My First 100 Words

What a first 100 words book is

A first words book pairs a picture with its name, so a child learns vocabulary by pointing and naming rather than by reading. The standard set is about 100 words: the animals, food, vehicles and weather a toddler meets every day. It works from around one year old, long before a child can read, because the point is naming things out loud together.

The Kipiku edition groups its 100 words into 10 illustrated themes, and prints each word in two languages on the same page. Every illustration is watercolour, painted by hand by the artist Digitalartsi.

Why the heritage-language version is different

Most bilingual first words books pair English with French, Spanish or Mandarin, and the Arabic ones are almost always in Modern Standard Arabic, which is the formal written language of news broadcasts and school textbooks. No family speaks it at home. A child handed an MSA picture book meets words nobody in their house says.

These books are written in the spoken dialect instead, published separately for Lebanese, Syrian and Iraqi rather than blended into an average nobody uses. In every edition written in a non-Latin script, each word also appears in Latin letters, so a parent who never learned to read the script can still read the bedtime story correctly.