series of books.

When we started learning French as a foreign language and I began to research resources to integrate into our learning I was thrilled when I found this book as it shares many of the sentiments of the Apple Tree Farm series, if not the main characters themselves.

The book is fairly straightforward. As the name suggests it includes 1000 common words in French, words that you would identify in everyday life; at home, in the kitchen, bathroom, school, at the supermarket, on the farm, etc. In the centre of each double page spread is a large picture that details all sorts of things that naturally happen in daily life and then around the edge of the page, in a white gutter, are small pictures with French words identifying each object.

The images around the edge of the page also appear somewhere in the picture so a game can be played to spot the object, using the French word of course. At the end of the book there are also a number of pages addressing groups of common words that may not have been covered in the main part of the book, numbers, days of the week, etc.

There are a few versions of this book. One has the book itself while another has stickers included for kids to place in the book or attach to objects around the house. Another version includes a CD that contains pronunciation of each word by a native French speaker, flash cards and stickers. The final version is actually a DVD that features simple animation but alot of charm.

First Thousand Words in French is a great resource and is useful for early learners right up to college students and adult learners.