The Missing Cat [With CD]

The Nicholas stories on tape are very easy to learn from because they are read slowly and clearly. They also keep the sentence structures pretty simple and repeat words and phrases a lot, which might be annoying for a book in your native language, but is very helpful to children learning a second language. My children don't like to listen to regular Spanish books on tape (often spoken quickly and the words seem to run together, more complex vocabulary, verb conjugations, etc.). However, they enjoy all the tapes in this series, even after we've heard them 50 times each. My son is in kindergarten in a Spanish immersion school, so we always keep these tapes playing in the car to give him extra practice listening to Spanish. The tape has a dictionary portion with 50 words from the story, spoken first in English and then twice in Spanish. This might sound dry, but our kids really like this portion of the tape. Even our 20-month-old repeats both the English and the Spanish words during the dictionary section.The story is read only in Spanish on the tape -- this has worked fine for us. However, the book is written in both Spanish and English, so if you wanted to enhance your child's understanding of what they were hearing, you could read them the story occasionally in English.I would recommend first buying The Missing Cat and then A Visit to Grandma before buying The Five Crayons. (The music on The Five Crayons, while perhaps more culturally authentic, has some fast songs and is sung in a style that makes it a little more difficult to understand the words). In general, I've found that for my children to understand the songs, it helped a lot if I sat down with the book and read the English translations of the lyrics to them.Overall, I'd say all that this series of books and tapes are a very good value -- lots of learning to be gained for a very small amount of money. If they made more tapes in this series, we would certainly buy them!