For children ages 4-7
Content rating: G

As I mentioned in another post, it's refreshing to find dual language books for children these days since there are many immigrants in North America. I wish I had had such books when I was growing up so that my mother who did not speak English could still read books to me with an Italian version in it.

Well, I found a company that publishes personalized books with the choice of having the story in one or two languages (bilingual) so I decided to have a book created for my 4-year-old nephew Stefano in a story about an underwater adventure in both English and Italian. He was thrilled to see a book with his name. My sister has read the book to him and she shared with me her experience. Stefano was engaged throughout the story, pointing at the fish and seeing himself in the story. He was interacting with his mother as she read the story and chatting with her about it. My sister loved reading this book to him.
The illustrations are colorful and bright, perfect for this age range. The world of sea creatures added a magical element to the story. Even before the book was read to him, my nephew was looking at the pages and pointing to the shark, dolphin and turtle. He loved the part about the dolphin tickling his toes. My nephew wanted to read it again and again. He sees this book as his book because it has his name in it and he associates himself with the character.

A long, long time ago (think BC time – Before Children time!), the first TimTimTom story – An Underwater Adventure – took shape while Kat was taking an arts/illustration course in Belgium. The story was neatly set aside with the hope of, maybe, some day being published.

Many years later Gaby, while living in Germany, struggled to find her kids’ favourite bed time stories in Spanish. She tried to “simultaneously translate” the German texts into Spanish while reading out loud. However she constantly had to hear “Again please, but now in German” from her kids.

Good things come to those who wait. Years later, when we re-met in Hong Kong, the half forgotten story and the idea of publishing stories with your choice of two languages came to life adding an extra twist, personalising. By personalising the stories we entice the children to read (or being read to) in more than one language. This is how finally everything came together and TimTimTom was born on a hot morning hiking through the Hong Kong trails.

After trawling through research papers, consulting with experts, and, most importantly, talking to families with multilingual backgrounds, we realised that everyone has similar concerns: raising children with two or more languages is not an easy task, it takes years and it requires constant work from kids and parents alike. Early learning of languages requires persistency but also fun ways of enjoying time with the youngsters while using multiple languages. Few truly multilingual children books exist to help. While there is no easy solution we can make it more enjoyable with TimTimTom.

So, we hope you and your kids have as much fun reading these stories, as we had writing, illustrating, translating and editing, and re-editing, and re-editing these stories.

This book was provided to me in collaboration with Multicultural Children's Book Day!

Multicultural Children’s Book Day 2019 (1/25/19) is in its 6th year and was founded by Valarie Budayr from Jump Into A Book and Mia Wenjen from PragmaticMom. Our mission is to raise awareness of the ongoing need to include kids’ books that celebrate diversity in homes and school bookshelves while also working diligently to get more of these types of books into the hands of young readers, parents and educators.