Audiobooks of real-life stories for kids
A collection of children stories that they can listen on their non-screen devices
I'd like to tell you about the series of audiobooks È la nonna che parla (It's grandma speaking) by Savina Sciacqua: she is my mom and created the True Tales Collection, stories based on reality and written in a documentary style, but narrated in a fun way to engage kids' attention.
The idea came to her when we left to travel the world: every week she wrote, recorded and sent a story to her grandkids… it was her way to stay close even when far, far away. Oliver and Emily liked it so much that my mother thought that maybe other children might like it too… and that's how these audiobooks were born.
Oliver and Emily love them, and I finally have a whole collection of stories that I can upload onto their iPods and that allow me to stay consistent with my decision to not expose my children to fantasy before the age of 6.
Today I'd like to dedicate this post to my mom's project, not because she is my mother, but because she really deserves it: she has worked so hard on her stories… and there are huge news!
È la nonna che parla is now in three languages 🇮🇹🇬🇧🇪🇸
At first, the collection was just in Italian, but my mom's dream was to have her stories also in English and Spanish, and so she worked hard to find nice, native voices, and she created "It's grandma speaking" and "Es la abuela quién habla".
On top of the single audiobooks (which include two stories each), she also created collections in Spanish, English, and Italian that you can buy at a slightly discounted price or gift to friends.
Each collection has a child's name, and contains between 14 and 20 stories.
Collection Bella (20 stories, English)
Collezione Oliver (18 stories, Italian)
Collezione Emily (18 stories, Italian)
Collezione Lavinia (18 stories, Italian)
Collezione Samuele (14 stories, Italian)
Collezione Elia (14 stories, Italian)
Collezione Sean (14 stories, Italian)
Colección Gabriel (14 stories, Spanish)
Coleccíon Lucía (14 stories, Spanish)
Colección Aysha (10 stories, Spanish)
Learning Italian or Spanish?
And since my mom is a volcano of ideas (we call her Savina Jones), she also decided to create a collection for parents who'd like to expose their children to a different language: each of these collections has the same stories in two different languages.
You can't learn a language passively, but you can train the hearing for that language: for example, it's more likely that somebody who was exposed as a baby to, say, Japanese, will be able to reproduce the sounds when they decide to learn it as adults.
Approach to Italian (coming soon)
Where can you find them?
The whole colleciton is available to download in mp3 format or as audiobooks (on many platforms).
We usually buy them as mp3 as I like the kids to have them on their devices. And yes, we buy them, because we like to support good projects. 🌸
The entire English collection (mp3)
La colección española entera (mp3)
L'intera collezione italiana (mp3)
Ps. The kids' devices you see in the photo are iPods with headphones, we use them a lot while travel as an alternative to screens. You can find below the related post.
