These 3 are the only books I brought back from my 1st trip to Italy ever; I did really well considering there were lots of familiar books there! Do you recognise any?? Yes, I even resisted buying an Italian version of Loup!!
Below was the actually selection of children’s books available in one shop called “Eataly”: it took a couple of visits and a couple of hours before I narrowed it down! The fact that I had only been learning Italian since January and I went to Italy in April made it hard to find a story that I would feel comfortable using.
“How will you use books in a language you hardly know?”. I hear you ask.
This is how: I am planning to ask an Italian lady I know to do a recording of the 2 stories above so I can practise and ensure my accent is half-decent; if I use the book in class I will actually use her recording but if on the bus I will manage myself.
With “l’uccellino Ugo” (such a helpful bird!!), we could start by learning the names of the 4 animals in Italian and use hand puppets to enact the story. Actually we could all make 3 paper flowers too! Next I want to help the children to spot the adjectives; some of them (3) are colours so we will use the paper flowers to practise then to point to when I read the story again; other adjectives the children will come up with actions to go with them so we can join in the story. Last but not least we could pick out the verbs and come up with actions to go with them. It is a short and simple story and I expect my pupils will probably have memorised it before I do ha!
With “la nuvola Olga” (a cloud and a girl can have great fun!), I would do something similar, but the vocabulary is a little more complex. Then we would all draw the cloud on paper with captions in Italian: a cloud is so lovely and easy to draw! Alternatively we could cut shapes out and put them on sticks to act out the story.
The 2 stories can be used to show to the children how letters are formed in quite a different way in Italian too using the image here.
If you like those books you can also buy one from the same author from Little Linguist here; I will get it myself once I have used those 2 and need another Italian story up my sleeve!
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