A self-published bilingual (English/Greek) children’s book titled Aria Goes to School is now available to purchase from www.okiddoky.com/shop/play/books/aria-goes-to-school/
The book is the first in a series of bilingual stories by author Luzdary Hammad-Stavrou, following the life journey of the main character, Aria. Based on the author’s daughter, she is a fun, kind and relatable character your children will surely enjoy.
Aria’s journey aims to help children feel more comfortable about starting school. The delightful story starts and ends in the same setting, presenting children with the opportunity to appreciate the importance of school from an early age.
This book is designed to engage young children through relatable characters, simple text and lively illustrations. The added bonus of its bilingual nature is perfect for multicultural families to bond over and to promote proficiency in both languages for aspiring bilingual children.
Coming from a multicultural family, Luzdary, based in Nicosia, Cyprus, was raised by her mother who spoke one language and her father who spoke another. From a young age she felt the importance of language; how language is the key to being a part of a culture and how left out one can feel without that key.
Now that she is raising her own children, Luzdary did what any parent raising a bilingual child does and bought her daughter lots of books in both hers and her husband’s native languages: Greek and English.
Luzdary explained, “My daughter normally picks the books she wants me to read and she would often pick a Greek book. I’d sadly tell her ‘mama can’t read Greek, you have to wait for papa to come home to read it to you.’ In other cases she’d pick an English book and give it to her dad, but he doesn’t feel comfortable reading in English as he often mispronounces words and doesn’t want her to learn incorrect English.
“These scenarios made me think how lovely it would be if both my husband and I could read the same book to our daughter in our native languages. We could bond as a family over the same book. And best of all she would listen to us reading the same book in two languages which would lead to her expanding her vocabulary in both languages.
“I searched for English/Greek bilingual books and found very few, so I decided to turn the bedtime stories I’ve made up for my daughter into books, thus creating Bilingual Stories.
“Bilingual Stories are self-published bilingual books written by me, a teacher and mum, for multicultural families to bond over and to promote proficiency in both languages for aspiring bilingual children. In addition to the books’ bilingual nature, each story is written based on a topic to help children feel more comfortable about going through a transition or dealing with a new situation. My hope is that Bilingual Stories will support your efforts in raising bilingual children as it has done for my family.”
For more on the author and Bilingual Stories, please visit Facebook page: @bilingual.stories.for.kids and Instagram: bilingual.stories