Parents As Successful teacherS

Franklin is the green turtle, main protagonist of the "Franklin" cartoon. When my girl was little she used to watch this cartoon. We have a book with this character. It is in English. I read it a while ago, but she was not interested to cooperate, to understand the text. We gave it a try again. What we did? We paid attention to the title first "Hurry up, Franklin" and the cover image. I asked her what does she think the title wants to say. She said that Franklin is running, so the title says "run Franklin". We had this conversation in our mother tongue. I gave the right answer and we did the same with the story. I read a page and then stopped. We had the conversation about the meaning of the text, watching the images. While I was reading she was able to translate some words. Then I followed the same strategy with almost all the text from the book. She was really excited when she heard about Rabbit. She knew the meaning of "rabbit". She learned a song about rabbits at kindergarten (at the English course).
A part of the text she was excited about is:
<It wasn't far to Bear's house. Just along the path, over the bridge and across the berry patch. Franklin meant no hurry -  except he saw something unusual. He wandered off the path and found Rabbit bobbing up and down in the tall, green grass. "What are you doing?" Franklin asked Rabbit.
"Playing Leap Frog," said Rabbit. "Do you want to play with me?" [...] >
The book is a little bit difficult for her English level. But I am sure that once she goes to school we will do it better. She will read it all alone. :-)
I wanted her to hear me read in English, to let her understand the text while analyzing the images and I was glad when she could also translate a few words and expressions.

Lady and the Tramp. Two books written in different languages (English and Romanian). It was interresting in the end. I am saying "in the end" because my daughter was hard to convince to use Lady and the Tramp in our comparison activity. She wanted other stories, but unfortunately this is the only book that she have in two languages. I have to fix this in days to come.
First of all I asked her to compare the two books by the criteria of size, color, format, consistence. Then we talked about images. What are the differences between the way the characters are drawn and the similarities. We looked at the writting (she knows the letters and she can read only some short words in Romanian) and page numbers and in the end we read the stories in both languages.
This are a few of the observations that she made. The English book is smaller, thicher (even if it has a smaller number of pages), it is narrow, yellow, it is not new, and the scene images are different. One of the scene from the book written in Romanian is missing.
The Romanian version is blue, is bigger, thiner, new and and it has more writting and more images and scenes. About the images she observed some diferences, little ones, on the cover.  Both of the books are soft and she said that it has the  "Disney" logo on the cover. While reading the story in Romanian, she watched carefully the images and we talked about the way they are drawn/represented.  I read also the English version and i asked her several times to try to "guess" what I read analyzing images.

My daughter received a new book in English titled "If I were a train driver". It was the perfect occasion to read a new story in English. She has other books in English but I translated them in Romanian while reading. I am pretty sure that I shouldn't have done it. She did not know that they are written in another language. I tried a few days ago to read them in English but they are no longer interesting for her. Maybe I will find a new way to introduce them in English too.
Even though she took a few English lessons in kindergarten, she quickly forgot what she was learning. We need to practice more. But I feel that it is difficult because most of the time I don't know how to learn her English. :-)
So, we have this new book. She put me read it in English for a lot of time. At home, but most of the time while we were going somewhere or being somewhere else than home. I am sure that she did this in a way to show to others that she knows a few words in English.
This book has 25 pages with big pictures and a sentence on each page. It is about a boy who imagines that he is a train driver. I read each sentence and I tried to correlate the image with the sentence. I also let her describe the image. I thought it will be a good idea to repet some expressions, showing the images, without translated them anymore like:
put on my uniform
i start the engine
red light, wait
green light...go
the passengers board the train
into the tunnel
out of the tunnel
up the hill
down the hill
over the bridge
under the bridge
trains with cars
lights on
wipers on
into the station
everyone out
well done
captain of a big ship.
If I ask her, she can say  from this list, words like start, go, train, tunnel and cars. Words, not expressions or sentences. But we will certainly practice again with this book.

Before afternoon sleep I let Teona choose a book from her library to read to her. This time I used a mediator, Peppa pig.

She chose Pinocchio.

Peppa: Why did you chose Pinocchio?

BOOK N. 2

The second book we read is titled “Dany the fawn”: this story is about a family of rabbits consisting of Daddy Rabbit, Mummy Rabbit and two bunnies.

One day, Daddy Rabbit brings the bunnies to school; while he’s coming home, in the wood, he sees a fawn named Dany, which looks hungry and frozen.

BOOK N. 1

We start from “The Ducks Painters”: briefly, the story is about two troublemaker ducks which have to paint Mrs. Rabbit’s home.

Mrs. Rabbit is very tidy, and since the ducks don’t do a good job, she doesn’t give them a reward (a cake), but a punishment (a pumpkin).

Hello everyone, my name is Federica; I’m 25 years old and I live in Turin.

I would like to describe a reading activity based on principles of PASS;
I did this activity with the child I babysit with; she’s born to French parents, and raised in Italy.
I hope my post may be of interest to you.

Before performing the activity, I prepared several question to ask the child, and then I took note of her answers and her comments.