Books of the week - children's magazines

Magazines from Bayard Press and Magia de Ler

Going back to the subject I've posted last week on raising multicultural children, I think that reading to them in our mother tongue helps a lot. Given that it's not always easy to find books in a foreign language, a nice way that I found to diversify our readings and to keep up with French and Portuguese is to subscribe the children to some magazines. We currently receive French magazines from Bayard Jeunesse and Brazilian magazines from Magia de Ler.

Bayard Jeunesse which is part of the big French publishing group Bayard Press - maybe the biggest one in France, also with offices spread around the world - is specialized in publishing high quality magazines for young readers of all ages. They've been around for some time now. In fact, as a child and then as a teenager, I was subscribed to their magazines, some of which were the same my children receive now. They are very nice and well thought out. Each issue comes with a story, nice illustrations, games, craft ideas, cartoons, short stories and some current subjects. It actually varies a lot depending on the age of the child (P's magazine is much smaller and vocabulary focused than F's magazines, which are already more story telling oriented), but they are all educational driven and usually add-free.

Magia de Ler is a Brazilian editorial group specialized only in children's magazines. They currently publish Toca (for ages 1 to 5), Peteca (5 years-old and up) and Joca, which is a newspaper for the young ones. The format and organization of these magazines is very similar to the French ones, because they were inspired on them. The quality of their design, illustrations and content is excellent.

What I like about receiving the magazines is, first of all, the excitement of the children when they see them in the mailbox with their names and address on them (just like mom's and dad's) but then, and most importantly, is the fact that is a monthly link to our countries (the Brazilian ones are actually bi-monthly publications). Moreover they come full of current subjects from those countries and new vocabulary or expressions that sometimes they would never learn with me.

I personally think it's a great way to keep up with our culture and not so expensive if you were to compare on how much it would cost to buy new books imported from those countries.

I'm not an expert on the subject and there are probably other magazines like these ones around the world. But the other two publishers of similar children's magazines that I happen to know by chance are the ones listed below. I've never read any of their magazines, but they seem very nice as well. If you know or have heard of others, please share them here with us.

• American magazines: http://www.cricketmag.com/ProductList.aspx?type=M
• Australian magazines: http://www.lottamagazine.com/Lotta/Lotta_magazine_for_kids.html (first Australian magazines solely dedicated to children and they have recently been launched).

I forgot to mention that Bayard Jeunesse also publishes magazines in other languages than French and Magia de Ler will start translating their magazines in English soon.